SAN SALVADOR — The fate of a U.N.-backed initiative to fight organized crime hangs in the balance in Guatemala, where legislators will decide this week whether to scrap a plan to create an international team of investigators to aid the country's beleaguered criminal justice system.
The government of President Oscar Berger reached an agreement with United Nations officials in December to create the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala to investigate the extent to which criminal groups have subverted the justice system.
But this month, a key congressional committee voted against allowing the commission, known by its Spanish initials, CICIG, to operate on Guatemalan soil. Rightists and other critics have said the commission would violate Guatemala's sovereignty. The full Congress is scheduled to take up the matter Wednesday.
Rights groups, diplomats and several leading Guatemalan politicians say that if the U.N. commission is killed, it would be a defeat for the rule of law in Guatemala. Organized crime groups, many of them with links to the country's elite, are widely believed to have bought influence within the judiciary, police and several members of Congress.
In recent years, Guatemala has been ravaged by a series of spectacular and brazen crimes. In February, three Salvadoran legislators were killed near Guatemala City, apparently by officers with an elite police unit working on behalf of drug traffickers. Four police officers were arrested, but they were slain days later in a maximum-security prison.
"If the CICIG is not approved, violence will increase," said one European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It would send a message to the international community that Guatemala is a country where impunity prevails."
The Bush administration has backed the plan, which provides for sanctions against Guatemalan police and judicial officials who refuse to cooperate with the international investigators.
But leaders of the rightist Guatemalan Republican Front bristle at the notion of foreign investigators entering their country.
"The CICIG violates the constitution and I, as a Guatemalan, am against it," said Carolina de Regio, an advisor to the party. "I can be in my home, raising my children and fighting to make my home better or worse, but in the end it's my home, it's my sovereignty.... For a foreigner to come a tell me, 'You did this or that wrong,' and then prosecute me for it, is wrong."
