The questioned Guatemalan attorney general, María Consuelo Porras Argueta, whom the population has strongly demanded her resignation in recent days due to the judicialization of the electoral process, came to office in 2018 and her term in office ends in 2026, re-elected ago. a year by the local president, Alejandro Giammattei.
Porras Argueta, a 70-year-old lawyer who has had a long career in the country’s justice institutions, has remained silent in recent days in response to the claim of thousands of citizens who have blocked at least 30 roads in the country throughout this week to demand to leave his position.
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The attorney general and head of the Public ministry She took office in 2018, elected by former president Jimmy Morales (2016-2020), and was re-elected to the position in 2022 by the current president, Alejandro Giammattei.
Porras Argueta’s management has been full of controversies and questions that led the United States to sanction her in 2021 with the withdrawal of her visa and the prohibition of entering its territory, accusing her of manipulating Justice in Guatemala.
Precisely the five years of Porras Argueta’s administration have been controversial at the local and international level, but it has been the intervention of the Prosecutor’s Office in the electoral process that has brought the head of the Public Ministry into the eye of the hurricane.
With an institutional past
Before her appointment as attorney general in 2018, Porras was a substitute magistrate of the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court. Likewise, she had also held positions in appeals chambers and within the Public Ministry itself as an investigator.
According to experts in judicial matters, in his first years at the head of the entity, Porras Argueta slowed down the investigations against corruption that were being carried out by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an entity of the United Nations. United Nations (UN), where they exposed the co-option of the State at the hands of businessmen and high-level officials.
Various social and human rights organizations pointed out Porras in 2019 as “limit access to justice” when he began to make changes in key positions in the institution that were described as “a systematic weakening” of this entity.
In 2021, Porras made one of the most controversial decisions of his administration: he fired the renowned anti-corruption prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval, former head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity, when he was investigating a Giammattei case for alleged bribery of Russian businessmen.
The dismissal against Sandoval cost Porras Argueta to be sanctioned by the United States within the Engel List as “undemocratic and corrupt actor”accused of “corruption and undermining democracy” of the Central American country.
The Prosecutor’s Office has also played a key role in the imprisonment of journalist José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, one of the most critical of the Giammattei Government.
Zamora Marroquín was imprisoned on July 29, 2022 for a money laundering case, for which he was sentenced to six years in prison, despite the fact that he denounced countless injustices in the judicial process against him.
Controversial re-election a year ago
In 2022, Porras Argueta ran to seek re-election as attorney general of Guatemala and with a controversial selection process, led by the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Silvia Valdés, Porras entered the final shortlist of candidates.
This is how Giammattei chose her for a new period at the head of the Public Ministry, for four years, from 2022 to 2026.
During the beginning of his second term, Porras has restructured the main units of the Prosecutor’s Office and some of them, such as the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Corruption, has been in charge of persecuting justice operators, activists and critical journalists.
The situation became critical for the head of the Public Ministry since September 1, when the president elected this year, Bernardo Arévalo de León, accused her of carrying out a “coup” against him to try to prevent his inauguration on January 14.
However, the attorney general has denied this version and clings to the position, warning that she complies with the law, while the demonstrations multiply day by day against her to demand her resignation and that of her closest circle.
