The experience in Honduras when I started this work was that, as I said, the percentage of convictions of people who were not found committing was 0%. That meant that every time they had to investigate, they weren't getting anybody convicted. You ask, why is that? Is there no will? Don't they care?
Part of it has to do with the fact that they're creating this new system and there are some serious dysfunctions in the way that it has been put. For example, prosecutors didn't exist under the old system. The ministerio públicos are new.
For example, one of the issues we're doing with Honduras right now is what we call the 72-hour initiative, because the way they're structured is.... What happens first of all, you have to understand, is that in a hybrid system, it's not the police who investigate. The police investigate under the direction of the prosecutor. So here you have prosecutors that come out of law school as lawyers. They get hired to be prosecutors. They don't have any police training. They don't know what a crime scene looks like. They don't know how to investigate.
We've been trying to address that dysfunction. We've actually been giving them training on how you direct a crime scene. Because if somebody is killed, what will go out with the prosecutor will be a technical team whose job it is to process the murder.
Now, the difference between us and them is that they have so many murders that the time you have to process a murder is probably two hours, as opposed to a whole day or two days. We've been working on training the technical teams, saying, look, we have to get them tight and we have to get them to the highest standards possible, because they can be. But then we have to train the prosecutor to know how to direct them and how to collect the evidence properly, because the prosecutor has to take control of the evidence afterwards.
But then what happens, you see, on the 72-hour problem we've run into, is the way that they structure.... This is what Guatemala was 12 years ago. They created a 24-hour turn. In a place like Tegucigalpa, they'll have a prosecutor who is on shift for one 24-hour period every 20 days. For 24 hours, they have to handle all the scenes with the teams. Then what happens is that they take two days off. They write up the report on the third day. On the fourth day, they transfer it to another prosecutor, who takes over the investigation. We're saying that this is crazy, so we're working on what we call a 72-hour thing. We've brought this to Guatemala, which has implemented this, so they can see it.
We're saying that the prosecutor who is investigating has to be on shift for 72 hours. They have to do 24 hours and then two eight-hour shifts. They have to work with the team. They have to do at least the first 72 hours, and then they have to meet immediately. I don't want them to transfer it over in 72 hours. That's not the way it should be, but we're looking at steps. We're saying that you need to transfer it over, and if you're going to do that, do it only at the 72-hour mark, and it has to be done without a delay.
In countries like Guatemala.... We've had cases in Honduras where they'll have a murder and the file gets transferred over to the investigating prosecutor two weeks later. We're saying that there's a problem there.
The second issue is that you can't just have the prosecutors doing murders and robberies. You have to specialize. What we're working on with them is creating what we did in Guatemala, which is the section called “la Vida”, which is the crimes against life section. We're saying that there has to be a special prosecutor, because there are enough murders there that they had better have a special section, and it's only that section that should handle the murders. We don't want them handling the robberies. We don't want them to have the sexual assaults. We want them just focusing on the murders.
Those are the changes that we are implementing with them right now, but in order to do that, we have to train them on the techniques. We also have to work with them on the systems. Then we have to work with them to make sure they get the personnel they need. Because that's the commitment we expect from them. They're going to provide personnel, and it's happening. It's happening and that's an example.
But you can see that a dysfunction like that from the very beginning means that your process is in trouble. What they do in the kind of case you're talking about, or any case that gets a high profile, is that they put special efforts into it. It's international, they say, and we're going to be observed, so we'll put in special efforts.
But what about the poor person who was killed on the bus? That's where my concern is. I'm really concerned about the common person. That's what we work on, and that's an example.
To me, it's those functional pieces that, one by one, we have to put in place. What we're trying to do is say, “Look, in Guatemala the law is a bit different, but fundamentally they're similar, and we should have these countries in the northern triangle all working in a similar way.” That's what we're trying to do.