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ABSTRACT
Postwar El Salvador and Guatemala have undertaken to reform and democratize the state and to support the rule of law. Each country entered the 1990s hobbled by a legacy of authoritarian rule, while a corrupt and politicized judiciary offered virtually no check on the abuse of power. Because the judiciary has performed poorly as an institution of horizontal accountability, this article examines the performance of a new "accountability agency," the Human Rights Ombudsman. The article discusses the context in which the office was established and developed in each country, perceptions of its performance, and political responses as the office began to perform its function of holding public officials accountable in their exercise of power. Unfortunately, this new office may fall prey to the same weaknesses that have plagued older institutions in both countries.
Latin American countries helped to lead the global "third wave" transition to democracy that began a quarter-century ago. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, elected civilian governments replaced authoritarian regimes across the region. By the mid-1990s, a generation had passed without an elected government being overthrown, which led one observer (Shifter 1997, 116) to speak of a "well-established norm of civilian, constitutional government in the hemisphere." Even as this judgment was being rendered, however, researchers also recognized that Latin America's new electoral democracies displayed a fragile commitment to the rule of law. Indeed, they ol'teii were hampered by what Diamond (1999, 31) calls a "disturbing undertow," referring to the pervasive corruption and politicization of justice sector institutions.
By the late 1990s, new studies began to appear that documented not only the demoralized state of the judiciary in much of Latin America, but also how difficult judicial and other justice sector reform was proving to be (Hammergren 1998; Jarquin and Carrillo 1998; Popkin 2000; Prillaman 2000; Dodson and Jackson 2001; Doclson 2002). Students of democratization expressed concern over the possibility of "reverse waves" that might be generated by an inability to establish the rule of law (Diamond J 997; Linz and Stepan 1996; O'Donnell 1997; Zakaria 1997; Schecller 1998). In that context, scholars recognized that weak judicial systems lay at the heart of what might be called the "horizontal accountability deficit" in Latin America (Schecller et al. 1999).
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