During the
Guatemalan civil war, Mack's sister Myrna, worked with indigenous Mayan rural peoples. She documented their displacement by fighting and the scale of the government's attacks on them. Myrna was stabbed to death in 1990 near her office in
Guatemala City by unknown assailants, believed to be ordered by a government that wanted to silence her public criticism. Beginning in 1991, Mack pursued the prosecution in Guatemala of those suspected of the crime, which included several men trained at the US Army School of the Americas (later renamed the
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). After more than a decade of seeking justice in Guatemala, Mack took the case to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC, and later to the
Inter-American Court in Costa Rica. In 1993 Mack founded and became the executive director of the Myrna Mack Foundation in Guatemala City. In addition to pursuing justice for her sister Myrna through national and international courts, the foundation engages in a broad array of other activities and programs to promote human rights in Guatemala. It supports victims of the war, as well as promotes political and economic development among the indigenous peoples. Under President
Álvaro Colom's government, Mack was appointed in 2010 "to lead investigations into police corruption. In one of her first statements after her appointment, she asserted that the low pay and poor work conditions of Guatemala's police were key catalysts in corruption and must be addressed." ==Awards==