Fue el Estado

Following last week's fire in Guatemala that killed 40 young girls, the country's minister and deputy minister of social social welfare and director of the Hogar Virgen de la Asuncion resigned or were dismissed. The girls died after they had been locked together in a room following an "escape" attempt. On Monday of this week, all three were arrested on charges of culpable homicide, negligence, and child abuse.

The survivors of the fire have been hastily relocated to other institutions and it is not clear that the conditions into which they are entering are any better than those they just left. A delegation from Disability Rights International visited the country after the tragedy and reported that:

The rush to place children in new facilities after the fire put them at risk of suffering the same abuse they endured at the home, the report said, because the new institutions were unprepared to take them.

“These institutions are the last place you would want to put a child who survived trauma,” Matthew Mason, the clinical director of the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development and a member of Disability Rights International’s team, said in the report.

“These are the dumping grounds of society, for people who are not wanted by society, whether they are disabled or gay or happen to get there through the criminal justice system,” Eric Rosenthal, the organization’s executive director, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

While there have been some improvements to the country's criminal justice system in the last ten years, there is very little evidence of institutional strengthening outside of that area. President Morales has asked the US FBI to assist his country with an investigation into the fire while Guatemala's Attorney General, Thelma Aldana, has full confidence in her office's ability to successfully carry out the investigation.

When the institutions of the state do not exist or are weak as in the case of Guatemala, people die from acts that could have been prevented. Numerous warnings were given about the conditions at the home. Yet the State failed to act. And now 40 girls are dead.