• 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 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 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 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 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.
• May 20, 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.
• April 6, 2015 The United States, under President Obama, is helping radical anti-Americans take power in our country.
• January 16, 2015 The question at the heart of the Ríos Montt trial is a simple and potentially dreadful one: did genocide occur during Guatemala’s internecine conflict?
• June 24, 2014 Guatemala has lately been a focus of international attention, and the present writers have extensive knowledge of the politics of this country. Even so, we were surprised when we were contacted by a reporter from the McClatchy news organization, which has a wide reach in US news markets.
• May 20, 2014 If you were observing US diplomacy in search of the curious – and you had decided to eavesdrop at one of its remotest, least-visited quarters – you would go to the Central American republic of Guatemala, where you would find something quite revealing about the nature of Barack Obama.
• November 12, 2013 In late 2011, Guatemala’s powerful attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, brought criminal charges of genocide against the country’s former leader, General Efrain Rios Montt.
• October 7, 2012 For the past year or two, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other diplomats have been hand-holding an attorney general in Guatemala who has twisted the law for political purposes and acted against a constitutional order.
