Guatemala’s new attorney general, Gabriel Garcia Luna, has pledged to dismantle what he called the “repressive and vengeful” administration of his predecessor, Consuelo Porras. Garcia Luna told the Associated Press earlier this month that the prosecutor’s office is “not a political entity, nor a political weapon.”
Statements like these come as a relief for those who watched Porras abuse the power of her office to undermine the fight against corruption and threaten President Bernardo Arevalo, whom Guatemalans elected in 2023 to reform their political system. Garcia Luna was appointed by Arevalo and took office on May 17, the day Porras’ term expired.
Most countries in Latin America would benefit from an independent attorney general who checks the president’s power and investigates corruption, which is why the office is the source of so many fights in the hemisphere. In Guatemala, the country’s “parallel powers,”—the network of politicians, business leaders and organized crime figures operating autonomously from the country’s formal institutions—used Porras to destroy the anti-corruption mechanisms established by the U.N.-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known as CICIG, which operated from 2007 to 2019. In neighboring El Salvador, the legislature summarily fired the attorney general in 2021 on the same night it purged the constitutional chamber, clearing the way for President Nayib Bukele’s consolidation of power. And Honduras let its Organization of American States-backed anti-corruption mission die in 2020.