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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to