By: Staff Writer
January 17, 2025
A recently released report by investigative crime journal, Insight Crime, says that Guatemalan president, Bernardo Arévalo, has been unable to craft a coherent plant to deal with the rampant corruption in the country.
The report said that notwithstanding Arévalo taking on the task of stamping out corruption and inherrting a public bureaucracy that has been “compromised,” for several years, “His inexperienced party, Semilla, founded in July 2017 and thrust into power for the first time, remains a minority force in a Congress dominated by old guard lawmakers. And the administration is reckoning with a hollowed-out justice system that has shown far more interest in persecuting Arévalo and Semilla than investigating high level corruption and organized crime.
“Faced with these restraints, the Arévalo administration has neither been able to develop a coherent plan for tackling corruption nor succeed in enacting tangible anti-graft reforms. The government has also dedicated valuable time and resources to repelling controversial legal attacks from prosecutors linked to the elite networks that oppose Arévalo’s reformist platform.”
The report also said: “The government is hamstrung by its reliance on the executive branch Arévalo’s administration has dedicated significant energy to exposing and mitigating corruption via executive bodies such as the National Commission Against Corruption (Comisión Nacional contra la Corrupción – CNC) and the Solicitor General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Nación – PGN), in addition to tax authorities and key ministries. But there is no executive institution with a mandate to investigate or prosecute corruption. That is the sole responsibility of the Attorney General’s Office, which has systematically shelved high-impact graft and criminal cases. The executive’s dependence on antagonistic branches of government compromises Arévalo’s hopes of dismantling state-embedded corruption networks.”
It added: “There is no simple means of overhauling corrupt institutions. With corruption so entrenched, any attempt to meaningfully purge institutions under the executive’s purview could leave the government with insufficient staff to perform basic functions. In some cases, ministers have continued to employ technical staff suspected of corruption, simply because the government could not find an adequate replacement. In other cases, bureaucratic hurdles have prevented ministries from firing officials accused of corruption. This presents a paradoxical scenario, in which respecting due process may actually make it harder for the executive branch to clean house.”
The report also said that reducing the amount of public funds available to corruption networks is not always practical. And, it further cautioned: “The immediate future is highly volatile. One year into the Arévalo administration, the political climate in Guatemala remains precarious. Though the existence of the administration alone has prevented corruption networks from consolidating their stranglehold on the main branches of government, the executive’s limited control of the country’s often compromised institutions has prevented it from implementing anticorruption measures capable of preventing a return to darker times. The transfer of power in the United States could also shift the tide, particularly if the incoming Trump administration softens support for anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala.”