The president of Guatemala moves to remove the controversial attorney general, but it will not be easy
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2024-05-12 23:02:29
“The dark cycle of Consuelo Porras must end now.” With these words, Bernardo Arévalo de León, president of Guatemala, opened the door a week ago to the possibility of dismissing the attorney general. It was something that a good part of the population had demanded of him since he took office and to which he himself had committed when he won the elections in 2023.
In a message broadcast on May 5, the president sought to dispel the accusations of lukewarmness against his Government for not acting more forcefully against Consuelo Porras, who has led criminal investigations against former anti-corruption prosecutors, judges and journalists, and who is attributed with the attempts to prevent Arévalo’s investiture last January.
The next day, Arévalo fulfilled what he had announced. Guarded by Karin Herrera, his vice president, by his ministers and by a group of citizens shouting “get out, Consuelo,” the president walked the 700 meters that separate the National Palace from the Congress of the Republic to deliver, by hand, a reform to the law that shields the prosecutor that allows him to remove the prosecutor from her position. “We trust that this legislature knows how to enter history by taking the side of democracy and justice,” he said in a brief press conference.
What was presented as a blow on the table, which pointed to the possibility of a change in the prosecution, was diluted throughout the week. Congress met on Tuesday, but did not discuss the initiative due to lack of quorum. The scene was repeated again on Thursday morning. After more than an hour of delay, the president of the Legislature ended the session with only 41 deputies in the plenary session.
What Arévalo’s proposal says
Since he came to office, a part of the population, including people who are in exile due to investigations opened by the Prosecutor’s Office, They have reiterated to Arévalo the need for him to dismiss Consuelo Porras. But the law prevents it.
The Constitution of Guatemala does authorize the President of the Republic to remove the Attorney General from office “for justified cause.” This historically allowed the president in office to change him at will, for a convenient profile.
But in 2016, several reforms were made to the Organic Law of the Public Ministry, which shielded the position. The then Attorney General Thelma Aldana (now in exile) was the one who presented the reform proposal. Aldana’s administration had initiated investigations against the Government of Otto Pérez Molina when he was still in office, so modifying the law prevented the president from taking action against him.
One of these changes established that, for the president to remove the attorney general, there must be a ruling that confirms that he committed a crime. This means that the position of attorney general is practically untouchable. Especially in the current context of Guatemala, in which a good part of the courts of Justice are aligned with a corrupt system.
Precisely, beginning to clean up this system is the intention with which the Arévalo Government proposed the law reform initiative. The president emphasized that the arrival of a progressive Government is not enough. In Guatemala, he said in his message, “a corrupt minority” survives and “the threat it represents to our democracy is possible due to the permanence of Mrs. Consuelo Porras in the position of attorney general of the Public Ministry.” This, he added, “encourages political-criminal networks to resist advances in the fight against corruption.”
Thus, his proposal seeks to channel the law so that the president can dismiss the head of the Public Ministry without the need for a sentence. The new document proposes that “lack of capacity, suitability and honesty” may be a justified cause for removal. “We are correcting a problem that has been generated through these reforms and preventing the Public Ministry from being left out in a situation of impunity, because it is not accountable to any entity,” Arévalo clarified on Monday in Congress.
The president assured that he proposes a mechanism to prevent attorneys general from committing abuses of power and for governments to manage them: “It is a reform that seeks to ensure that the Public Ministry is no longer used as a political weapon by any government. We won’t do it. And we seek to ensure that the governments that come later do not do so,” he said last Sunday.
The initiative establishes several assumptions for the president to define whether or not the person in the position of attorney general has that capacity, suitability and honesty. An important detail is that it also protects his decision: there will be no room for any appeal against it.
“If the law is left very open, it could be a risk for future attorneys general,” Edgar Ortiz, a lawyer specialized in constitutional law, tells elDiario.es.
The Arévalo Government’s proposal also sends a message between the lines. Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State of the United States, visited Guatemala last Tuesday and met with the president to address immigration issues. The United States has played a key role in the Central American country. In recent years, has sanctioned actors considered corrupt. Among them, the prosecutor herself Consuelo Porras.
The blockade in Congress
Congress must now analyze the initiative, transfer it to a legislative commission and thus begin the internal process to approve it in plenary session, in which there is an opposition majority. And that is where the Arévalo Government will face its first challenge: achieving the necessary votes. Semilla’s legislative bloc, the official party, has already announced that it will support the initiative. But they only have 23 seats and the proposal needs 107, so it must gather 84 votes.
Some congressmen have already spoken out on social network X, suggesting that they would not make it easy for Arévalo. “His personal conflicts should not be addressed in the Congress of the Republic,” public Sandra Jovel, deputy of the Valor party, with six deputies, and former minister of Jimmy Morales.
“We do not impose or buy deputies,” Samuel Pérez, head of the Semilla group, explained to the media on Monday. “Each bloc is going to have to reflect on whether it agrees with an initiative that favors democracy or whether it is going to position itself on the coup side.”
The absences of opposition deputies in the sessions on Tuesday and Thursday confirmed the suspicions. There does not seem to be any interest on the part of the legislative majority in carrying out an initiative that would change the political scenario in Guatemala.
La fiscal general se parapeta
On the night of the 5th, an hour and a half before the Government of Guatemala played Arévalo’s video, and when it was still not clear what the president would communicate, the Public Ministry announced through a statement that it would present an amparo before the Court. Constitutional. With this resource, he explained, he sought for the Constitutional Court to order the president to refrain from adopting measures to “take control of the Public Ministry.”
The statement did not specify what these measures would be and only spoke of a “real, certain and imminent threat” of actions that “can lead to attacks against the physical integrity and life” of the attorney general.
The Constitutional Court, with a majority of judges similar to Consuelo Porras, analyzed the protection with unusual speed. Before midnight of that same day, he admitted it to processing and gave Arévalo’s Executive a three-hour period to send a detailed report. On Tuesday afternoon he protected Porras y ordered the Government to “refrain from any act that, outside the constitutional and legal framework, violates the mandate” of the prosecutor.
In parallel to this accolade, Consuelo Porras and her private secretary, Angel Pineda, appeared at a press conference in which, impetuously and with several inaccuracies and hoaxesthe attorney general questioned Arévalo’s anti-corruption fight and clarified that “he does not receive instructions in either Spanish or English.”
Porras also warned the president and Vice President Herrera that “they are not and will not be above the law.” The Prosecutor’s Office he leads has requested that immunity be lifted for both in the past. At the press conference he announced that he does not rule out doing it again.
It will remain to be seen this week if the Legislature puts the Guatemalan Government’s initiative back on the agenda and if, if it does, it achieves the minimum number of congressmen, not only to approve it, but to begin analyzing it.
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