President Otto Pérez Molina resigned in September after being implicated by the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in a million-dollar tax-fraud scandal. The commission was established in 2007 to investigate organized crime and reinforce local efforts to strengthen the rule of law in Guatemala. In 2015, after the Guatemalan Congress voted to strip both President Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti of their immunity, prosecutors charged them and more than 35 other government officials with corruption.

Guatemala's efforts to promote accountability for human rights atrocities committed during the 1960-1996 civil war have had mixed results. While the Attorney General's Office has successfully prosecuted several high-profile cases, the vast majority of victims have not seen any form of justice for the violations they endured.

Accountability for Past Human Rights Violations

Former Guatemalan head of state Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty in May 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison, but several days later the Constitutional Court overturned the verdict on procedural grounds. The retired general had led a military government from 1982 to 1983 during which period the military carried out hundreds of massacres of unarmed civilians.

In August 2015, a trial court declared Ríos Montt mentally unfit for retrial, ruling instead that he should be represented by his lawyers in a special closed-door proceeding that is scheduled to start in January 2016.

In October 2015, an appellate court rejected a two-year old petition by Rios Montt's attorneys to apply a 1986 amnesty decree that would put an end to his prosecution. The court ruled that the decree, applicable to “all political and related common crimes” committed between March 1982 and January 1986, does not apply to genocide and crimes against humanity.

Guatemala's Congress passed a resolution in May 2014 denying that acts of genocide were committed during the country's civil war, despite findings to the contrary by a UN-sponsored Truth Commission in 1999.

In addition to pursuing the case against Ríos Montt, the Attorney General's Office has, in recent years, convicted several other former members of security forces for human rights crimes committed during the war.