Anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala have been thrown into doubt as the curtain comes down on Tuesday on a groundbreaking UN Commission. Its investigations in the Central American country put two former presidents and scores of officials in jail, exposing “a state that has been completely captured” by criminal networks.
Outgoing President Jimmy Morales, who hands over to Presidentelect Alejandro Giammattei in January, last year refused to renew the mandate of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, and barred its chief Iván Velásquez from the country.
“It leaves a huge hole,” said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, who has followed the commission closely since its inception a dozen years ago at Guatemala’s behest. “It was seen as an institution that had a really significant impact.”
Cicig, as the commission is known by its Spanish acronym, helped expose intricate multibillion-dollar corruption networks such as the one dubbed La Linea that toppled former president Otto Pérez Molina. A separate graft probe temporarily jailed his predecessor, Álvaro Colom and one in five legislators found themselves under investigation for corruption.
But the commission made powerful enemies in Guatemala, and was weakened when the administration of US President Donald Trump watered down Washington’s former strong support.
Cicig investigated Mr Morales and members of his family. He denied wrongdoing and his relatives have since been cleared, but he accused the commission of threatening national security and sovereignty and violating human rights. As he geared up to end Cicig’s mandate, he deployed tanks outside the commission’s headquarters, which is to be knocked down and turned into a shopping centre.
Mr Giammattei, a 63-year-old doctor who triumphed in a run-off in August, has also locked horns with Cicig in the past: it investigated him over alleged extrajudicial killings in a jail when he was director of prisons. He was briefly jailed but later exonerated.
“Pursuing corruption is right but that’s the easy part,” the president-elect told the FT, in a telephone interview. He said the real challenge was to attack the causes of a system that churns out corruption.
He intends to replace Cicig with a state commission that he said would “go deeper” than Cicig, but was fuzzy on the details. “This commission will have the power to promote the necessary changes so that we see changes in the system,” he said.
Cicig’s role in strengthening institutions and the rule of law
was seen as particularly crucial given that hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans have sought to migrate to the US in recent years to escape violent crime, near total official impunity and poverty — a tide Mr Trump wants to halt.
Cicig helped file more than 120 cases implicating more than 1,540 people and to secure more than 400 convictions. It pushed for legal reforms to allow prosecutors to access phone records and seek plea bargains and helped set up special courts and a witness protection programme, the Washington Office on Latin America noted.
But despite its advances, illicit networks involving politicians, business leaders, and members of the armed forces and criminal gangs continue to hold sway in the country. These structures — which are “designed to be permanent” — illegally finance electoral campaigns, enrich themselves and pervert institutions, the commission said in a damning final report entitled “A Captured State”.
In a farewell speech last week broadcast in Guatemala by video, Mr Velásquez warned that Guatemala remained riven by “systematic and structural” corruption in which drug trafficking groups were also embroiled. In this year’s elections alone, a quarter of the country’s mayorships “were won by known drug traffickers,” he said.
“Just when Guatemala needs it the most, it’s going away because of the very powerful vested interests that do not want Cicig to keep digging,” said Orlando Pérez, dean of liberal arts and sciences at the University of North Texas at Dallas.
Thelma Aldana, a former crusading attorney- general who worked closely with Cicig and now lives in self-imposed exile, said: “The state is captured and we have to free it . . . We were on the point of achieving it but it seems we have to do more.”
Mr Giammattei played down the difficulty of picking up the baton on fighting corruption. “There are no impossible challenges, he told the FT. “Nothing is impossible.”
Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a think-tank, was sceptical. “We can’t count on anti-corruption initiatives remaining,” he said. “Today, Guatemalan society is at a crossroads,” Cicig said in its report: go backwards and give into criminal networks or continue to break them up and appoint independent prosecutors and judges.
Mr Velásquez was under no illusions, saying he expected to see a “systematic effort to . . . rewrite the history of the last 12 years demonising the Cicig and its contributions”.
Mr Sabatini said Cicig proved that it was possible to expose illicit and corrupt networks. But its demise underscored “how quickly that can vanish. It raised expectations, brought down a government, inspired Guatemalans — but in the end, it was broken”.
