Jeff Abbott
Protesters in the streets in Guatemala, January 12. Their banner reads “our voice counts,” reflecting strong public opinion against the country’s president’s efforts to stop anti-corruption investigations.
Guatemalans took to the streets in protest on January 14 for a second time this month as President Jimmy Morales presented a report on his administration.
One week earlier, Morales announced he was unilaterally ending an agreement with the United Nations that formed the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, commonly known as CICIG. The president justified his move by pointing to alleged abuses committed by the anti-corruption body, including polarizing the country and putting its security at risk, violating human rights, and being allied with criminal structures and “terrorists.”
Morales also presented a video of U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, speaking before Congress and applauding Morales’s efforts against the CICIG. Wicker stated Morales’s efforts “were correct” and “should be praised.” It was a sentiment shared by other Republicans in the U.S. Congress.
“A nation’s sovereignty is the core of its freedom,” Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, tweeted. “Guatemala has every right to speak up and defend violations of sovereignty and abuses committed by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala.”
“Every nation has a right to sovereignty!” echoed Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. “Guatemala has a right to decide if it wants the U.N. to interfere in its internal affairs. CICIG was never supposed to last all these years. Additionally, the United States has funded CICIG for far too long. Time to stop that too!”
Donald Trump has remained silent, and his State Department has only issued vague statements in response.
Yet in Guatemala, Morales’s unilateral decision has sparked political upheaval that could lead to a constitutional crisis.
On January 8, the country’s Constitutional Court issued a ruling against Morales’s decision. The following day, the administration continued efforts to impeach members of the country’s highest court.
According to Guatemalan constitutional lawyer Oswaldo Samayoa, the Morales administration cannot unilaterally end the CICIG according to language within the agreement itself. “This is not possible and is against the law,” Samayoa tells The Progressive. “The accord says that only the United Nations can unilaterally decide to end the agreement.”
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, called for the end of aid to Guatemala over the decision, and California Congressional Representative Norma Torres, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, condemned Morales’s actions.
Ironically, Morales won the presidency in 2015, riding on an anti-corruption platform following the CICIG and the Public Prosecutor’s successful investigation of the administration of former President Otto Pérez Molina, who currently faces prosecution for acts of corruption. Morales promised voters that he was “not corrupt or a thief,” and expressed interest in working with the anti-corruption body.
But this changed following the announcement in 2017 of the CICIG and Public Ministry’s investigations into his son and brother for alleged fraud and money laundering. Soon Morales himself faced investigation by the commission into alleged illicit financing of his 2015 campaign.
A 2017 study by Vanderbilt University showed that 70 percent of Guatemalans support the CICIG as the country’s most trusted institution. But since 2017, the Morales Administration has carried out a campaign against the U.N.-backed anti-corruption body. Morales announced in August 2018 that he would not be renewing the CICIG accord with the United Nations, and shortly after blocked the lead commissioner, Ivan Velasquez, from entering the country. The Guatemalan Constitutional Court reversed this decision, but the administration disobeyed the order.
Jeff Abbott
Protestor in Guatemala, January 12. “Let’s take out the clown,” the sign declares of the country’s president.
The Morales administration and anti-CICIG activists have sought, and found, support within the U.S. Republican Party. According to an investigation by McClatchy, the anti-CICIG effort in Guatemala spent $80,000 lobbying the Trump Administration.
The Guatemalan government’s decision to move its Israel embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018 is viewed as a key means of finding U.S. political support for the anti-CICIG efforts.
“They have found allies in Washington,” Gabriel Wer, an activist with the movement Justicia Ya, tells me during one of the protests outside of the Guatemalan Congress, referencing the embassy. “It was a game by the government to be good with Trump, and the powerful Jewish and Evangelical Christian communities in the United States.”
Following the embassy announcement, Morales secretly met with Jared Kushner in Guatemala City in July 2018. Though the conversation was never made public, Guatemalan daily newspaper La Hora speculated that they spoke about the administration’s struggle against the anti-corruption efforts of the CICIG.
During his January 7 announcement that he would end the CICIG agreement with the U.N., Morales gave the microphone to a family he alleges has been abused by the commission. The Bitkov family—Igor, Irina, and their daughter Anastasia—fled Russia in 2008 over alleged fears of persecution from President Vladimir Putin’s Administration.
Igor Bitkov was sentenced in December 2018 to seven years in prison for using a false Guatemalan passport, after a retrial following the accusation.
“The Bitkov case has given an evil spin to the crisis,” Wer says. “It has put the CICIG in a vulnerable position. Republican Senators are using the case to benefit their agenda without understanding that there are no solid arguments behind it.”
The Bitkov family operated a paper mill in St. Petersburg, Russia until 2008, when it was forced to flee to Guatemala after a Russian state bank ordered the family repay a loan that reportedly reached $450 million. In 2015, following an investigation supported by the CICIG into a criminal network operating within Guatemala, thirty-nine people, including members of the Bitkov family, were arrested. The family of four was sentenced in January 2018 to fourteen for Irina and Anastasia and nineteen years for Igor in prison for the use of false passports, but the decision was annulled in June 2018..
The story then rose to international attention following a series of op-eds in 2018 by Mary Anastasia O’Grady, editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal. O’Grady accused the CICIG of mistreating the family and carrying out a campaign of repression against the Bitkov family on behalf of Putin.
O’Grady’s version of events played into the claims of anti-CICIG activists and the Morales administration. Perhaps at play: In 2015, she had received a honorary doctorate from the Guatemalan Francisco Marroquín University, a far-right institution that has backed Morales.
“The information that she is publishing in her columns comes from Francisco Marroquín University,” says Wer. “She connects things that don’t really have any connection.”
But the accusations resonated along political lines in Washington, D.C.
The House’s Helsinki Commission, headed by Representative Christopher Smith, Republican of New Jersey, and Senator Wicker, convened in April 2018 to investigate whether the Russians had manipulated the CICIG to persecute the Bitkov family.
Loreto Ferrer from the CICIG responded to the investigation in a statement saying, “We are surprised that unfounded allegations of interference by a foreign country in the conduct of criminal proceedings in Guatemala are circulating at the highest level of the U.S. Congress with no evidence.”
Nevertheless in May 2018, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who served on the commission, made an effort to block more that $6 million in funding for the CICIG.
“I am concerned that CICIG, a commission mostly funded by the United States, has been manipulated and used by radical elements and Russia’s campaign against the Bitkov family in Guatemala,” Rubio said in a statement.
The U.S. embassy in Guatemala carried out an investigation of the accusations in July, but found no signs of manipulations by Russian intelligence, according to Guatemalan daily newspaper, El Periodico.
In a January 2019 letter from CICIG lead commissioner Velásquez to U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres, each of Morales’s accusations against the anti-corruption body are detailed and refuted..
“The smear campaigns, defamation and threats have increased,” Velasquez wrote in the statement. “That is expected when it comes to a body that has as its goal the prosecution of structures that co-opt the State to make a profit and that refuse to give up the privileges they obtained illegally and illegitimately.”
He said of the Bitkov case, “In no case . . . has indication or evidence been found of collusion with the government of Russia.”
Meanwhile, the Morales administration has continued to show contempt for the rulings of the Guatemalan court. The crisis is likely to escalate as the country prepares to hold its 2019 presidential election, on June 16.