• January 25, 2016 In case you didn’t know, Guatemala went through a wrenching year in 2015. Its leaders were deposed and imprisoned on corruption charges. As the Organization of American States and others clearly saw, the literal decapitation of society was part of an attempt to cancel the country’s elections.
• January 6, 2016 Under pressure from the Barack Obama administration, it will re-start the trial of former President Efraín Ríos Montt, and thereby attempt to blame the country’s misfortunes on a non-existent genocide.
• December 18, 2015 All corruption, as Julius Caesar could have written, is divided into three parts. The first of these is the corruption itself, while the other two are the possible ways of redressing it.
• December 16, 2015 At the end of November, a curious report appeared in a Guatemalan newspaper. US Ambassador Todd Robinson announced that he intended to seek a commitment from President-elect Jimmy Morales.
• December 7, 2015 Peruvian novelist and Nobel Laureate Marío Vargas Llosa once quipped that the greatest producer of anti-capitalist, anti-US propaganda was none other than the United States.
• December 2, 2015 Guatemala’s political mob, which we call the blob, is once again trying to suffocate the country’s new government even before it takes power.
• November 11, 2015 Guatemala’s recent presidential election was far from ordinary. It was shaped by a joint effort between the Barack Obama administration and the United Nations’ self-appointed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) to change the country’s governing structure.
• November 11, 2015 From his prison cell, Otto Pérez Molina has played cry-baby by telling Russia Today — an odd bedfellow indeed — that the agent of his downfall was none other than the United States, up to its old tricks; and working in this case through the UN commission, the CICIG, a worthy partner in official corruption.
• September 29, 2015 In her first round of presidential voting on September 6, Guatemala narrowly avoided a coup d’état which would have cancelled elections and kept them cancelled for a long time.
• September 8, 2015 The contest between the various candidates had been largely overshadowed by the imposition of criminal charges, only a few days before the vote, against the president and vice president — a situation that had taken the country to the edge of a coup d’état.
• September 2, 2015 Guatemala’s congress last night voted to strip President Otto Pérez Molina of his official immunity from charges of involvement in a bribery ring. His former vice president, Roxana Baldetti, is already in prison, where she is awaiting trial on similar charges.
• August 5, 2015 In October 2014, the staff of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security sat down for an interview with their “distinguished scholar in residence,” Claudia Paz y Paz. Five months earlier, Paz y Paz had left the post of attorney general for Guatemala after failing to win reappointment.
• August 5, 2015 In October 2014, the staff of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security sat down for an interview with their \”distinguished scholar in residence,\” Claudia Paz y Paz. Five months earlier, Paz y Paz had left the post of attorney general for Guatemala after failing to win reappointment.
• August 3, 2015 A few weeks after the attempted assassination of Gilda Aguilar in 2012, a co-author of these articles, Steve Hecht, was invited to meet with Arnold Chacon, the US ambassador to Guatemala. Hecht went to the meeting alongside Professor Armando De la Torre, a dean at Francisco Marroquín University and a columnist for Guatemala’s El Periódico.
• August 1, 2015 If you want insights into the history of Claudia Paz y Paz, former attorney general of Guatemala (2010-2014), and what she symbolizes, look no further than the recent six-part series of reports from Steve Hecht and David Landau.
• July 28, 2015 The elderly defendant, having been found guilty and sentenced for genocide, stood alone among the spectators. Adrift in a vast public space that was more like an auditorium than a courtroom, the old man wavered about with no one to lean on.
• July 23, 2015 Gilda Aguilar, a prosecuting attorney for Guatemala’s Justice Ministry, was hurrying home to her two teenage daughters. Another attorney, a friend of Gilda’s, was driving; and Samuel Gonzales, a young police officer, was her security.
• July 22, 2015 In Guatemala, the Justice Ministry and its leader, the attorney general, have a separate place in the constitutional order. For one thing, the attorney general’s term does not coincide with the president’s. The president takes office on January 14 of every year divisible by four (2004, 2008, 2012, etc.); while the attorney general takes office two years later, on May 15.
• July 21, 2015 “Georgetown University is one of the world’s leading academic and research institutions.” That’s how the university describes itself.
But Georgetown’s use of its prestige to elevate Guatemala’s former attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, to star status raises questions about the direction the university has taken.
• June 21, 2015 The crisis in Venezuela has gradually been seeping into large media outlets in the Unites States and Canada, and earlier this month I had the opportunity to appear on Stossel to explain why the Chavista push for “social justice” has led to nothing short of a nightmare.
