VOXXI: Former president’s sentencing could usher optimism for Guatemala

"Former President's sentencing could usher Optimism for Guatemala"
W. Alejandro Sanchez
VOXXI
May 23, 2014
Originally published: http://voxxi.com/2014/05/23/alfonso-portillo-sentencing-us/

New York judge Robert Patterson has sentenced former Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo (2000-2004) to five years in prison on charges of accepting bribes while he was in office. This landmark ruling is the first time a former Latin American head of state has been sentenced to jail in the U.S. judiciary system.

This important verdict also raises several questions, such as whether Portillo will spend time in a U.S. prison or if he will be sent back to Guatemala. Moreover, it’s unclear whether the former head of state will actually serve all five years of his sentence. It seems likely that some sort of settlement will be reached.

SEE ALSO: Rios Montt found guilty of genocide

In any case, the ruling constitutes a significant milestone for the issue of presidential impunity, a cancer that has long plagued Latin American governments. Ideally, the New York ruling would motivate Guatemala to reach a final verdict for General Rios Montt, another former president on trial in the Central American state. However, we should not hold our breaths as the verdict regarding Portillo is not solely good news.

The Portillo verdict

Aside from spending five years and ten months in prison, Portillo will also have to pay a fine of $2.5 million. The BBC explains that a New York judge was able to rule on the case, which would seemingly fall under Guatemalan jurisdiction, because “the bribes came from an accountant in New York City.”

The disgraced president was accused of taking bribes from the government of Taiwan, so that Taipei would not lose Guatemala’s recognition. Several Central American and Caribbean states recognize Taiwan instead of China, so it is in Taiwan’s national interest not to lose its remaining allies.

The last few years have brought a blur of trials for Portillo. He was first arrested in his homeland in 2010 and later faced trial in May 2011 for embezzling funds that belonged to the Ministry of Defense, though he was declared innocent. He was eventually extradited to the United States in May 2013, where he was indicted for a variety of crimes, including embezzling money from Taiwan and “misappropriating funds from the publicly financed reserves of Credito Hipotecario Nacional,” among others.

At the time of his extradition, many analysts speculated that Portillo could face up to 20 years in prison and fines totaling $500,000. The final sentence is significantly less harsh since he pleaded guilty.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how much time Portillo will actually spend in jail. Some observers expect that, since he has already served time, his five-year sentence could be reduced to 18 months or even just 11 months.

Reasons for Optimism?

Understandably, the Guatemalan media has covered this issue extensively, and it shares the belief that Portillo will only spend 18 months in prison, which means that he will be free by November 2015. Still, he will probably be released sooner due to “good behavior.”

The Central American state is particularly interested in how Portillo’s sentence and eventual return will affect the country’s political system. An article in the Guatemalan daily “El Periodico” explains that Portillo’s return will change Guatemala’s “electoral forces” in the country’s upcoming September 2015 elections.

As for the Guatemalan government, President Otto Perez Molina has declared that he respects the New York judge’s decision. Nevertheless, Portillo is not without allies, as members of the Union del Cambio Nacional (UCN) political party in his homeland have declared that they continue to support the former head of state. It is too early to say whether Portillo could run for office, but stranger things tend to occur in Latin American politics.

Hopefully the Guatemalan judiciary will follow Judge Patterson’s precedent to pursue and sentence former heads of state and other high-level individuals that have carried out crimes while in office, particularly General Rios Montt, who ruled the Central American country during its bloody civil war. Guatemalan courts finally tried and sentenced the retired general in 2013, but the verdict was essentially canceled due to an obscure legal technicality. Many fear that Rios Montt may eventually go free when his trial resumes in 2015.

As for Portillo, his defense lawyers will try to have him sent back to Guatemala, arguing that he can serve the remaining time there. A worst case scenario would be that, if Portillo returns to Guatemala, his lawyers could find a way to keep him out of prison altogether.

Portillo’s sentence sends an important message to corrupt officials that their crimes will not go unpunished. Unfortunately, there is a high likelihood that Portillo will soon go free and continue to influence his home country. Unfortunately for Guatemala, politics will likely remain business as usual.

Blouin Beat: World - Honduras extradites alleged drug trafficker Lobo

"Honduras Extradites alleged Drug Trafficker Lobo"
W. Alejandro Sanchez
Blouin Beat:World
May 9, 2014
Originally published: http://blogs.blouinnews.com/blouinbeatworld/2014/05/09/honduras-extradites-alleged-drug-trafficker-lobo/

Carlos Arnoldo “El Negro” Lobo, a high-profile drug trafficker, has become the first Honduran extradited to the U.S. The extradition reportedly took place during the evening of May 8. Lobo, who is wanted by the U.S. Southern District Court of Florida, was arrested on March 27. The arrest represented a major victory for the country’s new president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, whose promises regarding citizen insecurity and crime were a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. Lobo’s lawyers tried to fight the Honduran court’s decision to send him to the U.S. but were unsuccessful.

Lobo had a well-established niche in maritime drug trafficking and ties with various Latin American criminal syndicates. “El Negro” is accused of transporting cocaine for Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran drug kingpins and organizations, including “the reputed leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin ‘Chapo’ Guzman […] and the Honduran drug trafficking organization Los Cachiros.”

Washington also accuses Lobo of working with “Los Mellos de Cassandra”,two twins arrested in January 2013who ran a drug trafficking operation on San Andres island, a Colombian territory in the Caribbean. The twins were also involved in trafficking cocaine from theRastrojosorganization, a Colombian criminal syndicate.

Considering the high-octane nature of his career, Lobo was captured in a mundane way. For days, members of Honduras’ police force and Public Ministry had been following his movements around his mansion in San Pedro Sula (in the northwest region of the country). Lobo was arrested when he left his home to go grocery shopping at a nearby bakery and transported via helicopter to the headquarters of the First Infantry Battalion in Tegucigalpa, where he remained until – as Honduran media reports it — two helicopters took him on Thursday night to Palmerola, a U.S. military base in the Central American country. The State Department hailed Honduras’ decision to hand over Lobo to U.S. authorities.

Lobo’s capture is a victory with particular significance for Hernandez, who centered his campaign on a pledge to reduce Honduras’ high criminal rates. The Honduran head of state later (and somewhat smugly) remarked to the press, “That is why I tell people that if they do not want to have problems, it is very simple: Do not break the law, but rather, lead a respectful lifestyle.”

Given that Hernandez is keen to maintain the Washington-Tegucigalpa partnership, it came as no surprise that all 15 magistrates of Honduras’ Supreme Court of Justice voted unanimously to accept Washington’s extradition request for Lobo.

The extradition process, however, is not without controversy. Lobo’s planned extradition represents just one manifestation of a controversial amendment to Article 102 of the Honduran constitution which was passed in 2012 and which permits the extradition of Hondurans to other countries if they are wanted for crimes like drug trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism.

As for the future of maritime drug trafficking in Honduras, the country’s role as a transit nation for cocaine coming from South America to Mexico will not stop in spite of the government’s trumpeting of the capture or elimination of high-profile drug lords. Sadly, either a single person or multiple smaller drug runners will inevitably attempt to fill the vacuum left by Lobo.

Nevertheless, Lobo’s fall does give some initial hope that President Hernandez means business when it comes to making his nation more secure. It is likely that the Honduran head of state will continue to support the country’s military police, a 5,000-strong unit created to deal with violence and crime in the country. A much-needed policy goal: Hondurans want to live in a country that is not riddled with drug crimes and violence but their nation continues to rank as a murder capital of the world, which suggests that Hernandez will have a lot of leeway with the general populace for hard-on-crime policies, though skeptics will doubtless remain within the legal and political communities. Which lends all the more validity concerns that semi-omnipotent security agencies could promote human rights abuses in the Central American nation.

VOXXI: El Salvador: Will General Jose Guillermo Garcia be deported?

"El Salvador: Will General Jose Guillermo Garcia be deported?"
W. Alejandro Sanchez
VOXXI
April 15, 2014
Originally published: http://voxxi.com/2014/04/15/el-salvador-jose-garcia-be-deported/

The ruling of a Miami judge to deport Army General Jose Guillermo Garcia, a former defense minister of El Salvador, serves as a victory for human rights supporters, despite the difficulties to implement the rule anytime soon.

Judge Michael Horn ruled that Garcia had a direct role in the torture and extrajudicial killings of hundreds of individuals during that country’s civil war (1980-1992).

A brief background

A brief summary of El Salvador’s bloody conflict is required in order to properly understand the accusations against the retired army general.

Garcia served as defense minister of the Revolutionary Junta – a military government that ruled El Salvador from 1979 until 1982. It was during this period that a bloody civil war commenced between the government and the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), a coalition of various insurgent movements. Some 75,000 thousand people are believed to have died in the conflict.

Three significant incidents that occurred at the onset of the civil war were: the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the 1980 assassination of four U.S. church women, and the 1981 El Mozote Massacre.

Garcia was defense minister of the country when these crimes took place, as he served in that post from 1979 until 1983.

The School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) reports that Garcia “refused to investigate reports that hundreds of unarmed civilians were brutally murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion in 1981.” This incident is known as El Mozote Massacre: Salvadoran soldiers, as part of “Operacion Rescate,” killed over 800 civilians at El Mozote village, where FMLN fighters were believed to be hiding.

Likewise, the SOAW claims that “Garcia also failed to launch a serious investigation of the murder of four U.S. churchwomen by members of the Salvadoran National Guard.” A 1998 New York Times reportexplains that the women (Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel) were abducted, raped and shot to death on the night of December 2, 1980; their bodies were later found alongside an isolated road.

A 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report concluded that Garcia and Coronel Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who at the time was the director of the National Guard, organized an official cover-up of the nuns’ assassinations.

In 1990, Garcia travelled to the U.S. in 1989 and was granted political asylum the following year. He has reportedly lived in Florida ever since.

In February 2013, during his deportation trial, Garcia admitted that he knew of abuses committed by Salvadoran forces, but he argued that he tried to stop them. “I have never ordered, nor have I ever agreed with torture because my principles prohibit it,” he stated.

The deportation verdict

Given the atrocious human rights violations that Garcia is accused of having either ordered or covered up while he was El Salvador’s defense minister, it is no surprise that human rights organizations have praised the recent ruling.

The Center for Accountability & Justice issued a press release in which it praises the judge’s decision and the New York Time’s work to make the ruling be public knowledge. It also states that the “CJA and our clients will continue to work to obtain justice for the brutality of the Salvadoran military and security forces under Garcia’s command.” (The CJA has uploaded a PDF of the 66-page judge’s decision).

The CJA has been trying to hold Garcia accountable for his actions since 1999.

In the conclusions of his lengthy decision, Judge Horn states that “the Court finds that the Department of Homeland Security has established by clear and convincing evidence that all the allegations in the charging documents are true and correct.” These are listed as Garcia’s extrajudicial killing of Archbishop Romero, the four American women, and the El Mozote Massacre, among several others. (P. 60-61)

It is well known that the U.S. government supported the Salvadoran military during the country’s civil war, and to this day the American military has a base in Comalapa, El Salvador. Garcia himself received some military training by the U.S. as he attended a course on counterinsurgency at the School of the Americas in 1962.

As for the general’s fate, his lawyer has declared that they will fight the decision to extradite his client back to Central America. In other words, we will have months, if not years, of legal proceedings before a final verdict is reached and carried out.

Thirty years ago, the atrocities committed in El Salvador’s civil war were horrific, and the perpetrators should be brought to justice. By perpetrators I do not mean solely the military personnel who killed the peasants of El Mozote or four American nuns, but also the higher-ranking officers who either ordered these crimes or covered them up. Hopefully Garcia will not face the U.S. justice system but will eventually return to El Salvador to be trialed there as well for his actions.