2023-12-14 18:58:02
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The European Parliament issued a resolution Thursday condemning an attempted coup in Guatemala and calling for the election results to be respected.
The Guatemalan prosecutor’s office maintains an attack against the electoral process, trying to annul the elections and against the elected president Bernardo Arévalo, who won the August 20 runoff with 60.9% of the votes.
By an overwhelming majority of 432 votes in favor, nine against and 39 abstentions, the European Parliament resolution demanded “respect for the democratic will of Guatemalans” and called for “sanctions against antidemocratic actors,” he said on his X account, before Twitter, deputy Jordi Cañas, who was also head of the electoral observation mission in the Central American country.
The resolution also called for sanctions for those who hinder democracy and asked the Council of the European Union for restrictive measures such as asset freezes and travel bans for Attorney General Consuelo Porras, her prosecutors Rafael Curruchiche and Leonor Eugenia Morales Lazo, and the Secretary General of the Public Ministry, Ángel Pineda.
The request for sanctions also includes Judge Fredy Orellana, who has jurisdictional control of cases against the electoral process, for “systematically instrumentalizing the Judiciary to weaken the rule of law and criminalize opposition figures.”
“This resolution… shows that the majority parties of the European Union understand that an attempted coup d’état is taking place in Guatemala and are willing to promote firm measures to stop it,” Juan Pappier, deputy director for the Americas, told The Associated Press. of Human Rights Watch, one of the entities that requested sanctions from the EU.
Pappier explained that the resolution calls for individual sanctions against judges and prosecutors “responsible for attacks against democracy, focuses attention on the response to this crisis by President Alejandro Giammattei, the high courts, Congress and the private sector, and remember that the free trade agreement between the European Union and Central America requires respect for democracy.”
The prosecutor’s office led by Porras is investigating alleged electoral fraud and irregularities in the purchase of parallel and rapid counting software for the election results, as well as the electoral magistrates and more than 125,000 citizens who collected, counted and safeguarded the votes in the elections.
The resolution comes after Curruchiche and Morales Lazo announced on December 8 at a press conference that they had requested the withdrawal of Arévalo’s immunity to investigate him for money laundering and falsifying documents in the creation of the Semilla Movement party that led him to win the presidency.
Morales then said that the prosecutor’s office found irregularities in the minutes that recorded the results of the elections and that these were null. The minutes had been seized by the prosecutor’s office in raids on the electoral headquarters whose legality was questioned.
In the same vein, on November 30, 107 deputies withdrew the immunity of electoral magistrates so that they could be investigated for the purchase of the software. After losing protection, the magistrates left the country.
In response, the US government announced sanctions for 300 Guatemalans – including more than 100 congressmen, businessmen, government officials and civilians – for undermining democracy in the country and attempting to ignore the election results.
The prosecutor’s actions have been criticized nationally and internationally and led to thousands of people blocking hundreds of roads throughout the country for 20 days. The rejection of the prosecution led the country’s indigenous authorities to hold protests in front of the Public Ministry for 75 days demanding Porras’ resignation.
Giammattei, for his part, has tried to distance himself from the actions of the prosecutor’s office and has said that by law he cannot ask the prosecutor to resign or fire him.
The EU Electoral Observation Mission as well as that of the Organization of American States (OAS) and national missions endorsed the elections as well as their results and denied that fraud had been committed in the country.
Porras, Curruchiche and Orellana have also been sanctioned by the United States, which withdrew their entry visas.
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