Guatemala’s government rejects arrest warrants against Colombia’s chief prosecutor and former minister – Colombia News

Guatemala’s government rejected an international arrest warrants that were issued by its prosecution against Colombia’s chief prosecutor and former Defense Minister.

In a press statement, the government of Bernardo Arevalo said it “strongly rejects” the order to arrest former Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez and Prosecutor General Luz Adriana Camargo.

Guatemala’s prosecution orders arrest of Colombia’s chief prosecutor and former defense minister

The Guatemalan Government said that it contacted its counterpart in Colombia “to make the appropriate diplomatic objections and clarifications, in order not to affect the honor of the nation as a result of this irresponsible and spurious act of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”

According to the press statement, the arrest warrants “lack a legal basis” and fly in the face of the treaty with the United Nations, which saw the creation of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala.

Velasquez led this investigative body between 2013 and 2019, when former President Jimmy Morales surprisingly suspended his government’s cooperation.

Camargo was one of the commission’s investigators who looking into systemic corruption in the Central American country during this period.

Guatemala’s anti-corruption prosecution chief Rafael Curruchiche, ordered the arrest of the Colombian officials on Sunday, claiming Velasquez and Camargo conspired with allegedly corrupt businessmen associated with Brazilian engineering form Odebrecht.

These actions are carried out with an evident political objective, without support in the national and international legal system, and are added to the series of actions by the Public Ministry, the Attorney General of the Republic and judges associated with corruption that have distorted the sense of justice in Guatemala, revealing the criminalization and abuse of criminal law, so many times pointed out and sanctioned in the national and international sphere.

Government of Guatemala

In a 2022 report, the US State Department dismissed Curruche’s corruption allegations against Velasquez and Camargo as “spurious claims.”

Jose Rafael Curruchiche Cacul (Rafael Curruchiche), the current chief of the Public Ministry’s Office of the Special Prosecutor Against Impunity (FECI), 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.

State Department

Guatemala’s prosecutor general “repeatedly obstructed and undermined anticorruption investigations in Guatemala to protect her political allies and gain undue political favor,” according to the State Department.