Jeff Abbott
Men walk up the Pan-American highway through Sololá in December 2020 during protests.
On March 15, the Guatemalan congress approved an additional allocation of almost 3.2 billion quetzales (about $440 million) for the Ministry of Communications, Infrastructure, and Housing, known by the Spanish acronym CIV. Its stated purpose was “strengthening of the maintenance and construction of strategic infrastructure.” The allocation passed quickly with little oversight as to how the money will be spent.
Since Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei took office in January 2020, the CIV has spent around 5.4 billion quetzales, about $700 million, on highways. But, so far, there have been few results.
“The lack of independence of the Public Prosecutor’s office is concerning. This gives politicians a certain freedom and above all impunity to come and continue promoting this [corruption].”
“There are no impacts with the five billion quetzales that have been invested,” Sonia Gutiérrez, a congressional representative with the center-left opposition party Winaq, tells The Progressive. “There is an infrastructure that is quite deteriorated that authorities have not taken care of.”
The approval of the law has generated outcry from the opposition within the Guatemalan congress.
“[It is] a law for looting and corruption,” Ligia Hernández, who serves in congress with the centrist Semilla political party, tells The Progressive. “This amount of money is used for campaign payments or political favors of financiers of the parties related to the ruling party and related to the government.”
The law was approved with 140 votes in favor and fifteen against. There are a total of 160 seats in the Guatemalan congress.
The approval has generated outrage from the public, given the corruption within the CIV. The Guatemalan business community has come out against the law, with the Chamber of Commerce issuing a statement calling for a veto of the law by the president.
The increase was approved just ahead of the 2023 campaign cycle, which only further contributed to opposition parties’ concerns over corruption surrounding the law’s high price tag; construction companies are often directly tied to the campaigns of presidential candidates.
“[The approval] generates little confidence,” Marielos Chang, an independent political analyst and professor at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, tells The Progressive. “We are in the midst of direct accusations against President Alejandro Giammattei about how he allegedly received bribes of twenty million quetzales from construction companies so that they would continue to receive [construction] contracts.”
Corruption in the construction of infrastructure is a problem that plagues projects across Latin America, andGuatemala has one of the poorest rated highway infrastructures in Latin America. The poor quality of the highways is best seen in the country’s western highlands.
Jeff Abbott
The Pan-American highway continues to remain in a state of disrepair.
The Pan-American highway, which stretches from Mexico to Panama, remains largely in a state of disrepair, with giant potholes threatening drivers who don’t weave in between them. But this stretch is better than long stretches of the highway that pass through the city of Huehuetenango, which are either dirt, gravel, or buried under landslides that were caused by back-to-back hurricanes in October and November 2020.
“People are saying they are totally abandoned by the government,” Gutiérrez explains. “We do not find coherence between what the people need and what the representatives approved [in the congress]. There is nothing that will benefit people who mainly live in rural areas, who have been affected by these [storms].”
The U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as CICIG, investigated the relationship between campaign financing and construction companies. The investigation also found how companies would receive multiple payments for projects, essentially being paid twice for the same work.
At least five former ministers of CIV in the past four presidential administrations have been accused of acts of corruption. Alejandro Sinibaldi, who served as minister of CIV during the administration of Otto Pérez Molina, was accused in at least five cases of corruption, including as part of the global Odebrecht bribery case and in the Construction and Corruption case that was investigated by CICIG. According to that case, the CIV built a criminal structure within the ministry.
The next minister of CIV also faced charges of corruption upon leaving office.
In October 2020, police raided a rented house in Antigua, Guatemala. Investigators from the Public Prosecutor’s office found more than twenty suitcases with nearly $16 million stuffed inside. On the tag of one of the suitcases was the name of President Jimmy Morales’s former minister of CIV, José Luis Benito Ruiz.
The charges are, in part, connected to Benito Ruiz’s role in the construction of a four lane highway project just north of Guatemala City, which, according to Chang, is “the symbol of corruption.”
The traffic passing through the municipality of Chimaltenango was horrendous. It had been horrendous for decades, but has grown worse in the last ten years due to urban development around the municipality, which sits about thirty-two miles from Guatemala City. But in spite of this relatively short distance, one could sit for hours in traffic trying to arrive from either direction.
Faced with this nightmare, the administration of Otto Pérez Molina set in motion a highway project to bypass the urban sprawl around Chimaltenango and the nearby municipality of El Tejar.
The first phase of the project began in August 2014, but it quickly led to problems once construction began near the community of San Andres Itzapa, where residents refused to sell their land. This standoff continued until September 2018, when the new administration of Jimmy Morales, who had utilized the corruption scandal around the administration of Pérez Molina to launch a campaign promising he was “neither corrupt nor a thief,” approved the expropriation of the lands in the route.
Less than seven months later, the new highway, labeled the “Libramiento de Chimaltenango,” or the “Liberation of Chimaltenango,” was open ahead of Holy Week traffic. The nine mile long project was completed over budget, costing 528.6 million quetzales, or around nearly $68.3 million.
On April 12, 2019, during the highway’s inauguration ceremony, then-president Jimmy Morales declared the structure a “mega project” and a “historic milestone” that would serve six million Guatemalans. He also took the time in his speech to decry the investigations against his family.
The inauguration occurred as the country entered the election cycle for the 2019 elections, despite laws prohibiting politicians from holding public works inaugurations in that time period. The administration’s spokesperson stated that it was not an inauguration, but rather an “opening ceremony.”
But the controversy around the newly opened “mega project” quickly grew into a worse crisis. Less than two weeks later, the highway flooded and there was a major landslide that collapsed a retaining wall. The landslides and flooding have continued up to today.
Seventeen people were charged for abnormalities in the construction. The judge, Mynor Moto, ordered the release of all of them due to lack of merit. Moto was later accused of corruption as he sought an appointment to the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s highest court, in 2021.
The case later expanded to include charges of money laundering and fraud against former minister Benito. The case is currently advancing in the courts.
But there remain concerns that the rule of law is being systematically dismantled, especially around cases of corruption.
“The lack of independence of the Public Prosecutor’s office is concerning,” Chang explains. “This gives politicians a certain freedom and above all impunity to come and continue promoting this [corruption]. These budget increases are quite opaque, and they know that the probability of being investigated is minimal.”
The lack of oversight within the judicial system and the continuation of impunity means that corruption will continue to worsen and communities will remain abandoned.