Note: Look at that smug Canadian superiority in that sign off. Four years later I’d rather go south but I’m actually not permitted to leave this country. Robin Williams described Canada as a “really nice apartment over a meth lab”, but it turns out the apartment was full of informants.

As the first female attorney general of Guatemala, Claudia Paz y Paz accomplishes miracles in a criminal state hollowed out by corruption and haunted by the U.S.–backed genocide of the ’80s. The number of prosecutions skyrockets under her watch, climaxing in the arrest and trial in 2013 of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (whose wealthy defenders are reduced to calling the state prosecutor “fatty”). What happens next is both amazing and heartbreaking, although Montt’s jovial contempt for the rule of law and the media support he enjoys point to the deeper realities Paz y Paz is up against. Aside from its obvious virtues, Burden of Peace provides a timely look at the culture and mechanics of political impunity as our neighbour to the immediate south emerges as the biggest banana republic of them all.

Georgia Straight, March 2017