The Guatemalan Supreme Court on Tuesday approved a request by the country’s attorney general to impeach Guatemalan President Otto Perez over suspected involvement in a racket to siphon customs revenue from the government, and passed the matter to congress for approval.
A number of corruption investigations have devastated Perez’s Cabinet and led to the resignation in May of then-Guatemalan vice president Roxana Baldetti.
On Sunday, Perez angrily dismissed corruption allegations that have been leveled against him by prosecutors, and said he would not resign despite mounting pressure on the government and calls for his impeachment as a presidential election looms.
Photo: EPA
Guatemala’s attorney general and a UN-backed anti-corruption body known as the CICIG sought to impeach Perez on Friday last week after months of investigation into the racket known as La Linea, or “the line,” after a telephone hotline that was used in the scandal.
Under the scam, importers were able to avoid paying customs duties in exchange for bribes, which investigators have said were distributed to officials.
Perez’s conservative administration has spent much of this year mired in public protests and scandals over corruption allegations against senior officials, several of whom the retired general fired during a Cabinet purge in May.
Baldetti, who was arrested earlier this month, was on Tuesday officially charged with illicit association, customs fraud and receiving bribes.
“I respect it, but I don’t agree with it,” she said in court upon hearing the charges.
Baldetti has denied any wrongdoing and is being held in pre-trial detention.
A first round of voting to elect his successor is due next month and Perez is barred by law from seeking re-election.
In other developments, a court ruled on Tuesday that former Guatemalan leader Efrain Rios Montt is set to be given a “special trial” next year on genocide charges in which the 89-year-old would not have to testify and would not be sent to prison if convicted, due to mental incapacity.
The ruling revives the hopes of those seeking a new sentence against Rios Montt two years after a historic conviction of the former strongman was thrown out on a technicality.
Guatemala’s forensic authority in July said that Rios Montt was mentally unfit to be tried again on the charges that he was responsible for the killings of nearly 2,000 indigenous Maya during a particularly brutal stretch of the country’s 36-year civil war.
The new trial is to start in January next year, although Rios Montt, who was diagnosed with irreversible mixed dementia last month, is to stay in hospital or under house arrest throughout the proceedings.
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