.JonathanBlitzer reports on the Guatemalan lawyers and judges who fought corruption in their country—until they were threatened and forced into political exile.
One morning in January, Rudy Herrera, a thirty-seven-year-old federal prosecutor, was working in his office on the fourth floor of the Public Ministry, in downtown Guatemala City, when a colleague pulled him aside to ask about a case. They stepped into a nearby bathroom, where no one else was around. The case in question, known as “,” involved a group of political operatives and public officials who illegally conspired to place favorable judges on two high courts.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon last month, I met Herrera at a row house in Washington, where Sandoval, his former boss, had arranged a meeting of colleagues living in the area. Since 2018, twenty-two Guatemalan judges and anti-corruption prosecutors have gone into exile. Many of them are living in Mexico, El Salvador, and Spain, but the largest share is concentrated in and around D.C. Sandoval, short and bespectacled, with a wry sense of humor, is forty and the group’s social center.
. Later that year, a political outsider named Jimmy Morales, a former comedian with no prior public-service experience, won the Presidential election by campaigning on the slogan “Neither corrupt nor a thief.”, which lent the organization a certain amount of protection.
The breaking point for Aifán came after two hearings at an appellate court in early March. At one of them, she later said, the presiding judge attempted to rewrite the court record to exclude key aspects of her testimony. Her requests that the hearings be public were denied. In an interview given after she left the country, shethe reporter José Luis Sanz that the judge “had already made a decision against me before the hearings.
For the last year, the Biden Administration has been vocal in supporting the growing group of judges and prosecutors under threat, but the attacks have continued. In March, 2021, Aifán won an award given by the State Department. Two months later, before her first foreign trip as Vice-President, Kamala Harris held a meeting in Washington with Aldana; Claudia Escobar, a judge living in the U.S.
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