The repression against anti-corruption magistrates reached a new milestone on Friday, December 16 in Guatemala. A former prosecutor of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity (FECI), Virginia Laparra, was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of authority, following a trial that many human rights organizations have described as a « vengeance » corrupt elites it had pursued.
“The verdict is harmful to the weak rule of law in Guatemala, former Attorney General Thelma Aldana assured on Twitter, herself exiled to Washington since 2019. It is a precedent that demonstrates the criminalization and persecution of those who fight corruption. »
Mme Laparra left the court in handcuffs, while about 50 of his supporters chanted “Virginia is innocent” et “out the corrupt”. The prosecution had requested eight years in prison against her. Since her arrest on February 23, she has been locked up in the Mariscal-Zavala prison, where she only has access to daylight for one hour a day.
Accused of “abuse of power” for having denounced a judge
This 42-year-old lawyer, who headed the FECI branch in the city of Quetzaltenango (200 km west of the capital, Guatemala City) between 2014 and 2020, was accused of” abuse of power “ to get, “for personal reasons” denounced the actions of a judge which seemed to him to contravene the law.
The FECI is a special prosecutor’s office created in 2008 within the Public Ministry to collaborate with the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig). This body had been set up a year earlier by the UN to help the country fight against the scourge of corruption. With the FECI, the Cicig will succeed in dismantling 60 criminal structures and arresting dozens of politicians, soldiers, business leaders, considered until then as untouchable.
At the head, the country’s own president, Otto Pérez Molina (2012-2015), and his vice-president, Roxana Baldetti, had been forced to resign following an investigation by the Cicig, called “La Linea”, for illicit association and customs revenue fraud. Both just sentenced, December 7to sixteen years in prison, after eleven months of trial.
But when, in 2017, the Cicig attacked the relatives of President Jimmy Morales (2016-2020), elected after the resignation of Mr. Perez Molina, then the Head of State himself, suspected of embezzlement to finance his election campaign, he decided to put an end to the organization’s mission and to expel the UN civil servants.
Cabal against former prosecutors and investigators
Since then, the successor of Mme Aldana at the head of the public ministry, Consuelo Porras, close to the implicated elites, leads a cabal against the former prosecutors and investigators of the FECI and the Cicig and against the independent judges who collaborated with these two organizations. More than twenty of them, including the former head of the FECI, Juan Francisco Sandoval – deposed in July 2021 by Consuelo Porras – have had to leave the country in recent months to escape prosecution, while six others are in prison for obstruction of justice and abuse of authority.
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Washington put Consuelo Porras and the current head of FECI, Rafael Curruchiche, on a list of corrupt Central American officials, the “Engel” list, for having, according to the US State Department, “obstructed and undermined anti-corruption investigations in Guatemala”. The Attorney General was reappointed in May for a further four-year term by President Alejandro Giammattei.
One of the plaintiffs against Virginia Laparra is the Anti-Terrorism Foundation, known for having defended Guatemalan politicians accused of corruption and army officers accused of crimes during the civil war (1960-1996). Three of the members of this organization were also included on the “Engel” list in 2021.
US State Department ‘deeply concerned’
During his trial, Mr.me Laparra was forced to renounce a key testimony, that of her former head at FECI, Juan Francisco Sandoval. The judge agreed to his appearance, on the condition that Mr. Sandoval, exiled in the United States, testify by videoconference from the Guatemalan consulate in Washington, which represented a risk that he would be arrested there.
After the verdict was read, Viginia Laparra denounced “a terrible precedent because never again will a prosecutor dare to lodge a complaint”. His sentence to four years in prison “is an obvious persecution motivated by a desire for revenge”, estimated Juan Pappier, of the organization Human Rights Watch, while the director of Amnesty International for the Americas, Erika Guevara Rosas, considered that Mme Laparra est “a prisoner of conscience who is paying a high price for her work as an anti-corruption prosecutor”. “She must be released immediately and unconditionally,” added M.me Guevara Rosas.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said “deeply concerned about the sentence”, before adding that “targeted prosecutions of justice and media actors undermine the rule of law, democracy and prosperity in Guatemala”.