He practises law in a country that is said to be even more dangerous than Colombia.

He has received death threats, someone tried to kill him by sabotaging his car and he fears for the lives of his wife and children.

His name is Edgar Perez and he lives and works in Guatemala, where he handles cases relating to massacres and other human rights abuses carried out during the country’s 36-year civil war - during which 200,000 people died and another 40,000 were ‘forcibly disappeared’.

The war, he told me, arose from the US’s Cold War doctrine in Latin America. It had at its roots the ‘CIA sponsored overthrow’, in 1954, of the country’s reforming, left-leaning president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Some 57 years on, the communist threat - if indeed it ever existed - is crushed.

And in its place we now have, as the US military describes the Central America triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, ‘the most dangerous zone in the world outside Afghanistan and Iraq’.

I met Perez on 12 September when he was in London to meet civil servants at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

We sat in a room in Garden Court Chambers, overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields where people were playing tennis, lazing in the sun, munching sandwiches, reading books.

It seemed very far from the ‘mafia state’ Perez went on to describe to me, where paramilitaries have defected to or even become drug cartels, where a ‘culture of impunity’ shields the military from prosecution for massacres and disappearances and where civil society can provide scant protection for its citizens.

Perez has achieved some successes in this dysfunctional state, most notably in a trial where four former soldiers were each sentenced to 6,060 years in prison.

They had been found guilty of involvement in the 1982 massacre of at least 201 men, women and children in the northern Guatemalan community of Las Dos Erres.

They were sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for each of their 201 victims, plus an extra 30 years for having committed crimes against humanity.

It was soldiers like these that a UN Truth Commission had in mind when it reported, after the war’s conclusion in 1996, that the security forces were behind 93% of the human rights atrocities carried out during the conflict.

However, long after the peace accords were signed, murders and disappearances still continue.

Nowadays, Perez told me, they are mostly fuelled by greed for land. Indigenous populations are, inconveniently, living on land that is rich in natural resources that others - including multinational companies - are keen to exploit.

Some indigenous people are getting in the way of water sources with hydroelectric potential. There may be oil, too. And then agribusiness would like them to step aside so their smallholdings can be turned over to a far more profitable monoculture.

Edgar Perez is one of a small number of civil rights lawyers standing between these indigenous peoples and big business, the drug cartels and the military.

Long may he continue to do so - death threats not withstanding.