Country facing political meltdown after Jimmy Morales announced plan to dismantle the commission investigating him

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jimmy Morales addresses the media flanked by military and police. Photograph: Reuters

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.

Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) Our relationship with Guatemala is important. We greatly appreciate Guatemala's efforts in counternarcotics and security.

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.

“Cicig’s plan of strategic criminal prosecutions to dismantle illegal groups and clandestine security structures which threaten Guatemala’s democracy means going deep into the mafia state and unmasking protagonists. There are no untouchables,” said a senior UN diplomat who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “The hostility against Cicig is a predictable reaction to the fact it’s getting close to the point of no return.”

Cicig does not make arrests or directly prosecute cases – but its joint investigations with local prosecutors have helped uncover 60 criminal networks and bring charges against 680 people including four presidents, military officers, judges, drug traffickers and entrepreneurs.

Those achievements have not gone unopposed.

Alarm as Guatemala bans head of UN anti-corruption body from country Read more

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.

“Cicig-backed investigations revealed how counterinsurgency military officials and their economic backers transferred their power and privilege from the war years into new clandestine parallel powers through organised crime and corruption,” said the Professor Jo-Marie Burt, a Guatemala expert at Schar School at George Mason University.

Investigators followed the money to politically powerful entrepreneurs involved in illicit campaign financing, which bought them protection and won them political favours and public contracts.

That, in turn, guaranteed bribes for the elected politicians.

In August 2017, Cicig and the attorney general alleged that Morales and his FCN political party failed to report almost $1min donations during the 2015 campaign. They made the first of several unsuccessful applications to congress to strip Morales of presidential immunity so he could be subpoenaed and officially investigated.

In response, Morales declared Velásquez persona non grata, an order the constitutional court ruled unconstitutional. A few days later, a fraud trial began against Morales’s son and brother.

Both men deny the charges, and the case is ongoing.

In the months that followed, additional allegations against Morales emerged; in April, some of the country’s most powerful businessmen publicly admitted secretly financing Morales’s 2015 campaign

As a result, his military-aligned party, the National Convergence Front, FCN, faces annulment, and Morales another impeachment vote. Morales denies any wrongdoing, and rejects accusations that terminating Cicig is personally motivated.

Still, a recent poll found 65% of Guatemalans believe the decision to not renew Cicig’s mandate is politically motivated. The scene is set for a final showdown as the constitutional court, the country’s highest judicial body, rules on the legality of the orders against Cicig, while lawmakers consider reforms meant to weaken the same court’s powers.

More than one in five lawmakers is under criminal investigation.

Morales has vowed to “disobey” rulings he considers illegal, which would constitute a “technical coup”, said political analyst Luis Solano.



“The government could be forced to back down by the constitutional court; congress could destroy the checks and balances which sustain Guatemala’s precarious stability,” said Solano. “These are critical days.”