A ccording to a 2001 Human Rights Watch report, in the last three decades of the 20th century some 200,000 mainly indigenous peasants were killed by state forces in Guatemala. During that period, 430 villages were wiped off the map, having been torched and their inhabitants killed.
January 2000 saw the inauguration of President Alfonso Portillo. He admitted state responsibility for the mass killings in his country during the above-mentioned decades. He called the brutal murder of Bishop Gerardi and its botched investigation a "national embarrassment", publicly committing himself to bringing those responsible to justice. However, according to Human Rights Watch, President Portillo's alliance with General Ríos Montt, Guatemala's former military ruler, who became President of the Congress in January 2000, was a "worrisome reminder of the country's inability to surmount its legacy of repression".
A UN special rapporteur on the independence of lawyers and judges reported on Guatemala in March 2001. The report detailed "incidences of corruption, as well as threats and intimidation of lawyers and judges".
In an Amnesty International Open Letter of August 29th, 2007, addressed to the Guatemalan Presidential Candidates for the September 2007 elections, it mentions "the widespread rape, torture and acts of genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples and documented by a 1998 UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).
Of the victims the commission could document, 83 per cent were of Mayan origin. Some 93 per cent of human rights violations were attributed to government forces. Despite these facts, there have been few satisfactory prosecutions of those responsible for perpetrating human rights violations, and the whereabouts of most of the adults and children who were forcibly disappeared still remain unknown".