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.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS