Guatemala: One Comedian Zero Laughs-The Corruption Game Continues

GUATEMALA

One Comedian, Zero Laughs

In 2015, actor and comedian Jimmy Morales won the Guatemalan presidency in a landslide with 67 percent of the vote.

His status as a political outsider fueled his cruise to victory after then-President Otto Perez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti, were arrested on suspicion of taking millions in bribes from businesses hoping to avoid customs charges.

Morales promised voters an end to the political corruption and entrenched organized crime that had plagued the country since the end of its decades-long civil war in 1996.

Instead, all he’s delivered is déjà vu. But this time around, political corruption could beget constitutional crisis and international instability.

Voters have come to see Morales for his political and ethical ineptitudes, the Economist reports.

Ivan Velasquez, head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a publicly trusted, UN-backed commission that’s been investigating corruption in the country for more than a decade, has sought to strip Morales of his presidential immunity on allegations that he failed to disclose some $800,000 in misappropriated campaign funds.

In response to the call, Morales declared Velasquez a persona non grata last month and sought to banish him from the country. The nation’s Constitutional Court overturned the declaration and gave Congress the go-ahead to vote on lifting the president’s immunity. But multiple attempts have fallen flat on the voting floor, Reuters reports. Even so, the number of legislators supporting such an action is rising, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Still, if Morales goes down, so do those standing beside him, writesAl Jazeera. More than 100 former cabinet members are facing trial on graft charges, along with over 50 high-profile legislators, bankers and business owners. Even Morales’ brother and son are accused of fraud and embezzlement.

While corrupt political elites circle the wagons to protect their own, the nation’s voters and civil society are outraged. Thousands took to the streets in Guatemala City late last month to protest the political establishment. Many fear that, backed into a corner, Morales could stage an overthrow of the judicial order.

“There’s a huge risk that Morales and his close circle of old military guard could order a state of siege to try to stop the justice process,” Anabella Sibrian, director of the NGO International Platform against Impunity, told the Guardian.

Should that happen, international oversight that’s been in place for over a decade vis a vis CICIG could be done away with. That would jeopardize a form of nation building at arm’s length favored by the international community, possibly destabilizing the region, writesCharles T. Call, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

“The momentum gained by this initial experiment in a constructive international mission against injustice may be dealt a blow that reverberates,” he wrote.