A former president in jail as he faces charges of embezzling money from the military budget. Two former national police chiefs arrested on drug counts. A former dictator’s son and other former Defense Ministry officials charged with fraud and embezzlement. Investigations into drug rings and illegal adoption rackets.
Since Guatemala turned its justice system into an experiment under an unusual agreement with the UN in recent years, the country has made some visible steps toward shaking up its culture of impunity and strengthening the rule of law.
Admitting that organized crime has burrowed deeply into the police, the prosecutor’s office and the courts, Guatemala invited in foreign prosecutors to prepare delicate cases that might otherwise have been shelved by intimidated or corrupt officials.
However, in the past few weeks, an escalating political struggle over the effort suggested just how fragile it was. The fallout led to the resignation of the charismatic chief of the international prosecutors’ panel and a limbo lasting possibly months while Guatemala picks a new attorney general, also referred to as a prosecutor general.
Both positions are essential to keep the experiment working, prompting the UN to appoint a new director this past week for the panel, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or simply CICIG. Under the agreement between the sides, outside prosecutors work alongside a special group of Guatemalan prosecutors and investigators.
“In Guatemala, criminal organizations had never been confronted,” the first director of the panel, the Spanish jurist Carlos Castresana, told a local television station in March. “CICIG is doing it, but so is the prosecutor general’s office and the judiciary. Let’s say it: We are looking the monster in the face, we are holding its gaze and it is reacting.”
The trouble started at the end of May, when a new attorney general began to remove prosecutors and investigators working with CICIG. Castresana responded as though his warning of a backlash had been borne out. He resigned on June 7 after asserting that the attorney general, Conrado Reyes, had links to organized crime — an accusation Reyes denies.
Within a week, Guatemala’s highest court removed Reyes from office, ruling that the complex procedures leading to his selection by Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom had not followed the law.
Now Guatemala is holding its breath, waiting for a new attorney general and for the new director of the UN panel, Francisco Dall’Anese of Costa Rica, to jump into the fray. The commission may not be able to afford a long pause in its work. Unless it is extended, its mandate runs out in September next year.
“Castresana is a very big loss,” said Alejandro Rodriguez, one of the top prosecutors at the attorney general’s office. “He has a great capacity for communication and persuasion.”
Dall’Anese, as attorney general in Costa Rica, led corruption investigations of two former presidents.
Guatemala’s criminal networks extend deep into the institutions of state. Even the language of Guatemala’s agreement with the UN refers to “illegal security groups and clandestine security organizations” with the ability to “avoid investigation or punishment.”
Every day, the Guatemalan newspapers offer a bewildering digest of developments in the commission’s caseload — and a glimpse into who is behind these illegal groups.
Former Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo and his defense minister are accused of embezzling money from the defense budget. Six more former Defense Ministry officials, including the son of the former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt, have also been charged with embezzling more than US$100 million from the ministry in a separate case.
Two former national police chiefs are in jail as they face drug charges, and the commission is investigating charges that the security detail of another former police chief was running an extortion and hit squad.
Some of the military suspects have histories going back to Guatemala’s armed conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, when the military conducted a scorched earth campaign in the countryside that wiped out whole villages.
“Before, we denounced these networks and we did not have the proof,” said Helen Mack, a longtime activist who now leads a commission to restructure the police force.
“What is happening now is that all this is being aired,” she said. “The CICIG’s presence has helped to uncover this and to give evidence of a whole system of corruption and impunity in the country.”
Amilcar Mendez is also waiting for justice. A well-known human rights activist during the armed conflict, Mendez has followed his own leads to try to solve the 2007 killing of his son, Jose Emanuel Mendez, who worked at the airport.
Mendez says he believes his son was shot dead because he refused to let drug planes land and publicly questioned an agreement that loosened restrictions on private flights between Honduras and Guatemala.
After years of inaction from prosecutors and no response from CICIG, Mendez was startled to hear Castresana say last month that his son’s boss had probably ordered the killing.
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