Article: Death Penalty

Inmates in hellish prison find hope, pride in learning

An education program started by inmates in a tough Guatemalan prison imparts a sense of personal worth, even to the students who are on Death Row.

By Catherine Elton
The Miami Herald

ESQUINTLA, Guatemala - When Audelio Díaz graduated from junior high last week at age 43, heavily armed guards stood by -- and a neighbor watched the ceremony through a mirrored window.

Díaz, two fellow graduates and two of their teachers all await execution on Death Row at the maximum security prison in Esquintla.

They prize their achievements in the unusual prison school, started by the inmates themselves. But they also hope the program will add a new dimension to a growing debate on the death penalty in one of the two Latin American countries that still have capital punishment.

"With what little we have here, we are showing society that we have the will and the desire to rehabilitate ourselves," Díaz told The Herald after the graduation ceremony in a stuffy corridor, with armed guards blocking the metal gates on either end.

Cuba and Guatemala are the only countries in Latin America that maintain the death penalty, both in law and practice. A handful of English-speaking Caribbean nations also maintain it. After a televised 1996 execution by firing squad shocked people around the world, Guatemala switched to lethal injections. The events are still televised, however.

No one has been executed since 2000, but there are some 30 inmates on Death Row, all of them men. Regardless of the crime, women cannot be sentenced to death in Guatemala.

Despite a worldwide tendency toward the abolition of capital punishment, Guatemala not only maintains it but took two measures in the 1990s to fortify it. Congress abolished the presidential pardon and added the death sentence for kidnappings, even when the victim is not killed.

PATH TO DEATH ROW

Díaz was one of several members of a notorious band of kidnappers sentenced to die for the well-publicized abduction of a wealthy farm owner's wife who was released unharmed.

Antideath penalty activists maintain that both of these recent measures violate the Inter American Human Rights Convention, which Guatemala ratified. And in addition to invoking basic humanitarian arguments for abolishing capital punishment, they cite some that are particular to the situation in this poor nation, which has just emerged from a decades-long civil war.

"The professional level of the judges is still very weak. The official defense system lacks economic and human resources and is unable to provide people with an adequate defense," said Kristin Svendsen, a Norwegian researcher for a death penalty abolition campaign at a think tank in Guatemala City.

"Loads of people are condemned to death on very weak evidence, which in almost all the cases is entirely testimonial," she told The Herald.

Svendsen added that some of the people on Death Row made confessions under police torture and that some Maya Indians who speak little Spanish were condemned to death in trials conducted entirely in Spanish. One of them, Svendsen says, didn't appear to understand that he'd been sentenced to death even months afterwards.

But opinion polls consistently reveal that capital punishment remains overwhelmingly popular here.

PRO-EXECUTION

''When I leave my house these days, I don't know if I'll make it back home,'' said Mario Castañeda, a 30-year-old bus inspector, in reference to the high murder rate in Guatemala City. "If we don't keep the death penalty, there will only be more violence. We need to be tough on crime."

Others say they support the death penalty because they doubt that the government can guarantee that convicts will stay in prison. In 2001, with the help of corrupt prison guards, 78 inmates escaped from the maximum security prison in Esquintla.

Experts believe that because of popular opinion, Guatemalan lawmakers see legislative initiatives to abolish capital punishment as political suicide.

In 2002, then-President Alfonso Portillo called on Congress to abolish the death penalty, but nothing came of it. Current President Oscar Berger has publicly spoken against capital punishment, but it is unclear whether he plans to act to abolish it.

"It's not the right moment. The crime problem affects many Guatemalans and has many of them quite indignant. To propose abolition now would be hurtful to them," congressman Otto Pérez Molina said.

Death Row inmates studying and teaching in the Esquintla prison -- commonly known here as “El Infierno”, or Hell -- don't expect the death penalty to be abolished any time soon.

The specter of execution, however, is not a deterrent for Fermín Ramírez -- convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl -- to continue his elementary school studies in prison.

Ramírez, 47, learned to read and write in prison. He says that even if he is executed, his work will be worthwhile.

"It will go down in the books, down in my history, that I did it, that I could do it," he told The Herald. "And that is something that fills me with pride.”

Posted by elcanche at November 24, 2004 03:02 PM