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LATIN
AMERICA:
Women Scale the Hierarchies of
Justice
Diana
Cariboni*
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 15 (IPS) - Women do not
yet represent 50 percent of the ranks of Latin America's
judicial systems, but many of the trials that are in the media
spotlight -- those involving major corruption scandals or
human rights violations -- are in the hands of female judges
and prosecutors.
”If a woman is going to enter
certain fields she has to be up to scratch,” says Nicaraguan
judge Juana Méndez, who indicted placed under arrest former
president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002) for corruption,
misappropriation of public funds and illicit enrichment.
Alemán is accused of embezzling an estimated 100
million dollars in a country where nearly 70 percent of the
five million inhabitants live in poverty and more than one
million subsist on less than a dollar a day.
”We are
about to enter the plenary phase, that is, the moment in which
the accused is ruled innocent or guilty,” Méndez said in an
IPS interview from her office in Managua.
But the road
to this point has not been easy for the Nicaraguan judge.
”I've received strong criticism. There are enormous
risks for me and for my family. There are people who are
digging into my private life. I have to be accompanied by a
bodyguard for my physical safety,” she said. This has been
particularly true during the Alemán trial.
”They
yelled threats at me in the street, and on the telephone. They
said they would kill me and my children. The situation reached
the point that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights asked the Nicaraguan government to assign me special
protection,” said Méndez.
And it proved expensive. Out
of her monthly salary of about 1,000 dollars she had to pay
for the meals of the security personnel that the government
assigned to protect her. In contrast, a judge in the United
States earns between 5,000 and 13,000 dollars a month.
”But in the end, the best reward is the contribution
made towards a culture of governance and respect for law in
Nicaragua and the Americas,” she said.
Like her
country and its complicated history, the judge has been marked
by a hard life. Widow of a Sandinista guerrilla commander, she
had to raise her three children by herself. But nothing could
keep her from serving as a judge for the past 10 years, and
now she is a candidate to become a justice on the Nicaraguan
Supreme Court.
The anti-corruption battle in Ecuador
also has women on the front line.
Ecuador's Attorney
General Mariana Yépez asked the Supreme Court on Jul.. 10 to
order preventative imprisonment of former president Gustavo
Noboa (2000-2003) for alleged million-dollar damages to the
state during renegotiations of the nation's foreign debt.
As a result of the arrest order, Noboa fled into
exile. The Dominican Republic granted him refuge.
But
it is Peru where the highest profile case is wending its way
through the courts, and two women judges have been leading the
way.
The anti-corruption court presided by judge Inés
Villa began the trial in February of former presidential
adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, a central figure in the
government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).
Another
judge, Inés Tello, is part of the three-member team in charge
of the Montesinos investigation.
Montesinos faces 50
charges, ranging from money laundering and drug trafficking to
human rights violations and murder. The colourful former
right-hand man of Fujimori and spy-master fled the country in
2001, but was arrested in Caracas and returned to Peru where
he has been in prison ever since.
In Argentina,
white-collar crime -- starring embezzlement and fraudulent
bank collapses -- was a prominent feature of the 1990s legal
landscape.
Last December, judge Marcela Garmendia
sentenced bank executive Francisco Trusso to eight years in
prison for defrauding savers at the Provincial Credit Bank
(BCP), which went bankrupt in 1997.
Another Argentine
judge, María Servini de Cubría, in March 2002 convicted banker
Carlos Rohm of economic subversion and ”illicit association”,
and issued an arrest and extradition request to the United
States for his brother and partner José Rohm.
Carlos
Rohm was president of the Banco General de Negocios and
vice-president of Banco Comercial del Uruguay, firms that went
under after their owners drained their assets.
Judge
Servini -- although under fire for her decisions that favoured
government figures in the 1990s -- has indicted six officials
from Chile's Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) for the
1974 assassination in Buenos Aires of Chilean general Carlos
Prats.
In Chile and in Uruguay, countries that
maintain an international image of transparency, charges of
corruption have recently come to the fore, and women judges
and prosecutors have proven their leadership as they tackle
these cases.
Chilean judge Gloria Ana Chevesich has
indicted and continues investigating business executives and
officials of the Ricardo Lagos administration and of the
University of Chile for crimes related to the illegal
diversion of tax revenues to pay unmerited salary bonuses.
Criminal prosecutor Mirtha Guianze is the only one in
Uruguay who has been able to put an official behind bars for
crimes committed during the country's military dictatorship
(1973-1985).
The official is former foreign minister
and former senator Juan Carlos Blanco, who was involved in the
1976 kidnap of leftist activist and teacher Elena Quinteros
from the grounds of the Venezuelan embassy in Montevideo where
she had sought refuge.
Blanco spent seven months in
prison for co-masterminding the ”illegitimate deprivation of
Quinteros's freedom”. Guianze later requested -- and judge
Eduardo Cavalli accepted the petition -- that Blanco be
indicted as co-conspirator in the murder of Quinteros. The
case will ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court.
Blanco is a civilian, but the military personnel who
tortured and killed Quinteros are protected by Uruguay's 1989
amnesty law that put an end to investigations into the crimes
of the dictatorship.
Guianze's legal career was
interrupted in 1980 when the military government removed her
form her post. After 1985, and the return of democracy, she
began work again in the public arena. Since 2000 she has
headed the association of magistrates at the Public
Prosecutor's Office, a ministry-level agency.
Mother
of three and grandmother of two, Guianze has investigated
numerous cases of corruption, ”which revealed practices that
were often tolerated over the years,” she told IPS.
Such as the case she is currently pursuing, which has
to do with conflicts of interest in distributing publicity for
state entities amongst the mass media. In a small country like
Uruguay, with just over three million people, ”granting major
state advertising contracts to certain media outlets is a
violation of the right to information, and the process
involved corruption,” she explained.
Although there
are more and more women in Latin America's prosecutor offices
and special courts, their presence decreases farther up the
judicial hierarchy.
Women are few among appeals court
justices, and there are just a handful in the region's supreme
courts.
A report published by the Latin American
Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) states that women held 45
percent of the region's criminal court judgeships in 1995, and
20 percent of the judgeships in the appelate courts. But they
were virtually absent from the highest courts.
According to United Nations figures, the proportion of
women supreme court justices in South America does not surpass
10 percent, while in Central America it varies between 10 and
20 percent.
The only female supreme court justice in
Argentina was Margarita Argúas, who served from 1970 to 1973,
designated to the bench in the final throes of a military
regime.
If the courts of first and second instance are
taken into account, as well as the public prosecutor's office
and the public ministry, the presence of women in Argentina's
federal sphere is 20 percent.
In Chile, the Supreme
Court did not have a woman justice until 2001. The ”pioneer”
was María Antonia Morales. In the country's appeals courts,
however, in the 1995-1998 period, the portion of female judges
rose from 27 to 35 percent.
The first female federal
supreme court justice in Brazil was Ellen Gracie, who was
designated to the court in 2000. She remains the only woman on
that bench.
In the opinion of Uruguay's Guianze, the
judicial sphere is more gender balanced than are either
politics or business.
”A woman can achieve a place in
the judicial hierarchy on merit, without regard to sex, a
circumstance that generally is not found in other arenas,
where other factors are in play,” said the prosecutor.
But why are so many cases that are so crucial for
upholding and reinforcing democracy being investigated by
women prosecutors or tried by women judges?
Argentina's Carmen Argibay, 'ad litem' judge of the
International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, says
it should come as no surprise that many cases dealing with
delicate issues are in the hands of women.
”Around a
decade ago in Costa Rica a study was conducted of the
judiciaries of Central America, and one of the conclusions was
that women are less inclined to corruption,” she said in an
IPS interview via telephone from The Hague.
Argibay
was referring to research compiled by Tirsa Rivera Bustamante
and published in 1991 by the Centre for the Administration of
Justice. The surveys included in the study showed that society
had a more positive perception of women than of men when it
came to imparting justice.
Although the publication
recognised that these were preliminary findings, ”the
prevailing opinion was that female judges are considered more
honest and less corruptible than men, and more strict in
applying the law.”
In Costa Rica, ”judges of both
sexes enjoy broad social trust, but the male judges in general
consider their female colleagues to be less susceptible to
corruption,” says the study.
According to Nicaraguan
judge Méndez, ”survival, the need to take good care of our
children and at the same time carry out multiple duties means
that we women judges have to be very responsible.”
Uruguayan Guianze noted that ”women tend to act with
greater independence, they don't feel like their hands are
tied by the circles of power from which they have
traditionally been excluded, and women possess greater
sensitivity for handling matters related to human rights.”
”Having been victims of discrimination,” said Argibay,
women ”know that the issues which many of their male colleague
consider marginal -- discrimination, domestic violence,
corruption -- are in reality central and important.”
”But that doesn't mean there are no corrupt female
judges or prosecutors. They do exist, but in a much smaller
proportion (than among their male colleagues),” she added.
And Argibay knows of what she speaks. She worked in
the Argentine justice system when it was subject to the will
of the different military regimes during decades past, and hit
by a wave of unprecedented government corruption in the 1990s.
She was a judiciary employee until the beginning of
the last dictatorship (1976-1984), was imprisoned by the
military regime for nine months, and then ”sought refuge” in a
private law practice.
Argibay returned to the public
sphere in 1983, founding the Argentine Association of Women
Judges, and served as the president of the International
Association of Women Judges.
Male and female judges
alike are subjected to the same types of pressures, agreed the
women interviewed for this report.
According to
Argibay, ”pressure, threats or persecution are part of daily
life in nearly all judicial systems. It may vary in intensity,
depending on political and social circumstances, but they
nearly always exist.”
”Whoever stands up to the powers
that be and tries to reveal that which others are trying to
keep hidden is exposed to these pressures. Customarily the
accused try to discredit the work of the investigator, as far
as the public eye is concerned, in order to dissuade the
investigator from pursuing the case,” said Guianze, who was
targeted during the proceedings against Uruguay's former
minister Blanco.
Do women have greater resources than
do men to withstand these pressures?
”It might be that
women are better able to stand up to pressure and threats
because these are aimed or created based on male behaviours.
And because the male reaction tends to be more violent, this
places men at a disadvantage for confronting them,” ventured
Argibay.
The reality is that intimidation sometimes
crosses the line, and members of the judiciary are murdered,
including women. Last month, Yampole Lozano Osorio, an
investigator for the Colombian Attorney General's Office, was
killed in the eastern city of Cali by a gunman on a
motorcycle.
Lozano Osorio was 33. She began working
for the Attorney General's Office in 2000, after studying law
and political science at the University of Santiago, in Cali.
In less than one month, two members of that office were
assassinated.
* With reporting by Néfer Muñoz (Costa
Rica) and Marcela Valente (Argentina). (END/2003)
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