Yuliana Ramazzini writes in El Faro on the continuing corruption of the Guatemala judicial system through an interview with former Attorney General, Claudia Paz y Paz, internationally known for bringing to trial the first charges of genocide in Guatemalan history, against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. In the last two months of 2024, Guatemala’s Prosecutor's Office for Human Rights suffered an internal earthquake threatening a series of cases of serious human rights violations against the country’s military elites.

Emilie Sweigart provides a snapshot for 2025 on Guatemala in Americas Quarterly. Elected on an anti-corruption platform, President Bernardo Arévalo and his center-left Semilla Party (which holds only 23 of the 160 seats in Guatemala’s unicameral Congress) have faced strong headwinds in advancing his transparency agenda. Judicial authorities temporarily suspended Semilla during the 2023 election, and the party was suspended again in late November.

In December, two-thirds of Congress approved an anti-monopoly law proposed by legislators aligned with President Bernardo Arévalo, marking a significant improvement of their negotiating power in the legislature while sparking debate over whether the new rules will in fact curb market concentration — or create insider loopholes. Yuliana Ramazzini writes in El Faro on the battle over new market competition rules and whether these rules rules will ultimately challenge or reinforce the decision-making influence of the most powerful economic actors in Guatemala.

Writing in Jacobin, Emilie Teresa Smith and Margarita Kenefic, both former militants in the Guatemala’s Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) during the Guatemalan internal armed conflict, talk of César Montes, ‘Central America’s Last Comandante’, who led rebel forces, including the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), against US-backed dictatorships across Central America. They spoke to him while he was detained in Mariscal Zavala prison prior to his subsequent escape.

In the genocide trial against retired military commander Benedicto Lucas García, initially expected to end three weeks ago, the defense has attempted to recuse the court to delay sentencing. Last-minute tension is affecting proceedings: A judge is now on medical leave, and Attorney General Consuelo Porras removed five prosecutors from the case. Victims asked for international support to achieve the justice they have sought for more than 40 years.

After spending more than two years in prison in a corrupt judicial process, Guatemala’s most prominent newspaperman was released on house arrest pending retrial. But a Guatemalan court, at the request of AG Consuelo Porras, wants to send Zamora back to Mariscal Zavala, where the publisher suffered poor treatment including torture and due process violations. El Faro recently posted a short video on the above and it can be viewed, with English subtitles, here.

The Winter 2024 edition of El Quetzal, from The Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC), has recently been published. It features an interview with Juan Francisco Sandoval, who was the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) from 2015 to 2021. As President Bernardo Arévalo’s administration approaches a year in office, the human rights situation in Guatemala remains extremely fragile.