The recent arrest of six prosecutors in Guatemala has sparked fears that political elites are seeking revenge after being investigated for graft.
The charges against the prosecutors, which range from obstruction of justice to abuse of authority, were brought by Guatemalan Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who has been included on a US list of “corrupt actors.”
The problems started when Guatemalan “business elites” were accused in 2016 of graft over construction contracts and illegal electoral financing, said Colombian Ivan Velasquez, who was head of the now-defunct UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.
Of those arrested, one was a representative of the commission, while the other five were members of the country’s Special Prosecutors’ Office Against Impunity.
The commission was created in 2007 to combat remnants of Guatemala’s “clandestine security machinery” that threatened human rights defenders and justice officials after the country’s 1960-1996 civil war.
The commission even had the power to prosecute.
Alongside the prosecutors’ office, it uncovered customs fraud in 2015 that provoked the resignation of then-Guatemalan president Otto Perez, who was identified as the ringleader.
“The business elites realized that the investigations would not be limited ... to Otto Perez,” Velasquez said.
They started smear campaigns in Guatemala, the US and Europe in an attempt to shut down the mission, Velasquez added.
When then-Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales, who originally supported the commission, found himself investigated for campaign corruption, he accused it of overstepping its duties and banished it from the Central American country.
Despite the expulsion of the commission, the prosecutors’ office continued to investigate corruption, but came under fire from politicians charged with graft, former office head Juan Francisco Sandoval told reporters.
Sandoval now lives in exile in the US having fled out of fear for his life.
With Porras now in charge of the public prosecutors’ office, it received no support.
“Any public servant who dares to oppose the system ... knows that they will not be able to survive, because they will suffer the same consequences” as the detained or exiled prosecutors, Sandoval said.
It is “a revenge plan by Guatemala’s criminal alliance because our work ... showed how corruption works,” said former attorney general Thelma Aldana, who has also lived in exile in the US since 2019.
Aldana wanted to run for president in 2019, but left Guatemala after an arrest warrant was issued against her for allegedly creating fake positions during her 2014-2018 tenure as top prosecutor.
“They are developing a scorched-earth policy [to] erase the pubic memory of what was a great opportunity to reconstruct” democracy, Velasquez said.
Porras is “in charge of dismantling” the prosecutors’ office and “managing this criminalization and this attack,” Aldana said.
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