A corruption scandal and it wasn't even a Thursday in Guatemala

David Agren has Have a laugh at Guatemala’s new president in MacClean's. Anita Isaacs and I have some comments.

“He may be a political outsider, but he is backed by the most conservative elements in Guatemalan society, retired military veterans who see democratic politics as a continuation of the brutal civil war they waged against leftist guerrillas for over more than three decades, and a traditional business elite,” says Anita Isaacs, political science professor at Haverford College, who studies Guatemala. “Morales was able to capitalize on widespread popular rejection of the political status quo to turn his political inexperience into his biggest political asset.”

The time was right for an unconventional candidate like Morales. Guatemalans protested peacefully for months against a scandal known as La Línea, in which politicians were accused of collecting kickbacks from importers in exchange for paying lower import duties or allowing products to enter the country duty-free. The case implicated then-president Otto Pérez Molina and his vice-president, Roxana Baldetti, who have both been indicted and remain behind bars.

Much of the evidence against the pair came from investigators with the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG,) established in 2007 by the government and the United Nations. After some early struggles, “It’s gone after the entire political system,” says Mike Allison, a political science professor at the University of Scranton and an expert on Central American politics. “No one is safe.” Except, for now, the joker who is now charge.

I sure hope that Morales' story arc from boy born of "humble origins" to business entrepreneur to successful president wins the day.

Elyssa Pachico looks at Guatemala's most recent corruption scandal in Insight Crime. The scandal was announced on Tuesday which was unusual because people had connected Thursday with CICIG-related corruption announcements.

According to the CICIG and the Attorney General, pharmaceutical companies would negotiate lucrative contracts with their IGSS contacts, such as getting the IGSS to buy a certain type of antibiotic in bulk. In return for issuing the multi-million dollar contracts, IGSS officials allegedly received financial kickbacks.

During the press conference, Attorney General Thelma Aldana said the investigation still hasn't established how much money the IGSS embezzled this way. "What we do know is this was a daily event between November 2014 to April 2015," she said, according to ElPeriodico.

I argued the other day that criminals are always one step of the police and that we are likely to see criminals adapt in Guatemala rather than simply go away. Hopefully, there will be fewer but I expect those who survive to be more adept at theft.

The other interesting development is that one of the individuals accused of being a ringleader of the scam is Gustavo Alejos, the ex-secretary of former President Alvaro Colom. The current investigation is focused on what he has done that last year. However, if he was engaged in this corruption in 2014-2015, there's little doubt that he was also engaged in corruption during the Colom administration.

I never said that there was no corruption in the Colom administration. However, I did say that the evidence of that corruption had been lacking since Perez took office. He ran criticizing Colom's corruption and El Periodico called his administration the most corrupt one in Guatemala's history. This doesn't prove that to be the case but it does call Colom's administration into question.