Guatemala's Struggle Against Impunity

Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank and media organization that seeks to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime and citizen security in the Americas. He is the author of two books, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins, 2020) and Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). He has reported from Latin America and the Caribbean for over two decades including from Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and from the subject our our conversation today, Guatemala. . Last month, InSight Crime published an in-depth report examining how Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo was faring in his fight against the deeply-entrenched and many-tentacled political-criminal monarchy that has scuttled the hopes many Guatemalans had for the country after the conclusion in 1996 of its thirty year civil war. Its assessment of where things stand was worrisome, to say the least.