ABSTRACT
In responding to the question whether the prosecutor should be independent or aligned with the government when investigating abuses of the government, I draw on two experiences. First, as research associate with the Center for Criminal Justice at Harvard Law School, I worked on the Guatemala/Harvard Criminal Justice Project where I was responsible for investigating political violence, witness intimidation, and judicial corruption, and for developing proposals to combat these problems in and through the Guatemalan criminal justice system. This work involved numerous interviews with representatives of virtually every sector of Guatemalan society from the most endangered, including human rights workers, labor leaders, student activists and church leaders, to the most privileged, including members of CACIF, Guatemala's most powerful business association. During these interviews, representatives of each sector expressed serious complaints about the Guatemalan criminal justice system and offered competing visions of the role criminal justice should play in ensuring that the democratic opening survived in Guatemala.
