Журнальный клуб Интелрос » PRISM » Vol. 5, No 4. 2015
Criminals dressed up as Rulers: Out! read one of the signs brandished by protesters who have returned time and again to the streets of Guatemala during a wave of corruption scandals in the Central American nation. Borrowing from previous episodes of public indignation against graft in government from Mexico, Brazil, or much further afield, and prompting in its wake an unprecedented series of demonstrations in neighboring Honduras, the Guatemalan protests are directly linked to the exposure of illicit activities located at the commanding heights of the state. Primarily the work of a UN-led investigative commission, the revelations began in April with the first arrests linked to a customs racket that plundered an estimated $325,000 a week. This was followed soon after by cases of embezzlement and money laundering in bodies across the Guatemalan state and political system, leading to a string of indictments against the country’s once untouchable elite. Among them stand the president and vice-president, both of them charged and imprisoned while still serving in office, as well as the former head of the tax service and the former head of the Central Bank. A charge-sheet of this sort suggests not merely that some holders of high office were seeking illegal material gain; nor just that they were conspiring to do so in corrupt conclaves. Instead, as the protester’s placard suggested, the various cases uncovered by the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) indicate that the core apparatus of the state system and its most basic services – not just the long corrupted National Police, but Congress, taxation, and elements of the financial system – had become protected spaces in which political appointees could exploit the law and their mandates for personal and factional advantage. The law of the land, in short, had become a gift and a goldmine for criminal endeavors