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The process of electing the Guatemalan courts continues to offer surprises at every step, as the malicious delays caused by some commissioners of each application process have become apparent in recent weeks. From the ingenious method of preventing all the appointed members from taking the oath of office – which took weeks to resolve – to the detailed discussions on the location of the deliberative sessions, the attitude seems to be aimed at delaying the electoral process as much as possible, with the supposed goal of achieving what has already been tried before: to keep the current judicial authorities functioning as long as possible, as has actually happened with the former judges of the Supreme Court, who unusually stayed for almost four years longer than they were appointed.
The process of electing the future Supreme Court and Court of Appeal is a key process that will determine the balance of power in the coming years. Another option is to advance a process of greater judicial independence than the current authorities, whose judicial management is quite problematic: all those who have previously been committed to the fight against corruption are subject to judicial harassment, such as Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez, Prosecutors Juan Francisco Sandoval or Virginia Laparra, as well as journalists Sonny Figueroa, Marvín del Cid or Michelle Mendoza, and many other exiles. In a country where journalist José Rubén Zamora and prosecutor Estuardo Campos are in prison, while many corruption cases are being dismissed and many complaints never progress in the investigative process, it is felt that the judiciary is clearly associated with impunity and corrupt practices.
(frasepzp1)
But the most obvious example of the lack of propriety is the systematic judicial attack, firstly against the transition process that seeks to declare the entire electoral process null and void, and secondly against the repeated attempts to prosecute or undermine the political capacity of the government led by the current president, Bernardo Arevalo. All this was achieved thanks to the undue collusion between some clearly undemocratic judges, such as Judge Freddy Orellana, and prosecutors, such as Rafael Kuruciche. Both acted under the protection of the judicial system: the higher judicial courts, such as the Constitutional Court (CC), did not know how to stop such procedures, despite the consensus that they were highly anomalous due to the dubious legal grounds on which they were based.
The Central Committee, in particular, has played a rather ambiguous role throughout the process: some Central Committee resolutions have protected actors who plot against democracy, others have formally maintained the transition and governance processes, such as the latest Central Committee resolution, which ordered that the deadlines for the court elections should be respected, which on the one hand seemed to automatically unravel the discussion on the venue of the electoral process: by consensus, it has now been approved that the meeting will be held at the University of Landivar, which previously seemed to be a problem that troubled more than half of the committee members.
Having a judiciary independent of the dominant interests is therefore a fundamental objective to have a better chance of changing the matrix of the Guatemalan political system, since the evidence shows that the constitutional politics, elections and weights and checks and balances in force since 1985, are now completely obsolete. In the coming years, great transformation processes are expected that will either deepen democracy or, on the contrary, encourage processes that close the democratic space. The fight in Guatemala is more intense than ever.
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