MEXICO CITY — Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales ordered the expulsion of the head of a United Nations-backed anti-corruption group on Sunday morning, attacking an organization whose rigorous investigations have put a former president behind bars and whose attention has now shifted towards alleged campaign finance violations by Morales himself.
Within hours, however, the expulsion order was blocked by the Supreme Court, at least temporarily, until it can look into the matter more thoroughly.
Morales’s decision to attempt to expel Ivan Velasquez, a Colombian lawyer who has led the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (known by its initials in Spanish, CICIG) since 2013, was met with swift international condemnation. The United States, along with several other countries that backed the anti-corruption commission, issued a joint statement saying that the group had “played a vital role in the fight against impunity” in Guatemala. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres also was “shocked” by the decision, according to a statement issued by his spokesman.
“I think this is a profound threat to the rule of law in Guatemala,” said Adriana Beltran, a Central America expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “CICIG has dealt a huge blow against corruption working jointly with the public prosecutor’s office…[and] it has provided Guatemalans with a sense of hope.”
Foreign minister fired
Morales, in a video posted on the Guatemalan government’s twitter page, said that as president of a “free, independent, and sovereign state,” exercising his constitutional rights, he declared Velasquez to be persona non grata. Morales also fired the foreign minister, Carlos Raul Morales, because he had refused to throw Velasquez out of the country.
Later on Sunday, Guatemala’s top court voted to issue a temporary injunction blocking Morales’s expulsion order. The court announced that it would deliberate on the case before making a further decision.
Over the past decade, CICIG has been a driving force in a series of corruption investigations against top government officials and it helped inspire a nationwide protest movement in 2015. The commission of investigators and law enforcement officers, working with the Guatemalan attorney general’s office, built a case against former President Otto Perez Molina, his vice president, Roxana Baldetti, and dozens of other people for public corruption. Perez Molina and Baldetti remain in prison.
The CICIG was formed in 2007 as a way to bolster notoriously weak judicial institutions in a country where impunity was rampant and murders were almost never solved. The group, comprised of investigators from around the world, relied on sophisticated investigatory techniques, wire-tapping, and examination of financial records to pursue the country’s most high-profile crimes.
But its success has also generated critics within the government, who see it as a foreign body that undermines Guatemalan sovereignty. Every two years, the group’s mandate must be renewed.
President ex-TV star
Morales, who was elected president in 2015 after a career as a TV comedian, had run on the campaign slogan “Neither corrupt nor a thief,” riding the wave of anti-corruption sentiment in the country. Earlier this year, however, Morales’s older brother and one of his sons were arrested on corruption charges.
On Friday, Velazquez, along with the Attorney General Thelma Aldana, announced that there was evidence suggesting Morales may have broken campaign finance laws when he was head of his political party, and he requested a formal investigation. For that to happen, Morales would have to be stripped of his immunity as president, something that would require approval by the Supreme Court and congress.
That same day, Morales, who has denied any wrongdoing, was in New York visiting Guterres, the U.N. chief, presumably to discuss the CICIG. In Guterres’s statement on Sunday he said Velasquez’s work assisting Guatemalan institutions helped “to ensure justice was done in numerous cases.”
