Carlos Figueroa Ibarra
A few days ago I had the pleasure of having a telephone conversation with whoever was the head of the High Risk Court “B” within the Guatemalan judicial system. During the course of the conversation I couldn’t help but remember my first days in exile in April 1980. The difference is that at that time I was 27 years old and today, the former judge is over sixty. Since November 2022, the lawyer Gálvez has been living the very long and sad avenue of exile as Otto René Castillo called it. Miguel Ángel was subject to what is called Lawfare because they invented a crime to get rid of him. In July 2022, when I had the opportunity to speak personally with him, then-Judge Gálvez already had a decision by the Supreme Court against him. The most probable scenario for him was moral and judicial murder, but his extrajudicial execution could not be ruled out.
Their precarious situation was not the product of a revolutionary commitment as happened to those of us who went into exile in the eighties or like those who went into exile in 1954 and in the following decades. Miguel Ángel Gálvez’s crime was decency, a virtue that has a subversive content in a country in which criminal governance has been established. Throughout the almost quarter of a century of his career as a judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez was lucky enough to handle cases of great impact, among which are highlighted the fact that he brought the case for genocide against Efraín Ríos Montt to trial in (2012); the case of the criminal organization “La Línea” that culminated in the imprisonment in 2015 of Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti, president and vice president of Guatemala (2012-2015); the case against 53 accused of the crime of “capture of the State” by organized crime (2016); the case of the Diario Militar that took 11 high-ranking and medium-rank soldiers to jail for forced disappearance (2021) and the case of “los Lemus”, a drug trafficking organization (2022).
The list of these cases, which are only the most prominent, indicates that Judge Gálvez touched with his judicial decisions the network of interests that govern Guatemala: corruption within the State, organized crime, particularly drug trafficking, and the neo-fascist right. of counterinsurgent roots. Since a part of the Guatemalan oligarchy and other business sectors participate in this network of interests, the honesty of Miguel Ángel Gálvez, his desire for the rule of law to prevail in Guatemala, became a threat to the current establishment in Guatemala. The actions of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) were also a threat until it was ousted by the government of Jimmy Morales in 2019.
Currently, to be considered subversive, one does not need to be from the left. It is enough to be decent and be opposed to the corrupt and criminal order that prevails in Guatemala today. Two examples suffice to illustrate the previous assertion. The first of these is that of Virginia Laparra, the former prosecutor of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) today sentenced to four years in prison for fighting corruption. The second, that of the journalist José Rubén Zamora, imprisoned for his journalistic work denouncing the so-called “corrupt pact.” The trial for genocide against Ríos Montt and other judicial processes against genocide, the actions of the CICIG against state and business corruption, the existence of social movements, including human rights, have generated a reactionary counteroffensive in Guatemala that today has dozens of of people in exile. Here are the most recent reasons for the nascent dictatorship that we are observing.
Carlos Figueroa
PhD in Sociology. National Researcher Level II of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico. Research Professor of the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla. Professor Emeritus of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Guatemala headquarters. Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of San Carlos. Author of several books and specialized articles on political sociology, sociology of violence and Latin American political processes.
Source The Time
