Once a beacon in the fight against corruption, Guatemala has seen the systematic stifling of efforts to hold economic and political elites accountable. Nearly three years after Guatemala’s then-President Jimmy Morales, with support from U.S. Republicans, expelled the internationally renowned United Nations–backed International Commission Against Impunity in Gua- temala (CICIG), the country’s independent judges and anti-corruption investigators are under attack.
“Guatemala no longer has a rule of law,” Erika Aifán, a former judge who presided over one of Guatemala’s high-risk courts and was forced into exile, says in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “[There is] only an appearance of legality.”
Aifán had presided over corruption cases against Guatemalan business people, officials, judges, and lawmakers, and she was slated to oversee a case against Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. But over the last two years, Aifán has faced a systematic campaign to charge her criminally, orchestrated by those she had ruled against for acts of corruption.
Erika Aifán
As the accusations against her increased, Aifán drew support from international organizations. The New York City Bar Association issued a statement in her support, and U.S. Ambassador William Popp accompanied Aifán to a hearing in the country’s Judicial Towers, a gesture met with cries of meddling by Guatemala’s far right.
But it was not enough. In March, the judge officially resigned and crossed the border into El Salvador, where she boarded a flight that took her to Washington, D.C. She is among the latest in an exodus of former investigators, lawyers, and judges associated with the fight against corruption in Guatemala, all of whom have fled the country out of fear for their safety.
Since February, the Guatemalan public prosecutor’s office, led by María Consuelo Porras, has stepped up these attacks, opening investigations against judges, investigators, and lawyers associated with anti-impunity and anti-corruption cases.
Among those targeted is Virginia Laparra, who worked in the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) in Quetzaltenango and was arrested in mid-February after accusing a judge of corruption. Sixty days later, she was still incarcerated, awaiting a hearing. Others associated with the FECI and CICIG currently face criminal investigations.
“Guatemala no longer has a rule of law. [There is] only an appearance of legality.” — Erika Aifán, a former judge who presided over one of Guatemala’s high-risk courts and was forced into exile
“It is not normal to see the persecution of so many judges who have heard emblematic cases,” Aifán says. “No other country in Latin America has registered the exile of so many justice operators in such a short period.”
Yet this dismantling of the judicial system was carefully planned. CICIG’s critics, including many of the politicians and business elites who were exposed in its investigations, sought their revenge in the two years after the commission was eliminated.
“Those who were affected by the CICIG investigations and those who were in favor of the status quo made a fairly simple and quick mapping of who were ‘their enemies’ within the state and [devised] a super efficient way to remove them,” Alejandra Colom, an anthropologist at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, tells The Progressive. “So the strategy is to threaten, intimidate, exhaust, and make sure that the new judges who are elected are judges who are aligned with what they want.”
And what they want is to erase the legacy of CICIG and the anti-corruption movement.
The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala was founded in 2007 by the administration of then-Guatemalan President Óscar Berger. Funding for the body, charged with rooting out the influence of corrupt special interests within the Guatemalan state, came largely from the United States and the European Union.
The CICIG gained international recognition for its investigations into corruption during the administration of President Otto Pérez Molina, leading to his resignation in 2015 along with the majority of his ministers. Pérez Molina currently faces prosecution.
The high-profile case exposed the illicit financing of his campaign, and its connection with criminal groups. Investigations also targeted Jimmy Morales, a former comedian who became the country’s next elected president. Morales had won the presidency on the promise that he was “neither corrupt nor a thief.”
As the scrutiny of Morales and his family increased, he took steps to dismantle CICIG, which had been a goal of the nation’s far right and economic elites for years. His administration attempted to expel Iván Velásquez, a Colombian investigator who took over CICIG in 2013, twice declaring him “persona non grata.”
The body’s investigations continued to unearth more evidence of corruption. In 2018, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations, a leading business group, was forced to do something it had never done before: apologize for illegally funding presidential campaigns. But these revelations led to a new narrative that began to find traction—that CICIG had become ideological.
“They are illicit political/economic networks, a confluence of interests of the political class with the economic sector,” Juan Francisco Sandoval, the former head of FECI who was forced into exile in July 2021, tells The Progressive.
The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency paved the way for CICIG’s elimination.
In 2018, the Trump Administration blocked the $6 million funding for the Guatemalan body. Later that year, feeling as though he had been given a green light, Morales announced that he would not renew the body’s contract, forcing it to close. That shifted all open investigations to FECI, within the public prosecutor’s office, at the time led by Sandoval.
In February 2018, Morales traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the yearly National Prayer Breakfast arranged by the Fellowship Foundation. During the high-profile gathering, he met briefly with Trump, who thanked him for the Guatemalan administration’s decision to move its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. This meeting was coordinated in part by then-Guatemalan Ambassador Manuel Espina, the son of former Vice President Gustavo Espina Salguero, both of whom were accused of money laundering in a CICIG investigation.
Espina’s lobby was just one of many that found support within Republican and evangelical circles for ending CICIG. “They presented themselves as Christians who are fighting a leftist agenda,” says Eric Olson, an analyst with the Seattle International Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based group that champions “good governance and equity” in Central America. “Some people in the Republican Party, in the House and Senate, viewed it through the lens that these were reliable Christian partners from Guatemala.”
This narrative found sympathetic ears from Republicans including U.S. Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Mike Lee of Utah, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, among others. They echoed the accusations of those under investigation in Guatemala of the “ideological attacks” and human rights violations being committed by CICIG.
“A nation’s sovereignty is the core of its freedom,” Lee tweeted in 2019. “Guatemala has every right to speak up and defend violations of sovereignty and abuses committed by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala.”
Colom says that U.S. conservatives and the Guatemalan right are “very close ideologically and [share] that same paranoia of believing that communists are everywhere.”
Conservative media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, published op-eds and editorials promoting these accusations. The misinformation campaign against CICIG centered on painting the organization as an ideological tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the arrest of three Russian refugees in Guatemala being used as fodder.
The case concerned the Bitkov family, which prior to 2008 had operated a paper mill in St. Petersburg, Russia, before they fled to Guatemala over alleged fears of persecution from President Putin. In 2018, the family was convicted for the use of falsified documents. This ruling was upheld in 2020.
The family is still appealing the conviction.
The CICIG officially ended on September 3, 2019. In the months that followed, the Guatemalan congress launched a “truth commission” to detail all of the former body’s alleged transgressions. Elite business leaders and politicians testified of the alleged mistreatment they had faced.
In the end, in their quest to maintain a system of impunity, the Guatemalan right successfully turned the struggle against corruption into a partisan cause. “It should be a bipartisan issue,” Olson says. “But that is part of the damage that was done by this Bitkov and other campaigns that turned it into an ideological left/right debate.”
Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. is beginning to once again support anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala. His administration has put more pressure on Alejandro Giammattei to confront corruption, but there seems to be a lack of political will to make this happen.
“It is not normal to see the persecution of so many judges who have heard emblematic cases. No other country in Latin America has registered the exile of so many justice operators in such a short period.” — Erika Aifán
In 2021, the Biden Administration declined to invite the Guatemalan president to the Summit for Democracy, which was seen as a snub. Instead, the Guatemalan president gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation.
Republicans continue to remain key allies for the Guatemalan right. Renzo Rosales, a Guatemalan independent political analyst, says conservatives in Guatemala are operating under the assumption that the Republican Party will regain the presidency.
The Biden Administration has implemented sanctions against key actors including María Consuelo Porras, now Guatemala’s attorney general, and the far-right activists who have filed many of the lawsuits against anti-corruption investigators.
“There is no confidence in the attorney general and a lack of confidence in the constitutional court and the supreme court,” Olson says.
Porras is up for re-election in 2022. Initially, she failed to obtain the necessary votes to appear on the final list of candidates from which the president selects the attorney general after nine rounds of voting. But her potential for re-election was restored after far-right activists threatened the electoral board if she was not included on the final list.
Porras has found backing from some evangelical groups in the United States, with Pentecostal pastor and motivational speaker John C. Maxwell calling Porras “one of the best leaders that I have known in the entire world” during a presentation to the Guatemalan Industrial Council.
Representative Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey, has also made statements supporting the embattled attorney general. In April, during a House Foreign Affairs Committee session, he decried what he alleged was the U.S. embassy in Guatemala meddling in the electoral process.
Meanwhile, impunity and corruption continue to be the norm at every level of Guatemalan society.
Guatemala’s lobbying efforts are ongoing in the United States. In January 2022, Reuters reported that Taiwan is currently paying $900,000 for lobbyists from Guatemala to promote “investment and tourism” from the United States to the Central American country.
And CICIG is also not returning, as such efforts would never find support from the political and economic elites in Guatemala. While the Biden Administration has launched an effort to create a tip line to denounce acts of corruption, such measures are unlikely to succeed. The likely outcome is far darker—the further consolidation of what can be described as a narco-religious state.
“[Their goal is] to establish an authoritarian power in the country,” Aifán says. “The end of democracy may be the final consequence of this attack on the rule of law.”