Guatemala’s Supreme Court revoked international arrest warrants for Colombia’s chief prosecutor and the country’s former defense minister.
In a ruling, the top court said that the Guatemalan Prosecutor General’s Office abused its powers when it issued the international warrant for the arrest of Colombian Prosecutor General Luz Adriana Camargo and former Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez.
The warrants were issued by Guatemala’s top anti-corruption prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, who claimed that Velasquez and Camargo led a criminal “structure” dedicated to political corruption.
Between 2013 and 2019, Velasquez led a United Nations commission against impunity in Guatemala in an attempt to root out corruption in the Central American country.
Colombia’s current prosecutor general was one of the commission’s investigators until former President Jimmy Morales pulled the plug on the anti-corruption investigation and expelled its foreign members.
International police organization Interpol rejected the Guatemalan prosecutor’s request to issue a red notice amid growing concerns about its legal validity and the motives of Guatemala’s prosecution.
According to the United States’ government, Guatemala’s anti-corruption chief “obstructed investigations into acts of corruption by disrupting high-profile corruption cases against government officials and raising apparently spurious claims against FECI prosecutors, private attorneys, and former International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) prosecutors.”
Curruchiche’s boss, Prosecutor General Maria Consuelo Porras, “repeatedly obstructed and undermined anticorruption investigations in Guatemala to protect her political allies and gain undue political favor,” according to the State Department.
The Guatemalan government distanced itself from the now-revoked warrant to persecute the former CIGIC commissioners.
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