#cicig

A UN commission that spent the last 12 years investigating graft in Guatemala has described the country as “captured” by corruption in its final report, days before it is set to wrap up operations after President Jimmy Morales refused to renew its mandate.

The commission, known as Cicig for its initials in Spanish, said in its final report that there is a “mafia coalition” among members of government, the business community and private individuals that is “willing to sacrifice Guatemala’s present and future to guarantee impunity and preserve the status quo”.

The commission chief Iván Velásquez, a Colombian lawyer who has been barred by Morales’ government from entering Guatemala, said via video conference from Colombia that the report would be the commission’s last public act.

“We almost got to the nucleus of the structures that have captured the state,” Velásquez said. “This cannot be solved without a profound restructuring of the state.”

The commission began its work in Guatemala in 2007 at the request of then-president Óscar Berger and was given responsibility for dismantling illegality in the wake of the country’s 1960-1996 civil war.

Morales accused the body of overreaching its authority last year, after the commission brought investigations against him, some of his relatives and his inner circle. He was protected from prosecution as a sitting president and has denied wrongdoing.

While many observers praised the commission for its work, which resulted in the prosecution of more than 400 people, including the former president Otto Pérez Molina, his vice-president and much of his cabinet, Morales decided that Cicig had run its course, setting up its impending departure on 3 September.

Critics saw Morales’ refusal to renew the commission’s mandate as an attempt to protect himself and those close to him.

The report said the “impunity of power” in Guatemala dates to colonial times.

One of the reasons why corruption networks persist today, it said, is that “they have distorted democratic institutionality in their favor and they have molded the political system and designed mechanisms that allow them to occupy positions of power, manipulating legislation.”

“Between 2012 and 2015, an illicit, political-economic network took over the executive (branch), subordinated the legislative, manipulated and interfered in the election of judges to high courts and, in addition to looting the state, promoted laws and policies favoring private companies to the detriment of competition and the citizenry,” the report continued.

All that benefited drug trafficking networks, it added.

Together with Guatemalan prosecutors, the commission took down 70 organized crime networks. Those targeted for prosecution have included public officials, lawmakers, judges, businesspeople and other civilians.

It also investigated Morales’ National Convergence Front for alleged illegal political financing.

Washington, D.C., August 13, 2018—Guatemala’s renowned Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) is in crisis after its director Gustavo Meoño Brenner was abruptly removed in one of a series of recent actions orchestrated by the Guatemalan government and a United Nations office. The actions also placed the AHPN’s remaining staff of more than fifty people on temporary contract, and transferred oversight for the repository from the country’s national archives, where it had functioned since 2009, to the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Meoño learned of his removal on Friday, August 3, when a convoy of government vehicles pulled up in front of the Police Archive, and officials from the Culture Ministry and the Guatemalan office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) entered, demanding that he leave. “The operation was executed with all the characteristics of a commando strike,” one press account reported.

The unexpected move threatens to jeopardize the stability of the AHPN’s enormous collection of fragile National Police documents. Since their discovery in an abandoned and deteriorating state on a Guatemala City police base in 2005, hundreds of volunteers and paid employees have cycled through the AHPN under Meoño’s leadership to clean, organize, scan, and make public over twenty million pages of the estimated 8 linear kilometers of paper records. A UNDP employee with no experience in archival management has been named to replace Meoño as director.

Historically, the UNDP played an important role in the creation of the Police Archive. Its Guatemala office administered millions of dollars in donations granted to the AHPN by foreign governments and the United Nations. The office provided technical assistance, political advice, and administrative support. It was also a frequent ally to the AHPN during several difficult periods in the course of the archive’s growth and development.

Yet in a press release issued on the Sunday after Meoño’s ouster, the UNDP failed to explain its decision to push the long-time director out, beyond stating that his contract had ended and would not be renewed. The release is written in bland, bureaucratic language that provides no detailed plans for the future management of the Police Archive beyond ensuring that it is “strengthened in its institutionality and sustainability.”

For the National Security Archive, Meoño’s abrupt removal, the decision to shift oversight of the AHPN out from under the careful stewardship of Ana Carla Ericastillo – director of the national archives of Guatemala – to the untested Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the UNDP’s refusal to provide dozens of long-time staff members with reasonable working contracts are deeply troubling developments.

The National Security Archive has an association with the Historical Archive of the National Police that goes back to the AHPN’s beginning. The Archive’s Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio had the privilege of visiting the site of the massive Police Archive just weeks after it was discovered in July 2005. They witnessed firsthand the awesome task that faced Meoño and his colleagues to rescue a treasure trove of historic documentation that was rotting with mold after years of neglect. Doyle went on to advise the AHPN project, bringing professional archivist Dr. Trudy Peterson conduct an initial assessment of the collection, and then worked with the AHPN to develop investigative skills to identify evidence of human rights abuses. Today, Doyle serves on the AHPN’s International Advisory Board.

In 2010, Doyle participated as an expert witness in the first criminal human rights proceeding in Guatemala to draw on Police Archive records as legal evidence for the prosecution. The trial of two former police agents for the forced disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando García, and a second trial in 2013 of their superiors – including the former chief of the Guatemalan National Police, Col. Héctor Bol de la Cruz – represented a breakthrough in human rights justice in Guatemala. Led by Meoño, the extraordinary work of the Historical Archive of the National Police made those prosecutions – and the many others that followed – possible.

Indeed, it may be the Police Archive’s crucial contributions to human rights trials that caused the government of President Jimmy Morales to seek to control the repository and fire its director. Besides the Fernando García case, AHPN records played a central role in trials of former army and police officers for the 1980 deadly burning of the Spanish Embassy, and the 1981 abduction, torture and rape of Emma Molina Theissen and forced disappearance of her 14-year-old brother Marco Antonio, among others. AHPN documents also form the heart of evidence in the as-yet-untried “Death Squad Dossier” investigation, concerning the mass forced disappearance of almost 200 citizens over the course of 18 months at the height of the country’s internal conflict.

Those cases, along with the 2013 genocide trial of ex-dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, enraged powerful military intelligence and operational officers who were behind the scorched earth counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s. They have sought to harass, intimidate, and shut down the human rights and justice organizations contributing to the prosecutions ever since. President Morales himself has also attacked the international investigative body that helped strengthen human rights prosecutions and fight corruption, known as CICIG. Since taking power, Morales’ government and the Congress his party controls have tried to shut down CICIG and kick out its commissioner, Iván Velásquez, without success.

So it is possible that the government crackdown on the Historical Archive of the National Police is another effort to halt the process of human rights justice in Guatemala and punish its defenders. What is still utterly unclear is why an agency of the United Nations is joining in that effort.

The deaths of two Guatemalan children in Border Patrol custody raised a furor in the United States, but drew a far more muted response in their own country, where a government focused on its survival is afraid that antagonizing the Trump administration could end American support.

The children, Felipe Gómez Alonso, 8, and Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7, fell ill and died this month after they crossed the southwestern border into the United States with their fathers, in separate events, and were detained by the Border Patrol.

Their deaths prompted outrage in the United States over the conditions that migrants, especially children, endure in Border Patrol custody, putting the Trump administration on the defensive as the president insists that Congress approve $5 billion toward building a wall he says will thwart illegal immigration.

But the Guatemalan government’s response has been cautious. Aside from sending diplomatic notes to the State Department requesting an investigation into each child’s death and offering to pay for the bodies’ return home, the government has sidestepped the issue. There has been no formal protest against the American crackdown on migrants or condemnation of the hardships that even children are facing in detention centers...

The reason for the government’s reticence, analysts suggest, is a combination of Guatemala’s centuries-old discrimination against its indigenous Mayan communities, into which both children were born, and a careful political calculation ahead of next July’s presidential election.

Mr. Morales has cultivated relations with the Trump administration and its allies to assure their support in his fight against an international panel on corruption that has accused him of campaign finance violations and filed charges against a wide array of political and economic power brokers in Guatemala.

His efforts have been largely successful, and the United States has fallen silent as Mr. Morales has defied rulings from Guatemala’s highest court and barred members of the panel, including its head, from the country.

This is a marked break with precedent: For years, the United States unequivocally supported the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, the United Nations-backed panel known as CICIG, which has been working alongside Guatemalan prosecutors to bring corruption cases since 2007. Americans saw in its efforts a way to combat the corruption that has crippled Guatemala’s political and economic development — and, in part, fueled the migration of its citizens.

But the Trump administration has remained supportive of Mr. Morales even as his actions to shut down CICIG have taken Guatemala to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Now, with migration becoming a growing irritant in that relationship, Mr. Morales is anxious to smooth over the tensions...

The children’s deaths have also underscored the deep failures of successive Guatemalan governments to improve conditions for the country’s poorest people, particularly the indigenous Maya who make up at least 40 percent of the population.

Jakelin, who died in an El Paso hospital a few days past her seventh birthday, was buried on Christmas Day in her small village, a cluster of thatched-roof houses where Q’eqchi’-speaking families struggle to survive by growing corn and beans.

Felipe, who died on Christmas Eve in a New Mexico hospital, had left his isolated Chuj-speaking village with his father. The village is near the Mexican border in the province of Huehuetenango, which sends more migrants to the United States than any other in Guatemala. Four out of five people in his rural municipality live in poverty, official statistics show.

“We have a de facto apartheid society,” said Anita Isaacs, a Guatemala scholar at Haverford College. “This country continues to be almost as racist as it has been historically.”

The result is that the death of an indigenous child barely registers, she said: “These lives are worth less, and these people are fundamentally invisible.”

Alongside that indifference, Ms. Isaacs said, is an interest in developing the regions where indigenous people live. Palm oil plantations have begun to encroach on the Q’eqchi’ lands north of the village where Jakelin’s family lives.

Historically, these communities have been evicted to make way for cash crops like sugar or coffee, Ms. Isaacs said.

The armored jeeps were lined up single file along a Guatemala City street on August 31 in an ominous queue. By mid-morning, images began circulating of the jeeps outside the offices of a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission that has played a key role in bringing down corrupt officials. More jeeps were spotted in the vicinity of the National Palace, along with military personnel. In a country with a not-so-distant past of military coups and massacres, the photographs and videos spread like wildfire, raising alarm as people scrambled to find out what was going on.

To Feliciana Macario, the show of force evoked the worst years of military rule in Guatemala, during the 36-year armed conflict between the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary forces and left-wing guerrilla groups. Macario is one of the national coordinators of CONAVIGUA, a national human rights organization founded by women whose husbands were killed or disappeared during the conflict.

“It creates the threat of a return to the 1980s,” said Macario, an Indigenous Maya Kiche woman who works with victims and survivors of conflict-era state violence.

The armed conflict left more than 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 disappeared. More than 80 percent of victims were Indigenous Maya civilians, and the military was the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. A U.N.-backed truth commission and now two Guatemalan courts have determined that the military committed genocide in the early 1980s. Peace Accords ended the armed conflict in 1996, but Macario said that Guatemala’s current president, Jimmy Morales, is violating the terms.

“One of the Peace Accords that we highlight is the accord on the role of the army within society. It says that the army has to reduce its numbers, its budget, and everything. But on the contrary, what Jimmy Morales is doing is militarizing. He is increasing the army’s budget and wants to remilitarize the country,” Macario told The Intercept.

Roughly two hours after the jeeps were first spotted outside the offices of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala — CICIG, by its Spanish acronym — Morales stood inside the National Palace flanked by military and police officials and announced that he would not renew CICIG’s mandate, sparking legal challenges, protests, and an ongoing political crisis. The deployment of the jeeps deepened concerns among many Guatemalans about Morales  — all the more so when the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala revealed that the vehicles had been donated by the United States for use in border regions, not the capital. Morales and his backers have been courting the support of the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers against CICIG, and there are signs that the U.S. government’s longstanding support for the commission is weakening...

The U.S. has been CICIG’s biggest funder, providing $44.5 million between 2007 and 2017, which amounts to more than a quarter of the commission’s total budget. In the past, the U.S. has joined the other main donors — Canada and the European Union — in vocal support for CICIG, but it was conspicuously absent from donor country joint statements lamenting the Guatemalan government’s decision to bar Velásquez from entering the country. Observers suspect that the change in tune may be due to aggressive lobbying by Morales and his supporters, who have positioned Morales as a key U.S. ally in the region.

Flanked by high-ranking military and police officers, Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales declared that the country’s fight against corruption and impunity was over.

In a scene evocative of the country’s repressive military history, he claimed that the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) – a body established by the United Nations in 2007 to help dismantle powerful criminal networks – had in fact encouraged corruption, selectively pursued criminal cases based on ideological bias and sown “judicial terror”.

Morales presented no evidence, but declared he would not renew the commission’s mandate, which runs out next September.

Meanwhile, a convoy of US-donated military jeeps encircled the CICIG headquarters where corruption cases against Morales, his family and scores of his political patrons are being investigated.

A handful of former military officers celebrated outside the compound, screaming “Good riddance to the foreign communists” as the TV cameras rolled.

The events earlier this month unfolded like a cold war flashback, and have plunged the Central American country into political meltdown.

As Guatemala’s constitutional court prepares to rule on petitions seeking to save CICIG, the country remains on a knife-edge. Protests in favour of the commission have brought highways and towns to a standstill. But Morales and his supporters seemed unperturbed by international expressions of concern – perhaps buoyed by the Trump administration’s indifferent response. A day after the announcement, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, used Twitter to thank the government – and made no mention of the commission.

Countries across Latin America – from Argentina and Brazil to Mexico and Honduras – are currently reeling from a string of huge corruption scandals that threaten democratic institutions and economic growth.

Which is why analysts warn that the assault on CICIG is so serious: as the region’s most experienced and successful crime-fighting force, it offers a model for the fight against impunity.

And according to diplomatic observers and supporters of CICIG, the government’s attacks on the commission are part of an effort to thwart criminal investigations of the country’s ruling military, economic and political elites...

In recent months, Morales has sacked pro-CICIG officials including the police chief, security minister and chief tax inspector. CICIG chief, Iván Velásquez, has been blocked from re-entering Guatemala for unspecified “reasons of order and public security”.

Anonymous trolls manage online smear campaigns accusing Velásquez of election interference and denouncing CICIG as a communist conspiracy.

In Washington, rightwing columnists and lobbyists push dubious allegations that CICIG is under Russian influence. The Republican senator Marco Rubio suspended $6m of US funding for the commission pending further investigations into the claims.

“The neurological centre of the campaign against CICIG is the VIP Mariscal prison, run like a country club for detained former presidents, lawmakers, generals, judges, drug traffickers and bankers,” said Martín Rodríguez, the editor of digital news magazine Nomada. “Morales fronts the campaign.”

Morales, an evangelical Christian and former blackface comedian, was elected in 2015 after a CICIG-backed investigation exposed a multimillion-dollar customs scam and triggered a mass uprising that brought down the government of General Otto Pérez Molina (who remains in Mariscal prison).

He promised a zero-tolerance approach to corruption, and one of his first acts as president was to extend CICIG’s mandate by four years.

So what changed? First, the customs scandal – known as La Línea – broke the traditional wall of silence protecting high-ranking politicians.

Key actors in that scam became state witnesses, and their evidence enabled investigators to connect scores of corruption cases which revealed how corruption had metastasized across the institutions of the Guatemalan state – all to benefit the same powerful networks that thrived during the brutal 36-year civil war.

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New Post has been published on https://notimundo.com.mx/internacional/guterres-pide-a-guatemala-que-garantice-la-seguridad-del-cicig/

Guterres pide a Guatemala que garantice la seguridad del antiguo personal de la CICIG

Guatemala.- Tras la emisión de un informe del Congreso de Guatemala relativo al trabajo de la Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, la CIGIG, el Secretario General dijo que confía en que el país cumplirá con sus obligaciones internacionales, incluyendo aquellas que se refieren a los privilegios e inmunidades del personal internacional de la Comisión, de conformidad con el derecho internacional.

El portavoz de las Naciones Unidas publicó un comunicado este viernes, indicando que António Guterres se encontraba al tanto de un informe que denuncia presuntos vejámenes cometidos por el personal de la entidad internacional.

“Tanto la CICIG, como su personal y funcionarios del sistema de justicia, han hecho una contribución decisiva para la erradicación de la corrupción y la impunidad en Guatemala y para fortalecer las instituciones, tal como han reconocido repetidamente las autoridades guatemaltecas, defensores de los derechos humanos y la comunidad internacional”, aseguró el Secretario General en la declaración.

Guterres instó a las autoridades guatemaltecas a proteger los derechos y garantizar la seguridad del antiguo personal de la CICIG, así como de los operadores de justicia y defensores de derechos humanos que trabajan a favor al Estado de Derecho en Guatemala.

Lo que se informo

Según despachos de prensa, el informe, presentado al Congreso este viernes por una “Comisión de la Verdad” que investigó el trabajo de la CICIG durante los últimos doce años, tiene el objetivo de determinar posibles irregularidades en la labor de la institución y su personal.

Entre las supuestas ilegalidades se encuentran una serie de incumplimientos del mandato de la CICIG. La Comisión de la Verdad recomendó a la sala legislativa de Guatemala que condene las presuntas irregularidades y anunció que remitirá el informe al Ministerio Público, que podría solicitar órdenes de captura.

Las actividades de la CICIG finalizaron oficialmente el 3 de septiembre del 2019 tras doce años de labor en los que contó con un amplio apoyo de la sociedad civil, de las instituciones públicas y privadas guatemaltecas y de la ONU y sus agencias.

Durante todos estos años, y con el apoyo del Ministerio Público, consiguió acusar a más de 1500 personas, logró que se procesara a más de 660 y, a julio de 2019, se habían dictado 400 condenas.

Llegó el tan ansiado para unos y tan temido para otros, 3 de septiembre. Desde hace poco más de un año, cuando el presidente Morales anunció que no renovaría el mandato de la Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala —CICIG—, no faltaron las celebraciones, las denuncias, los amparos, el enojo, el desamparo y la euforia. Sentimientos tan opuestos y encontrados, como en el estado en…