In 2015, when Joe Biden was serving as Vice-President, he travelled to Guatemala on a visit that attracted little attention in the U.S., but which altered the course of history in the Central American nation. The Guatemalan President, Otto Pérez Molina, a former general who served as the head of the country’s military-intelligence service, had refused to renew the government’s agreement with a United Nations anti-corruption organization known as the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, its initials in Spanish. Over the previous decade, the commission, an independent body working jointly with Guatemalan prosecutors, had emerged as Latin America’s most successful and popular anti-corruption project, helping convict scores of military officers, politicians, and businessmen. In at least two private meetings in Guatemala, and in phone conversations, Biden reportedly told Pérez Molina that he would withhold a multimillion-dollar U.S. aid package that he was trying to push through Congress if the Guatemalan leader failed to extend the commission’s mandate. Pérez Molina relented and allowed the commission to continue its work. Weeks later, Guatemalan and U.N. investigators accused him of presiding over a vast corruption racket that had received $3.7 million in bribes in a single year. Six months after Biden’s visit, Pérez Molina, facing nationwide protests, resigned the Presidency. He was taken to prison less than twenty-four hours later.
Biden’s election to the Presidency has raised hopes among Guatemalans that he will help revive the anti-corruption work once done by the commission, which was shuttered by Guatemalan leaders in 2019, with the tacit support of the Trump Administration. The closure of the commission stalled years of bipartisan U.S. efforts to combat drug-trafficking-fuelled corruption, and end impunity for members of the country’s élite.
After Biden’s win in November, a group of veteran prosecutors and investigators who had worked for both the Guatemalan government and CICIG talked excitedly on a Zoom call about the chances for renewed accountability. “Kamala Harris is a prosecutor,” Leopoldo Zeissig said, referring to the incoming Vice-President, his voice brightening. “She’ll understand what’s happening here. She’ll support us.” Zeissig was the lead prosecutor who investigated the 1998 murder of a seventy-five-year-old Guatemalan bishop named Juan José Gerardi. Two days before the bishop was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his parish house, he had released a human-rights report sponsored by the Catholic Church which blamed the country’s military and its allies for tens of thousands of civilian killings during the country’s thirty-six-year civil war. “KA-MA-LA!” Arturo Aguilar, a lawyer and investigator, triumphantly texted in a separate group chat. Aguilar, when he was a nineteen-year-old law student, had also helped investigate Gerardi’s murder.
In a 2001 trial, three Guatemalan military men, along with a priest, were found guilty of having played roles in the slaying of the bishop. That was the first time in Guatemalan history that military officers had been found guilty of involvement in an extrajudicial political murder, ending decades of impunity for members of the armed forces. For the first time since a C.I.A.-backed coup overthrew a democratically elected leftist President and replaced him with a pro-U.S. military dictatorship, in 1954, American officials had supported the rule of law in Guatemala.
In 2006, the United Nations and the Guatemalan government agreed to create CICIG, the first effort of its kind in the region. The commission, with a staff of about a hundred and fifty people from some twenty different nations, worked with Guatemalan prosecutors and police to fight organized-crime groups and government corruption. The U.S. was the primary contributor to CICIG’s roughly fifteen-million-dollar annual budget. The group had some early successes, but it became most effective after a Colombian prosecutor named Iván Velázquez took over as its commissioner, in 2013. The commission exposed criminal groups deeply embedded within the government, and helped jail some six hundred and eighty individuals for corruption and related crimes. It played a central role in the prosecution of a powerful and formerly untouchable narcotics-trafficking group that was involved in the seizure of farmers’ land. Cases against myriad other organized-crime groups followed.
In October, 2015, Jimmy Morales, a forty-six-year-old former television comedian, who used to perform skits in blackface, was elected Guatemala’s President. Running under the slogan “Not Corrupt, Nor a Thief,” Morales vowed to upend the country’s political establishment and crack down on corruption. A year later, Donald Trump was elected in the U.S. As President, Morales mimicked Trump’s swaggering disdain for the news media and his hostility to judicial institutions that defied him. Soon after Morales took office, the country’s Attorney General, Thelma Aldana, and CICIG requested that Guatemala’s Congress lift the President’s immunity from prosecution, so that they could jointly investigate reports that he had received at least a million dollars in undeclared campaign contributions from business interests. Congress denied the request, and Morales said that he was a victim of politically biased investigators and accused CICIG of overreach.
Morales also took steps to cement Trump’s favor. In 2017, four pro-Morales Guatemalan congressmen, who declined to reveal the source of their funding, hired an Indiana-based lobbying firm, Barnes & Thornburg, L.L.P., for eighty thousand dollars a month, to help improve foreign relations with the United States. Opposition politicians accused Morales of hiring the firm, which had close ties to the Vice-President, Mike Pence, to court the Trump Administration and Republicans in Washington. (It was later reported that an executive of the construction giant Cementos Progreso, which is owned by one of the country’s most economically powerful families, was behind some of the payments.) After Trump moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in 2018, Morales rushed to make Guatemala the second nation to move its Embassy there. Morales also entered into a safe-third-country agreement with the Trump Administration, which allowed the U.S. to send asylum seekers from other counties to Guatemala. A former U.S. official said that he believed that the Morales government’s willingness to do what Trump asked was an attempt to secure “a get-out-of-jail-free card,” which would allow Morales to do as he pleased in Guatemala without fear of a reprimand from the United States.
Morales’s allies in Washington began questioning the work of CICIG and other anti-corruption officials in Guatemala. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, and other Republican lawmakers, including Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, attacked the commission, falsely claiming that the U.N.-endorsed body was being used by Russia to advance its interests in Guatemala. Ending years of bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress for the commission, Rubio placed a hold on funding in the spring of 2018. Despite the criticism from Washington, CICIG remained deeply popular in Guatemala, with more than seventy per cent of Guatemalans supporting it in public-opinion polls. José Rubén Zamora, the founder of one of Guatemala’s leading investigative newspapers, elPeriódico, has been decrying the scale of political corruption for decades. He told me, “The system can’t fight the narcos, corruption, and impunity when the narcos, corruption, and impunity are the system.”
In August, 2018, Morales announced that he would not renew CICIG’s mandate to operate in the country, accusing it of “selective criminal prosecution with an ideological bias.” In 2019, after Aldana completed her term as Attorney General, and ran for President, corruption accusations were brought against her, which were widely considered to be fabricated. An electoral court disqualified Aldana and certified the Presidential bid of a Morales ally, who was later arrested in Miami and charged with having offered Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel access to Guatemalan ports and airports, in exchange for campaign financing. While Morales and his allies were sabotaging the country’s democratic institutions, officials in the Trump Administration made few public statements standing up for the rule of law in Guatemala. In a telephone interview from Bogotá, Iván Velázquez, the former CICIG head, who had been ordered out of Guatemala, told me that the Trump Administration was responsible for the shuttering of the commission. “The Administration’s support for the Morales government was absolute, despite everything it knew about the corruption in that government,” he said. The former U.S. official told me that he considered the dismantling of CICIG to be the most shameful episode in his decades of government service.
It’s logical to assume that most Americans rarely, if ever, consider the power of their government to radically alter reality, for worse or for better, in countries such as Guatemala. During the Trump years, immigration from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—was treated as a grave American national-security problem. Little public consideration was given to possible measures that the government could take to help improve conditions in those countries, which might have alleviated the necessity for many to flee. The wreckage of democratic and judicial institutions in Guatemala under the Morales government mirrors the damage that Trump inflicted on similar institutions in the United States. In Guatemala, though, those institutions were always more fragile.
Morales left office in January, 2020. Like all Guatemalan Presidents, he was barred by law from seeking a second term. Guatemala’s new President, Alejandro Giammattei, is a member of a different party and part of the country’s political establishment. Since Giammattei took office, attempts to oust independent prosecutors with ties to CICIG have continued. The Attorney General appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Juan Francisco Sandoval, Guatemala’s special prosecutor against impunity, who had worked with the commission in the past. Soon after the special prosecutor was named, she was removed from her post. Days later, she and her boyfriend were stopped by police as they strode through a Guatemala City shopping mall. The man was wanted for extradition to the U.S. on drug-trafficking charges. “Those were difficult times,” Sandoval told me over the phone.
Velázquez said that he hopes the Biden Administration will rapidly implement the “Biden Plan” for Central America, a campaign pledge that contends that stemming organized crime and graft in Guatemala and other countries in the region will slow the flow of migrants north. He also praised Biden for proposing to not merely cancel the U.S. visas of corrupt Central American politicians and businessmen but also to freeze their assets in the U.S. “I think they’re going to act against the country’s great corruption, and the way the administration of justice and other institutions have been captured by organized crime,” Velázquez said.
Political and economic systems that benefit the few and deny democratic rights and prosperity to the many are a problem throughout Latin America. But CICIG’s successes gave Guatemalans a sense of what is possible. The U.S., the U.N., and the European countries that supported CICIG cannot push corrupt Guatemalans out of politics. That is up to Guatemalan voters. But they can support and help to strengthen judicial institutions and democratic norms in the country. Nonpartisan prosecutors, Velázquez told me, can “generate political transformations in a society, not because they take any political positions themselves, but because they open spaces previously captured by the corrupt. Prosecutors can liberate states captured by criminal networks, which should allow new forces to emerge into the political scene, and to transform that reality.”
