Guatemala’s former president Otto Pérez Molina has denied that he led a major customs corruption racket worth millions of dollars.
In a preliminary court hearing on Friday, the day after he resigned from office, he said: “I have the right to the presumption of innocence. I would never exchange my dignity for any quantity of money.”
The sight of the retired general turned politician at the mercy of an open court was, until very recently, unimaginable in Guatemala. It came courtesy of an internationally backed criminal investigation, an emboldened domestic judicial system and a cross-class social movement that pushed the country’s politicians into action.
During the hearing, the prosecution played hours of taped phone conversations of alleged members of the ring. Some included references to “the president” as well as “the Number One” and “the owner of the farm.”
Pérez Molina, who had listened impassively to the tapes, became more animated as he mounted his defence, occasionally raising his voice and banging the table in front of him as he dismissed the tapes as a mixture of hearsay and fragments of conversations taken out of context.
“Anybody can say they are talking in the name of the president, it happens all the time,” he said. The former president claimed the moral high ground by recalling that he had fought in the country’s 36-year civil war and helped negotiate its end in 1996. He claimed he turned down a huge bribe from Mexican drug lord Joaquien “El Chapo” Guzman when he captured him in 1993.
Judge Miguel Angel Galvez adjourned the hearing at the end of the day and sent Pérez Molina back to jail until the court reconvenes next week.
Daniel Wilkinson, of Human Rights Watch, said: “This is a country whose justice system was left in tatters by decades of military rule and political violence and all the resources thrown at it had not made any difference. Just a few years ago, a lot of people had simply given up on Guatemala.”
The roots of Pérez Molina’s dramatic downfall go back to 2007 and the formation of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known by its Spanish acronym CICIG. Its investigators worked closely with local prosecutors who, over time, became more effective and more confident about working on cases that implicated powerful figures at the same time as earning respect among the general public.
When the CICIG revealed the customs scam in April, thousands demonstrated in support of the investigation. By the time it directly alleged that Pérez Molina headed the racket last month, the protest movement had swelled to a general clamour to end corruption.
Apparently nervous about losing votes in Sunday’s general elections, even political parties that had previously backed the president supported the move to strip him of immunity from prosecution in a historic session of Congress on Tuesday.
“None of this would have happened without the CICIG,” said Manfredo Marroquin, head of a local NGO Citizen Action. “It helped the population wake up and realise that it has the power to force change.” But Marroquin claimed the state remained riddled with corrupt mafias.
Opinion polls before Sunday’s election show that three candidates have the potential to go on to a second round runoff on 25 October – a wealthy businessman, a former first lady and a comedian with no political experience promoted by a party said to be rooted in the military.
