This three-part investigative series looks at how the last three winners of the presidency in Guatemala financed their campaigns using hidden funds from drug traffickers to big businessmen. This means of financing campaigns is, in the words of a famous prosecutor, the country’s “original sin.”
Investigation Chapters
The Zetas, Drug Money and the Colom Campaign in Guatemala
In the first of three articles concerning illicit political contributions in Guatemala, we look at the 2007 presidential campaign of Álvaro Colom. Colom, the bookish former head of a prominent development agency, won the election with help from dubious operatives such as Obdulio Solórzano
Guatemala Politics and the Patriotic Party’s Theory of ‘Eternal Return’
Juan Carlos Monzón was in South Korea when his boss, Guatemala’s Vice President Roxana Baldetti, received the call that would change their two trajectories – intimately intertwined for the previous four years – forever.
President Jimmy Morales’ (and Guatemala’s) ‘Original Sin’
It was just five months after he’d been sworn in as president of Guatemala that Jimmy Morales was in trouble. The date was May 5, 2016, and an auditor appointed by the country’s top electoral body had concluded that Morales’ political party had broken many of the rules regulating campaign financing.
