A New Breed of Justice Reshaping Latin America

They call him the Indiana Jones of the Chapare.

Godofredo Reinicke has intervened in confrontations between anti-drug commandos and coca farmers, sped to a hospital trying to revive a baby fatally overcome by tear gas and performed an impromptu autopsy on a casualty of police bullets in front of an angry crowd.

Reinicke, an anesthesiologist turned human rights investigator, helps bring justice to the jungle.

The Chapare jungle is the center of Bolivia’s U.S.-sponsored war on cocaine. It has all the trappings: circling helicopters, U.S. law enforcement and military advisors, search-and-destroy missions, guerrilla ambushes on police by peasants.

Compared with the wilds of coca-producing nations such as Colombia and Peru, however, the Chapare is surprisingly civilized. The combat has rules and limits. Powerful prosecutors and stern laws are balanced by human rights “police” patrolling in jeeps for two governmental watchdogs: the Defender of the People, a new federal agency that Reinicke represents, and the human rights division of the Justice Ministry.

“I tell the representatives of the police and the justice system that I am not here to weaken them but to strengthen them,” says Reinicke, 44, who lives in a cluttered compound behind his office here in the jungle’s biggest town. “Our presence has had an impact. The authorities are much more careful. The conflict has lessened considerably.”

Reinicke and others like him are part of the remarkable reshaping of an archaic and arcane system of criminal justice in one of the hemisphere’s most impoverished countries. Bolivia has rapidly discarded old laws and institutions and created new ones, including the Defender of the People, a constitutional court, a council of judicial administration and government-paid attorneys for the indigent.

During the next two years, a new criminal code will introduce exotic concepts: Suspects will be presumed innocent. Trials will consist of oral public arguments instead of secret paper proceedings that lead to graft, political manipulation and a mountainous backlog. Judges will become impartial arbiters rather than all-powerful figures who both accuse suspects and decide their fate. Courts will respect indigenous languages and tribal governments.

And verdicts will be issued by judicial panels composed of citizens as well as judges--a landmark advance in the relationship between the law and the people.

“We knew that our justice system needed a radical transformation,” said Reinaldo Imana, an author of the code. “We want to do away with the idea that justice is incomprehensible to the citizens.”

Bolivia is not alone. Venezuela, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile are among other nations trying to clean up, speed up and modernize courts and laws.

Latin America already has modernized rapidly in some ways. The spread of free elections, free speech and free markets makes dictatorship a fading memory in most nations. Nonetheless, there is increasing disenchantment with democracy.

A central reason is the failure to establish the rule of law that is the bulwark of progress in North America and Western Europe, experts say. The justice apparatus remains a bastion of backwardness and shields entrenched elites who “think they can tinker with economics without doing the vital carpentry of judicial reform,” said Carlos Alberto Montaner, a Cuban-born political commentator.

Noble Ideals Ignored

The authoritarianism, corruption and stodginess of most Latin American legal systems make them, in the words of one expert, “direct descendants of the Spanish Inquisition.” The legal bureaucracies of colonial times centered on subservience to far-off monarchs. Constitutions written after independence from Spain and Portugal enshrined noble ideals that have been subverted, weakened and ignored ever since by dictators and economic elites.

Studies show that 92% of Peruvians, 87% of Argentines, 85% of Venezuelans and 73% of Brazilians have a negative opinion of their justice systems.

“The system has seen crime not as part of a social conflict but as an act of disobedience to authority,” Imana said. “And the repression has lacked the limits that are absolutely indispensable in a democratic society that respects individual dignity.”

The region’s recent history is full of political murders and other scandals among the elites that end in impunity or ambiguity. The results are not much better in regard to common crime. Instead of the U.S.-style triangle of prosecutor, defense attorney and judge, the legal system inherited from Europe’s Napoleonic Code centers on a magistrate overseeing a ponderous, paper-driven investigation, which can cripple crime-fighting, especially in complex cases.

“These countries have old European systems with U.S.-style violent crime,” said a U.S. law enforcement official with long experience in Latin America. “And it just doesn’t work.”

Taking on the system can bring deadly consequences. On Sept. 5, the corpse of Brazilian Judge Leopoldino Marques do Amaral, who accused 16 fellow judges of selling verdicts and other crimes, was found in a Paraguayan border town. He had been shot twice in the head and set on fire.

The murder of Marques, a father of eight, was a death foretold. On television, he complained of threats after he gave a congressional investigative commission luminous allegations against a “judicial mafia” in Mato Grosso state. He spent his last days hiding in cheap hotels.

Police arrested suspects, but Brazilians do not expect a speedy resolution. Some cases languish 12 years in Latin American courts, according to a World Bank study. Judges working in offices piled with yellowing files and bereft of computers spend up to 70% of their time on administrative matters.

“Due to a lack of space for archives and active case storage, [files] are often found lined up along the hallways of courts,” the World Bank study said. “Most courts experience severe case backlogs. . . . In 1993, there were approximately 500,000 cases pending in the entire court system in Ecuador. . . . In Colombia, over 4 million cases were pending.”

Resources are not always the problem, according to Argentine Justice Minister Raul Granillo Ocampo. The amount of the budget that Argentina dedicates to the justice system is proportionately double the amount in the United States. Argentine judges have 40% more support staff than their U.S. counterparts, Granillo said.

“These numbers lead to the conclusion that the solution is not to keep creating courts that operate in the same manner,” said Granillo, a former ambassador to the United States. “We must do something different. The courts still operate the way they did 100 years ago.”

Argentina is one of 18 nations in the region experimenting with juries and other U.S.-style reforms. In Bolivia, reformers decided that 12-member juries would be too cumbersome in a nation of 8 million where as much as two-thirds of the population has little education and a tenuous hold on Spanish. They opted for mixed five-member judicial panels of three citizens chosen at random and two professional judges, based on a model used in Germany.

‘Do Not Lie’

The criminal code approved by Congress this year also incorporates traditional indigenous values expressed in Quechua-language commandments that date back to the Inca empire: “Do not steal, do not lie, and do not be lazy.”

In an effort to reach out to the disenfranchised indigenous majority, the code mandates the use of interpreters and court officials who speak Quechua and Aymara. The judiciary may also defer to the decisions of tribal justice councils as long as they respect basic rights.

Although these changes represent a leap across centuries, they are resisted by many legal professionals

“It has been a very difficult task,” said Imana. “We have encountered vehement reactions, which are a dramatic confirmation that the inquisitionary system has become more than a system of judgment. It is a way of life. It is a culture.”

Unfortunately, it is a twisted culture full of tragicomic horror stories. A recently abolished law in Bolivia defined terrorism as throwing bombs--or causing a disturbance in public. Suspects charged with crimes such as burglary can spend more time in jail awaiting trial than the maximum sentence for the offense. Suspects who are acquitted sometimes remain behind bars because they cannot afford a fee to acquire their release papers.

The system that brutalizes the weak coddles the powerful. Drug corruption reached its apex in Bolivia after the 1980 military coup by “narco-colonels” aligned with cocaine kingpins. The return of democracy and a multimillion-dollar U.S. commitment to security forces have weakened the mafias. But the victims of official excess are usually the poor, not drug lords.

Exhibit one: Law 1008, approved in 1988, granted extraordinary power to anti-drug police and prosecutors, who receive U.S.-funded bonuses. It prohibited pretrial release and other basic rights in drug cases. It even kept drug suspects who were found innocent behind bars while prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court.

The poster-child for abuses of the anti-drug law is Aldo Choque, a college student who hitched an ill-fated ride in a jeep accompanying a truck near the city of Oruro. Police stopped the vehicles, found a load of precursor chemicals used for processing cocaine in the truck, and filed smuggling charges against the occupants.

Although he was innocent and a model citizen, Choque was sentenced to 25 years and hit with huge fines that he could not pay, bringing his total sentence to a staggering 80 years. He spent 5 1/2 years in jail before an international outcry brought his release by an appellate court in 1994.

The new laws scuttle key sections of Law 1008. Some draconian aspects had already been dismantled by former Justice Minister Rene Blattman during his 1994-97 tenure. Blattman’s legacy includes new bail laws,

public defenders, the release of thousands of citizens imprisoned as debtors, and the criminal code.

Blattman was appointed by former President Gonzalo Sanchez Losada, whose reforms included decentralizing government and balancing privatization with social programs. The passage of Losada’s justice reforms under his successor, President Hugo Banzer, reflects a Bolivian talent for political stability and continuity. Despite profound socioeconomic problems, Bolivia seems more likely than some of its neighbors to achieve true change.

“There is a capacity for compromise here that I have not seen in too many places,” said Frank Almaguer, a former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Bolivia who recently became U.S. ambassador in Honduras.

The U.S. contributed to the reforms. A local consulting company that helped write the legislation is run by a retired judge from New Mexico. It received funding and technical assistance from USAID, along with European agencies and Latin American experts.

Nonetheless, critics say the U.S. State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration further weaken Bolivian rights and institutions by pushing harsh laws and an increasingly militarized drug war.

The Chapare jungle is a treacherous and polemical battlefield because gangsters take refuge behind more than 250,000 coca-growing peasants who organize “self-defense” units and have elected leaders to Congress. As Bolivian authorities stepped up the eradication of illegal coca in the 1990s, hostilities between police and peasants resulted in dozens of deaths.

Blattman made pacification of the Chapare a priority. He formed an entire division of the Justice Ministry devoted to human rights; he needed a special operative in the jungle, someone who knew the turf and had the brains and guts to walk into cross-fire and survive. He needed, as he put it, an Indiana Jones.

Reinicke got the job. He had spent much of his life in the Chapare because his father owned a mining company here. Although a medical doctor by training, Reinicke was restless and wanted to do something socially meaningful.

The first years were a whirlwind. Reinicke had to gain the trust of the peasants who were the primary victims of abuse, while keeping in mind that some of their leaders were linked to drug mafias. He had to work with the law enforcement authorities he was supposed to investigate.

Reinicke denounced the police for illegal shootings, beatings, thefts, collusion with traffickers--and suffered retaliatory harassment.

“I don’t like drugs, as a Bolivian and much less as a doctor,” he said. “But I have to protest against the methods they use.”

Reinicke is tall and solidly built, with a pugnaciously prominent jaw. He walks with easy confidence into military outposts and coca markets alike. His admirers call him a pioneer. His detractors grumble that he shoots from the hip.

Violence Has Declined

But the recent history of the Chapare undercuts the assertion by some government officials that human rights advocates impede crime-fighting. Bolivian authorities have made record strides in coca eradication even as the presence of outside watchdogs has increased and violence has declined.

In today’s relatively peaceful climate, Reinicke is more likely to investigate the alleged theft by soldiers of a coca farmer’s bicycle than he is to look into a questionable shooting. His relationship with law enforcement has improved.

“Before, there was a total rejection,” he said. “Now, the relations are cordial.”

Last year, Reinicke moved from the Justice Ministry to the new Defender of the People. The work is similar, but the ombudsman agency has more autonomy and a higher profile. It is headed by Ana Maria Campero, a respected journalist.

In an ideal system, there would be no need for the Defender of the People. While the arduous work of institution-building proceeds, however, short-term solutions are desperately needed. Campero combines two forces that have become de facto guardians of the law and individual rights in Bolivia and across the continent: human rights groups and the press.

These watchdogs sometimes end up taking over the mission that official crime fighters are unable or unwilling to handle, with all the danger and disorder that entails. It is a singular kind of power: broad yet largely symbolic, persuasive rather than coercive. The mission is crucial because reform brings risks, Campero said.

“The old state is changing, and we don’t yet have a new state,” she said. “People don’t know the new rules of the game. . . . On paper, we have fantastic laws, we have made great strides. We are in the vanguard.”

Implementation of Bolivia’s new legal system will take another two years at least. The judiciary and others will have their hands full preparing courthouses, officials and the public for a difficult transition period.

Although Bolivia has a long way to go, it is heading in the right direction, said former USAID director Almaguer.

“It will take much longer than [two years] to develop the roots of a system,” Almaguer said. “And no system is immune from corruption. But where we are today, compared to as recently as four years ago--it’s night and day.”

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About This Series

Despite reforms of the past two decades, Latin American societies remain unequal and unjust. This three-part series explores efforts to reform the justice system, which have taken on the urgency of restoring democracy in the 1980s and modernizing economies in the 1990s.

* Sunday: Police fight rising crime while battling their own traditions of brutality and dishonesty.

* Today: Reformers rewrite criminal codes, open up secretive investigations and trials, and protect the rights of the poor and powerless.

* Tuesday: Prison officials strive to end overcrowding and violence with large construction program and campaign to change the mentality of authorities, inmates and the community at large.

The series will be available on the Internet at https://www.latimes.com.