In July 2019 my wife reported a violent, misogynistic crime at the Fiscalia de Mujeres. An investigation by INACIF was duly instigated and a report issued within a month which concluded that such a crime had indeed been committed.
At that stage, in any country that takes such matters seriously, it would then be the responsibility of the state to hold the alleged perpetrator responsible.
Yet what seems to happen here in Guatemala is that the defence counsellors appointed by abusers, rapists and other forms of masculine toxicity are somehow able to intervene prior to the first court session in order to cherry-pick the charges their clients will actually face. And thereafter generate endless procedural delays which inevitably exacerbate the harm done to the alleged victim as the so-called 'friends and family' of the accused jump on the intimidation/misogyny bandwagon.
The seriousness of the charges make no difference to whether men like Diego Ariel Stella or Jason Wade Lever are culpable or not.
They undoubtedly have a inalienable right to defend themselves and to try to establish their innocence — in a courtroom — but they should absolutely not be permitted this aberrant opportunity to define what they might be guilty of even before the victim has had the opportunity to make a case against them in the presence of a judge.
And, as noted above, in the instance of violent crimes, and especially that of rape, it should always be the state that is seen to be making the formal accusation, not least because that protects the victim from the sort of defamatory abuse Verónica Molina Lee has lately been receiving on social media...
In the worst possible taste...
The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) in England & Wales would absolutely never tolerate such attempts to undermine its case during the pre-trial remand period and the MP and INACIF deserve a similar legal firewall in Guatemala.
No civilised country today can permit public smear campaigns targeting the alleged victims of gender violence.
In my wife’s case where the defendant is Jason Wade Lever, the prosecutor responsible at the Fiscalía — somewhat coincidentally also named Claudia Paniagua — unilaterally adjudicated in October 2019 that no crime had been committed and passed the case file down to the civil court.
She did so without notifying or consulting with my wife in any way, thus violating her rights by involving her as the agraviada in a legal process to which she had not explicitly consented, and would then have to follow through on her own and at her own expense.
Her abuser’s lawyer — the other Claudia Paniagua — apparently had access to all the files including the INACIF report, before she did and it was from that moment that parts of it started to go missing.
All the guarantees that she had specifically requested when she made the denuncia at the Fiscalía de Mujeres, confidentiality, personal security and so on, were thus infringed, and in an inexplicably negligent and furtive fashion which further endangered her safety and overall wellbeing.
Her abuser’s lawyer — the other Claudia Paniagua — apparently had access to all the files including the INACIF report, before she did and it was from that moment that parts of it started to go missing.
All the guarantees that she had specifically requested when she made the denuncia at the Fiscalía de Mujeres, confidentiality, personal security and so on, were thus infringed, and in an inexplicably negligent and furtive fashion which further endangered her safety and overall wellbeing.
Inevitably, Lever redoubled his efforts to insult and intimidate her.
Go ahead and give this one the Prince William perspective switch.
What kind of grown-up, adequately socialised person behaves like this?
Meanwhile, Diego Stella is, via surrogates at least, playing the victim along with a flagrant double game — pleading for a more balanced process whilst simultaneously indulging in a social media smear campaign designed to blacken the reputation of his alleged victim in a manner he must know would not be permitted in any country possessing a more robust system of justice.
He must also know that the damage already done to his reputation is due in no small part to his connivance with an insidious pattern of influence trafficking, as described above.
Much of it is essentially his own fault and he surely has no business lashing out at Verónica Molina Lee in an nonsensically hypocritical attempt to forcibly level the playing field now that his own actions have panned out somewhat poorly for him.
Yet the fact remains that Verónica Molina Lee has been let down by the MP and other officials who should have been supporting her.
I too have had to listen to some of them using the platitudinal notion of disinterested balance as an excuse for their inertia — along the lines of 'I am neither on your side nor on theirs', which is pretty much the most absurd thing that could ever come out of the mouth of a prosecutor.
Both my wife and Molina Lee were subjected to attempts to shanghai them into attending a psychiatric examinations after they had both already been positively profiled by INACIF when their accusations were first made.
In my wife's own case that session with a shrink was presented as a demand, backed up by an illegal document sitting on the case file and about which she had never been informed: Lever had gone into Claudia Paniagua's office and testified without any evidence at all that she 'must be suffering from something' and that he himself was the victim of xenophobic prejudice. This was never signed off by a prosecutor. It would be hilarious if it were not so heinous, the equivalent of Harvey Weinstein sueing his victims for anti-semitic bias.
And the only thing she was suffering from was good, old-fashioned feminine intuition. She saw what he was up to and drew a line. His response was vile — and he consciously chose to be vile in a manner that targeted her gender.
Neither woman has been granted any kind of restraining order at any stage of the process. At the first session my wife attended back in October 2019 the judge even told her that she, the agraviada, would not be permitted to get close to her abuser, Lever.
Early in the following year, in an extraordinarily ill-conceived attempt to shut me up, Lever dispatched his wife to make use of Guatemala's femicide law in a notably spurious manner against me. Her denuncia was immediately thrown out, but she still had protective measures imposed on me for six months. (This was the same individual who had falsely accused me of verbally abusing her to her face in February 2018 when I wasn’t even in the country, another crime which went unpunished*.)
Claudia Paniagua — take your pick as to which one of them I am referring — is an indigenous swimmer in this very contaminated pond. But abusive men like Lever and Stella are extranjeros who apear to have made the choice to avail themselves of unmerited advantages deriving from specific flaws in the justice system of this country, and that is shameful.
Lever in particular seems to be an opportunistic scrounger with a compulsion to take advantage of any small leg up that living in the occasionally chaotic developing world might present him with.
This is a snap of his 'water meter' on February 27, 2018.
The Municipality must have struggled to get a decent reading from that...and yet the year before he had constructed a swimming pool sending our own bills sky high, whilst at the same time boasting unblushingly to us that he had 'free water', also known here as hurto de fluidos, an actual crime on the statute books in Guatemala.
For around five years after moving to his home he was steadfastly refusing to build his own wall, lay down his own drains or open a water account. He had his reasons. In the end he had to do all three, but under duress — one might say kicking and screaming like a child throwing a tantrum — only when actual personal consequences beckoned, and in each case with specific spiteful counter-attacks against us and our property which we had done nothing to deserve. We weren’t forcing him to do anything; these were his obligations in law and his avoidance of them was prejudicial both to us and the wider community.
The last time I was able to snap the contents of that water box in 2020 there was already a meter inside, but the numbers had been painted on the front of it. This month the Muni told my wife that Lever registered an account in 2017, a certain impossibility, given that photo above and several recorded conversations I have with officials there from 2018. This would anyway imply that he had been gorreando without a care for at least four years.
These things might appear fairly localised and trivial and perhaps my mistake was to believe so myself at first. But hindsight has revealed that they are markers of an anti-social, bottom-feeding mentality, that of an outsider whose only real interest in this country is as an adventure playground for perpetrating petty (and not so petty) scams.
Lever has been offered multiple opportunities to resolve some of these issues amicably and has systematically and disdainfully refused, always escalating the astringent, aggressive nature of both his bravado and behaviour afterwards.
This is ultimately not a localised, personal concern. When an individual behaves as if they have no consideration for basic social and sexual mores — and specifically when that individual follows up with gender aggression and sexual exposure — the problem becomes one for the entire community. Because it is never going to stop.
Maybe the bigger lesson here should be that Guatemala really ought not to be providing such a safe haven for the world's deadbeats and degenerates.
* * *
* On the very night that the denuncia arrived in October 2019, there was a good deal of intoxicated loudness emanating from the Levers' side of our wall, along with explicit, bellowed threats to cheat us out of our property.
Lever co-opts his wife and children into his hate campaign and consistently bullies her into making false reports to the police and MP.
That same evening he was overheard doing just that along with a known Dutch male associate, aggressively and relentlessly. She pleaded with them not to be made to lie, as 'I lied last time'.
O...or like this?
Later that night she deleted two posts from the sick Instagram account they had set up to insult and demean us, which felt like being spat at several times a day for weeks on end — this is prejudice in action... — both of which rather inconveniently corroborated witness statements they would have only just come across in the case file.
A few days later the entire Instagram account disappeared, only to be resurrected shortly afterwards with all new content as the social media face of Lever's then new (and now failed) business Roadkill Grill, using the very same collection of followers earlier acquired via the 3-month-long cyber-bullying campaign — and so the Levers were in effect seeking an economic boost on the back of their unhinged hatred.
Hatred is only personal until it becomes pathological. Or morphs into something targeting gender, nationality, race, religion, appearance, reproductive or lifestyle choices.
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