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Editor's Note: Vaclav Masek Sánchez is licensed by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) of the University of New York (NYU). His academic research focuses on political histories in Central America. Follow him on Twitter at @_vaclavmasek.
(CNN Spanish) - Days after the CICIG mandate ended, last century Guatemala woke up.
As a rehabilitation addict who experiences withdrawal symptoms, sudden and uncontrollable, a confusing event generated a government reaction that evokes his authoritarian era
An attack during a military operation in the Buenos Aires town of El Estor, which claimed the lives of three soldiers, was attributed to organized crime. The official version accuses local people, "pseudo-campers" and "pseudo-defenders of human rights," according to statements by President Jimmy Morales, for having collaborated with the alleged drug traffickers. They lashed out at soldiers looking for an aircraft carrying drugs in the area.
Although several human rights groups condemned an eventual state of siege, fearing that the measure would lead to more repression and violence, Congress quickly resolved in favor. The National Army mobilized 2,000 troops, taking control of several locations in eastern Caribbean Caribbean.
The "state of siege", second only after the "state of war" in the emergency hierarchy for Guatemala, suspends the fundamental rights of the population of that area, including that of free locomotion, demonstration, assembly and carrying of weapons during A period of 30 days. It is illogical that after the death of three soldiers, in a confusing fact, in an isolated community, 22 municipalities in Guatemala are under that figure.
Why does it go back to its authoritarian era? Because it includes the same actors who were involved during the bloody seventies and eighties.
After the attack on El Estor, the Army also launched an operation that sought to arrest César Montes, a veteran fighter and emblem of the insurgency during the time of the armed conflict. The search for the former guerrilla commander of the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) and the Guatemalan Army of the Poor (EGP) concluded without success.
The armed confrontation occurred in the department of Izabal, on the border with Honduras. Its coasts provide the only access that Guatemala has to the Caribbean Sea, being a strategic point of interest for the flow of capital, whose control has historically been disputed between the Guatemalan State, insurgent movements, and now, drug trafficking. InSight Crime has declared that border area as a region "perfect for cocaine transfer."
Izabal is also a department with great social conflict. Much of the department is inhabited by indigenous Q'eqchí indigenous communities, who have fought for land rights and have repeatedly demonstrated against nickel extraction and African palm plantations.
The event also dates back to authoritarian days because it poses a territorial dispossession in the name of corporatist developmentalism, with the Army as an operational spearhead.
What happened days after CICIG left the country is indicative that efforts to eliminate government corruption will never be enough, because it seems that impunity reigns in Guatemala. Citizens were taken to death by decades of abuse and corruption that lived in hiding and was never punished.
It is necessary then to make a brief elegy to the CICIG, after 12 years of continuous struggle to unmask the illicit associations that profit from the State. CICIG showed that in Guatemala there is corruption in the ports, in state contracts, in social security, in municipalities. In general, CICIG showed that public administration works for and thanks to corruption. Moreover, in his closing ceremony, Commissioner Iván Velásquez mentioned that there is a "coalition of gangsters" within the Guatemalan state.
It will be a matter of time to see if Velásquez's conclusion also applies in El Salvador.
The president, Nayib Bukele, said he would seek to create a commission in the style of CICIG. Authorities in San Salvador have already confirmed meetings between Vice President Félix Ulloa and former Commissioner Velásquez. With a 90% approval, Bukele will seek to decorate its management with a device that can break up the country's illegal networks.
The main difference with CICIG is that CICIES will be controlled by the Executive, not by the Public Ministry. If President Bukele does not address the legitimacy and autonomy problems of this commission supported by the OAS, his Government risks playing with the credibility and future of CICIES before he begins his investigations.
His actions against journalists from El Faro and Factum Magazine , Salvadoran media of investigative journalism who were denied access to the CICIES launch conference at the Presidential Palace in San Salvador, are of concern. If its political and technical independence is not ensured, CICIES can become a weapon of attack of the Executive.
The agreement seems to establish little, so it only remains to speculate what its mandate will be in practice. In a government where the first 100 days have been a cult of Bukele's personality, the commission can be instrumentalized by a skilled and popular ruler. Will he investigate himself if cases arise in which he is involved?
The Central American summer dusk with Guatemala as a besieged state, with military deployment in a good part of its territory; an anti-corruption commission terminated in Guatemala, another that barely achieved its first sentence in Honduras, and a new one that has erratically initiated in El Salvador.
Ironically, the month of the national holidays in the isthmus also grants the dangerous approval of the USA. UU., Which wants to turn three Central American countries into a shelter for international refugees. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security UU. He plans to have an immigration pact with Honduras and El Salvador in early October.
CICIG
