We do not want imprisoned judges, but suitable judges

Law No. 1443 promulgated this July 4 has a nice title, but it is an empty norm. It has been called “protection for victims of femicide, infanticide and rape of infants…”, but its essential content is practically exhausted in the greater punitive rigor of the State against, not so much the criminals, but the judges who know these causes and commit the crimes of “prevarication” and “consortium” in their trial.

The proximate origin of this rule is not, as government officials said, in a supposed judicial reform plan, but in the public scandal that was unleashed in January by the actions of judges, prosecutors and even counselors who illegally released the femicide Richard Choque, discovered committing more femicides after Judge Rafael Alcón, brother of Pdte. of the Council of the Judiciary, granted him “house arrest” and that similar illegal releases had occurred in more than a hundred cases of murderers sentenced to 30 years in prison without the right to pardon. The repudiation and the protests were massive and in the face of this the Government hastened to form “commissions”, “intervene in courts” and arrest some judges.

The final corollary of all this government improvisation, it is clear to us, is the enactment of Law 1443 by which, basically, the sentence of prevaricating judges is increased from 8 to 20 years, while prohibiting judges from granting house arrests those who have been convicted or grant provisional release to those who have been prosecuted; all this in the indicated crimes of femicide, infanticide and rape of an infant.

Lawyer Arturo Yáñez correctly described the government action as “criminal populism”, which we fully endorse, adding that punitive populism is, precisely, the improvised and empty response of the rulers to the heinous crime that, in its impunity and recurrence, generates popular rejection and the demand for a heavy hand. In those moments of helplessness and pain, society demands the death penalty, life imprisonment or chemical castration, when it does not opt ​​for violent actions such as lynchings, seeking “justice” by its own hands.

And that path, that of penal populism, is the one that the Government of President Arce has taken, poorly advised, to cover up the deficiencies in the administration of justice and the lack of preventive public policies without solid institutions, trained personnel or sufficient resources and that, for the same reason, they do not accompany several laws, such as 348, allegedly protective of women and children.

Already in 2016 criminal populism was made official by the rulers, when Vice President García Linera asked, at a “Judicial Summit” in Sucre, that life imprisonment be implemented for rapists and murderers of minors. An attempt was made to use the outcry and repudiation of the people to gain popularity and votes in the state vacuum of comprehensive policies and in the midst of the tragedy of the victims’ homes.

Capital punishment has not reduced violent crime one iota in the US, nor has life imprisonment in several European countries. It has been universally proven that crime is not eliminated by eliminating criminals, and that the aggravation of penalties is equally useless.

Worse when now our rulers tell us that the hardening of sentences, that is to say criminal populism, is part of the official judicial reform, always changing and always postponed.

It is that in addition the position is cynical. Let us remember that the prevaricating judges who now want to be imprisoned for 20 years, are the ones that the Government selected and elected first in “elections” that supplanted the popular vote with the manipulation of candidates, some with the surname Alcón, who thus came to the top of the Council of the Judiciary, and later with judges outside the judicial career but very close to the Government, appointed by that same Council and also surnamed Alcón.

Many current justice operators, with other surnames, have similar backgrounds.

No, our society does not require imprisoned judges, what it urgently needs are independent and qualified judges, with decent salaries and working conditions, appointed for their merits and no longer for their partisan affinities.

We do not need empty laws, nor any criminal populism. It is clear that we require a true judicial reform via referendum by citizen initiative.