A difficult task I do say

From an AP story on President-elect Otto Perez Molina

Former general Otto Perez Molina takes office as Guatemala’s new president Saturday with a top priority of ending a long-standing U.S. ban on military aid imposed over concerns about abuses during the Central American country’s 36-year civil war.

Perez, who was a top military official during the war, has long insisted there were no massacres, human rights violations or genocide in a conflict that killed 200,000 civilians, mostly Mayan Indians...

Close advisers say he supports meeting the conditions set by various U.S. congressional appropriations acts for restoring aid that was first eliminated in 1978 halfway through the civil war.

Among the required steps is reforming a weak justice system that has failed to bring those responsible for abuses to justice. A U.N.-sponsored postwar truth commission said state forces and related paramilitary groups committed most of the killings.

The U.S. also insists that the government support a United Nations-supported international anti-corruption team whose prosecution effort has been criticized by Guatemala’s political elite.

I find it hard to believe that Perez is going to put a lot of effort into reforming a judicial system so that it can bring human rights violators to justice for atrocities committed during the civil war when the president himself believes that no such violations took place and his incoming administration is filled with former military officials.

Many of his other officials are tied to the country's economic elite who have been waging war on CICIG and the attorney general. I hope that I am wrong, but I don't have a lot of confidence here either.

He won handily this time with campaign promises to deal with criminals with an “iron fist,” a stand that resonated in a country of more than 13 million people where murders are committed at a rate of 45 for every 100,000 residents. That is almost three times higher than in neighboring Mexico.

45 per 100,000 is closer to 2008 or 2009 not today. Last year the murder rate was about 38.5 and in 2010 it was 41 per 100,000. While Guatemala's murder rate might be three times as high as Mexico's, it is about half its southern neighbors, Honduras and El Salvador, with which it is more frequently grouped.