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

Guatemala’s prosecution ordered the arrest of Colombia’s Prosecutor General Luz Adriana Camargo and former Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez.

According to allegedly corrupt prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, Guatemalan authorities asked international police authority Interpol to arrest Camargo and Velasquez on conspiracy, obstruction of justice and influence peddling charges.

In a press statement, Curruchiche said that the former defense minister led a “criminal structure” that sought to benefit businessmen associated with the corrupt Brazilian engineering firm Odebrecht.

Between 2013 and 2019, Velasquez led a United Nations commission against impunity in Guatemala in an attempt to root out corruption in the Central American Country.

Colombia’s current prosecutor general was one of the commission’s investigators until former President Jimmy Morales pulled the plug on the anti-corruption investigation.

In a response, Velasquez stressed that Curruche and his boss, Maria Consuelo Porras, have been sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for their alleged involvement in the obstruction of corruption investigations.

Colombia’s Foreign Minister issued an “energetic rejection” against the international arrest warrants, claiming they constituted “an attack against the fundamental principles of international justice” that “violates fundamental human rights.”

According to the Foreign Ministry, international cooperation mechanisms like Interpol’s red notices “may not be misrepresented or used as instruments of political or personal persecution, or to justify decisions lacking legitimacy.”

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.