Edgar Gutierrez: “The road is nearly cleared, but this will go on for a long time. As long as Consuelo Porras remains as Attorney General, the persecution will continue.”
HAVANA TIMES – The December 14th ruling of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court now smooths the way for President-elect Bernardo Arevalo to be inaugurated on January 14th. However, warns Edgar Gutierrez, Guatemala’s former Minister of Foreign Relations and a current political analyst, the legal decision won’t extinguish the efforts of Guatemala’s “pact of the corrupt” to keep Arevalo from taking office.
The president-elect is backed by a large degree of the citizenry, who are fed up with the corruption that has corroded much of society’s core. He also has sizable support among the international community, which has repeatedly expressed its demand that the popular will of the voters be respected.
The battle will also be fought in Congress, where Arevalo’s Movimiento Semilla party will hold fewer than 15% of the seats. However, there’s also the fact that all the parties in the “pact of the corrupt” – current president Alejandro Giammattei’s Vamos party; the UNE Party of defeated presidential candidate Sandra Torres; and the Cabal Party of Edmond Mulet – are fragmented, something Bernardo Arevalo could use to his advantage, and attempt to build a majority bloc to facilitate his legislative agenda.
In an interview with the online television news program Esta Semana and the Confidencial news site, Gutierrez predicted, “the persecution will continue,” as long as Consuelo Porras remains at the head of the Attorney General’s Office. Nonetheless, he added, “Bernardo Arevalo has sufficient arguments to demand the resignation of Consuelo Porras as of January 14, if current President Giammattei doesn’t do so earlier.”
The Constitutional Court’s ruling
On Thursday, December 14th Guatemala’s Constitutional Court granted a definitive injunction against the Attorney General’s Office, ordering the presidential inauguration of Bernardo Arevalo on January 14th. Does this mean that the Attorney General’s Office can no longer persist in their actions to annul the elections? Is the road now cleared for President Bernado Arevalo?
I’d say almost cleared. That is, Perhaps what the Attorney General’s Office has going against it most is time, because forming a case and later stripping Bernardo Arevalo of his immunity in 30 days is nearly a material impossibility. They’d have to call a plenary session of Congress, which is about to go on recess, and then obtain a two-thirds vote, which is the qualified majority. Hence, the Constitutional Court has cleared the road for all the other authorities, but the legal cases against Bernardo Arevalo and his Semilla Party are going to continue in accordance with the court resolution itself.
The ruling also orders Congress and the current President Giammattei to submit to the electoral mandate and contribute to this transition process. What should President Giammattei do?
What President Giammattei should do is to call for the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, because she’s the one who’s impeding an orderly transition and the taking office of a democratically elected new government. If he wants to comply with the Court order to a T, he needs to get Consuelo Porras out of this, because she and her inner circle are basically the ones who are torpedoing the process of democratic transition.
The ruling of the Constitutional Court doesn’t impede the right to investigate. It even speaks of the Attorney General’s criminal persecution. Does this mean that the persecution will continue as long as Attorney General Consuelo Porras and Prosec