Sofía Hernández has served three terms in Guatemalan Congress and will look for a fourth when Guatemalans head to the polls on June 25. So far, it has been a bumpy ride. 

Hernández has survived the death of the three political parties that carried her into power. The three party leaders — one a former president — were separately convicted of customs fraud, money laundering, and drug trafficking. She has also faced accusations of corruption at home and abroad.  

Now, in the last leg of her re-election campaign, she is reminding voters of the merits that have seen her become one of the most influential politicians in Huehuetenango, a border province where politics has long co-existed with the narcotics underworld.

“I am a woman who has forged herself. I graduated as a teacher. I went to university. I am a psychologist. I have a Master’s degree and a Ph.D.,” Hernández said at a political rally in her hometown of Santa Ana Huista, in western Guatemala, just weeks before the vote. 

But that is just part of Hernández’s story. Her rise in politics has brought scrutiny, mainly of her family’s alleged ties to the drug trade. She is just one of a host of election candidates with questionable ties to organized crime in a country where traffickers have long understood the importance of forging political alliances.

*This story is a prelude to an in-depth investigation into the politics, corruption, and organized crime surrounding the 2023 Guatemalan elections. InSight Crime will publish a series of articles in the days before Guatemalans head to the polls on June 25.

UCN: A ‘Narco Party’ Migrates 

Hernández hails from Santa Ana Huista, a small town in Guatemala’s western Huehuetenango province, nestled in the mountains straddling the border with Mexico. Before entering politics, she worked as a psychologist treating victims of crime at the Huehuetenango branch of the country’s Attorney General’s Office.

Her initial foray into politics came in 2011 when she was elected as a congressional representative for Huehuetenango with the Patriot Party (Partido Patriota – PP). She left the PP in 2014, one year before a landmark customs fraud investigation took down the party’s leader and then-president, Otto Pérez Molina; Pérez Molina’s vice president was later accused by the US of drug trafficking. 

She secured re-election in 2015 with the political party Líder, led by presidential candidate Manuel Baldizón. Baldizón came third in the elections but was later extradited to the US, where he served 28 months in prison after admitting to laundering money stemming from the drug trade. Electoral authorities annulled the Líder party in 2016, forcing Hernández to join an independent bloc of legislators. 

SEE ALSO: Guatemala: An Election Enshrined in Impunity

For the 2019 elections, she joined the Union of National Change (Union del Cambio Nacional – UCN), a political faction once branded a ‘narco party’ by the US Embassy in Guatemala. 

The upheaval continued. The UCN leader and presidential candidate, Mario Estrada, was arrested in Miami just two months before the elections, accused by US authorities of soliciting campaign funds from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. He later pled guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The scandal highlighted the depth of the UCN’s ties to the drug trade. It also raised broader questions about the extent to which drug money had infiltrated the elections. But Estrada’s case did not stop Hernández and 11 other UCN officials from winning a seat in Congress. And once in power, the UCN bloc quickly struck an alliance with Vamos, the political party of Guatemala’s newly-elected president, Alejandro Giammattei.

The alliance marked the beginning of the UCN’s golden era. The party became the third-biggest voting bloc in the legislature. Hernández became vice president of Congress. But it was also the party’s swansong. In 2021, electoral authorities ruled to annul the UCN for financial misconduct, once again leaving Hernández without a party. 

Hernández’s rise in Congress also brought unwanted attention. The US State Department sanctioned her in 2022 for “misusing her official powers to intimidate her political opponents,” soliciting bribes, and threatening to weaponize Congress “to retaliate against her enemies for personal benefit.” Two years earlier, Guatemalan prosecutors documented a meeting between Hernández and a prominent political operator accused of meddling in the country’s high court appointments during an investigation into alleged influence trafficking.

Her family was also a problem. Hernández’s brother, Henry Hernández Herrera, was arrested for his links to a prominent drug ring known as the Huistas, based in Hernández’s hometown of Santa Ana Huista. He later pled guilty to collaborating with the drug ring and, after being released from prison, was shot dead while playing soccer in Huehuetenango. Prosecutors also connected Henry Hernández and another brother to a network of companies owned by members of the Huistas in the same province.    

In 2021, Hernández’s nephew was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges.

She and her UCN colleagues, tarnished by links to the drug trade, needed a new home. They found it in Vamos, the party of President Giammattei, whose reputation lay in tatters following a series of high-profile corruption scandals. 

It seemed a good fit. The UCN representatives were already used to voting with Vamos in Congress. Giammattei’s party, deeply unpopular and faced with slim prospects of retaining the presidency, saw an opportunity to retain influence in Congress by recruiting a set of influential UCN regional operators. The geographical distribution of the seven UCN congressional candidates now running with Vamos spans multiple regions pivotal to the drug trade, including Hernández’s home province of Huehuetenango. 

The others include Napoleon Rojas, head of the UCN voting coalition, now running for Congress with Vamos in the Santa Rosa province on the Pacific coast. 

Congressional representatives Jaime Octavio Augusto Lucero (Jalapa), Mynor Estuardo Castillo y Castillo (Jutiapa), Sandra Carolina Orellana Cruz (Zacapa), and José Arnulfo García Barrios (Suchitepéquez) have also joined the UCN-Vamos migration in the hope of retaining a seat in Congress.

Hernández’s son, Erick Geovanni Martínez Hernández, has also migrated from the UCN to Vamos in his bid for Congress re-election (Huehuetenango). Her daughter, Karla Martínez, has also jumped between the two parties but has traded Congress for a shot at a seat on the Central American Parliament (Parlamento Centroamericano – Parlacen).

Electoral Headache

The UCN migration did not end with Vamos. All of the party’s remaining congressional representatives found their way to a new party for the elections. Other members and affiliates, some with links to the Huistas, have also looked for an alternative route into power, most conspicuously with the political party Citizen Prosperity (Prosperidad Ciudadana – PC). 

A minor force in politics, Citizen Prosperity took the 2023 elections by storm when the party’s presidential candidate, Carlos Pineda, emerged as a surprise favorite mid-campaign. But the party’s hopes evaporated when electoral authorities excluded Pineda and the entire party from the elections on an administrative technicality. 

This has created a headache for a set of UCN affiliates and alleged Huistas’ allies that had hoped to cruise into power on the Pineda bandwagon. This includes the family of Freddy Salazar Flores, a UCN Parlacen member who, in 2022, was sanctioned by the United States for “transporting and storing cocaine on behalf of the Huistas.” The sanctions followed an indictment against Salazar lodged by the Justice Department in 2016. 

SEE ALSO: Electing Criminals: Municipal Power and Organized Crime in the Northern Triangle

Electoral authorities blocked Salazar’s bid for re-election with Citizen Prosperity, but his mother and wife stepped in to replace him. His wife, Danury Lizeth Samayoa Montejo, is the daughter of alleged Huistas leader Aler Samayoa. Samayoa is wanted by US authorities on drug trafficking charges. Salazar’s sister, Elisa Judith Mejía Salazar de Rozotto, was reportedly married to another Huistas leader as of 2018 and had registered as a PC congressional candidate prior to the party’s exclusion. 

The PC’s elimination could dent the extensive influence network built by the Huistas in Guatemalan politics. Like many DTOs, the group has increasingly looked to Congress to position allies who can provide political protection and, according to the allegations against Freddy Salazar, hands-on assistance with storing and transporting cocaine. The group’s political connections may help explain why it has outlasted some of the country’s most prominent drug rings, many of which buckled under intense pressure from authorities in the 2010s. 

But the elections are partly about hedging bets across Guatemala’s fragmented party system — 22 parties have put forward presidential candidates — and there is no shortage of alternative options. 

Political party Podemos now houses UCN congresswoman Vivian Preciado Navarijo, whose family is linked to a drug ring on the country’s Pacific coast. 

Another UCN congress representative, Julio César López Escobar, is now running with the Cabal party, led by a presidential frontrunner, Edmond Mulet. López Escobar’s father was previously embroiled in a corruption scandal and is also running for Congress with Cabal. His uncle, Roberto López Villatoro, was the architect of a sophisticated criminal scheme aimed at stacking the country’s courts with allies to secure political protection.

“They say I’m a narco, and I am…” 

Gunshots rang out in a town high up in Guatemala’s mountains as a group of townspeople held their mayor, Exadillas Ramos, aloft. Ramos and his supporters, from the municipality of Esquipulas Palo Gordo, in the western San Marcos province, were celebrating the launch of the mayor’s re-election campaign and his decision to join forces with Vamos.

Ramos is one of 169 mayoral candidates running with Vamos for the 2023 elections, part of a nationwide strategy aimed at scooping up votes and propelling the party’s lukewarm presidential candidate, Manuel Conde, to a second-round runoff. 

The scope of Vamos’ campaign has taken the party to many municipalities that house smuggling routes, particularly in border provinces like San Marcos, where drug traffickers seek municipal power to facilitate and shield operations. Guatemalan mayors enjoy political immunity and hold sway over local security forces. They also have privileged access to state contracts that can be used to launder money.  

“They call me a narco, and I am one…” Ramos said at a public event after being elected mayor in 2019. 

It was a view shared by Guatemalan prosecutors. The Attorney General’s Office raided the Equipulas Palo Gordo town hall in mid-2021 and identified Ramos as a suspected member of a local drug ring moving cocaine between Guatemala and Mexico. 

Prosecutors raided the town treasury and singled out Ramos’ wife as the group’s main money launderer. Authorities also arrested two of the mayor’s sons.

Mayor Exadillas’ political immunity shielded him from a formal indictment. His alleged connections to the narcotics underworld did not appear to concern electoral authorities, who greenlit his re-election bid.

Exadillas is joined on the ballot by his brother, Roderico Ramos Aguilar, who was also arrested in the raids. Prosecutors accused Ramos of money laundering and illicit association, but the case against him was later dropped. He also faced no resistance from electoral authorities when signing on as a mayoral candidate for nearby the town of El Rodeo. The town’s current mayor is wanted for US extradition on drug trafficking charges. 

Other Vamos election candidates with links to the drug trade include Roberto Marroquín, the mayor of a Pacific Coast town engulfed by narco violence. InSight Crime chronicled the mayor’s connections to the drug trade in a 2021 investigation. 

Guatemalan drug authorities have also arrested a candidate for municipal council, running with Vamos in the El Progreso province, wanted for extradition in the US on drug trafficking charges.

Vamos has also provided a new political platform for over a dozen UCN mayors, according to an investigation by Ojoconmipisto. Another 30 have joined Vamos from the political party the Union of National Hope (Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza – UNE), whose previous election campaigns were allegedly bankrolled by Mexican drug traffickers.

The post Guatemala Elections: A Blurry Line Between Politics and Drugs appeared first on InSight Crime.

Note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence against children.

Guatemala’s child protection system was shaken to the core on March 8, 2017, but nothing seems to have changed during President Jimmy Morales’ administration.

The fire last year at the government-run Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home took the lives of 41 girls, but it has not become the catalyst it was expected to be in terms of resolving the circumstances that brought and kept the girls there in the first place. The case is now over a year old, and impunity for those responsible continues.

Victims’ relatives and organizations working on the case have complained that Attorney General Thelma Aldana has only held one hearing about it and has shifted responsibility for it to her deputy, Secretary General Mayra Véliz, who is vying for Aldana’s position.

But like the attorney general, Véliz has not shown interest in thoroughly investigating allegations of torture and sexual exploitation networks; they are instead in the hands of the prosecutor’s office in charge of child welfare cases. No one knows when the results of that investigation will be released.

*This story was translated, edited for clarity, and published with permission from Nómada. It does not necessarily reflect the views of InSight Crime. See the Spanish original here.

The Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home was created in 2010 during the government of President Álvaro Colom. It never had protocols or procedures in place for riots or other emergencies. The situation only worsened after President Otto Pérez Molina took office in 2012. And in March 2017, just two years into the presidency of Jimmy Morales, the massacre happened.

The home was divided into five large sectors where children were housed based on gender and age. It should be noted, however, that some adults were housed there as well.

Both male and female youths over the age of 13 were sent to specific buildings according to a profile assigned to them when they entered the home. Virgen de la Asunción administration decided to use these buildings to group them according to their needs and origins. There were buildings for children entering for drug abuse and homelessness, and others for victims of human trafficking..

After the fire, the institutions tasked with caring for the children had different figures of how many boys and girls were housed there.

Traumatic First Days

Clara entered Virgen de la Asunción at midnight one day in September 2016. She was 14 years old and carried a backpack with several changes of clothes. A teacher opened the door and woke up the other girls inside with a yell: “New arrival!”

Everyone turned to look at Clara. She made a beeline for her assigned bed, and when the teacher closed the door, a group of girls began to interrogate her. In light of accusations that she was a member of the Barrio 18 gang, they decided to give her the “bienvenida,” or the “welcome.” About 10 teens beat and kicked her that first night. They also gave her 18 “pechugazos,” which was slang at the institution for double-fisted blows to the chest.

In another account, a judge ordered three adolescent youths to the children’s safe home in April 2012. According to their intake paperwork, they were sent there for “drug abuse, living in the street, insubordination and possible gang membership.”

They were 13, 14 and 15 years old, and a dark place awaited them. Their first day at Virgen de la Asunción was recorded in a formal complaint.

SEE ALSO: Coverage of Human Rights

“On Saturday afternoon they gave us the ‘welcome,’ which is 18 ‘pechugazos,’ or punches to the chest. I’m all purple. After that, they asked if I wanted them to ‘nalguear’ [sexually abuse] me. Four of them grabbed me and started to masturbate. They put [their penises] on my face. They told me to suck them off. They beat me up because I didn’t want to. Then the four of them covered my eyes, grabbed my hands and put it in me from behind.”

After the two other youths who entered the institution in April 2012 faced similar treatment, they were transferred to another sector of the facility.

It turns out that the three children had come from a dark and frightening place as well: their own home. They sought refuge in the state because one of their relatives, a 33-year-old man, had been sexually abusing them. He was never found, and reports they filed against him have been forgotten in a sea of administrative records.

Constant Vulnerability

Virgen de la Asunción was like a dangerous city, where children who did not know how to take care of themselves were only made more vulnerable. They soon learned that after relying on their wits to escape the perils of the streets or their own homes, they would have to do the same at the state-run institution.

Violence among the children, sexual abuse, the employees’ lack of ability and experience and the facility’s lack of procedures and protocols came together to complicate an already difficult life for the youths who were staying there.

For example, one allegation states that on October 1, 2016, a 15-year-old girl was attacked by a group of 20 girls from another building who hit and kicked her in the face, abdomen, legs and back. The complaint further alleges that one of the girls threatened the other because of a supposed gang rivalry.

The very next day, two teenagers reported that girls from other buildings came to look for them, and to get them to come out of their dormitory they flickered the lights and finally resorted to physically removing them from their beds. They were then assaulted by approximately 26 girls, according to the complaint.

The girls then noticed the presence of two teachers in the room. They told them to get off the floor, gave them brooms and told them to clean the bathroom. But then a teacher locked one of the girls in the shower and asked her what had happened. Afraid of being killed, she described the events, but finished her complaint with “that’s all I can say.”

Another complaint recalls events from a Saturday afternoon in August 2012. Four children were playing marbles on the wet ground. It had just rained.

“On Saturday I was playing marbles with [some girls], and because it rained beetles were coming out. Two of the girls gave a beetle to another girl. She put it on my shirt and I got scared and got it off my shirt. Then, they did it again, but this time they put it in my mouth. I started to cry and took it out. Then [the girl] got mad and grabbed me by the throat with her hands, but she put her leg on my chest. I thought she was going to kill me. I felt like I was running out of air. The other two were laughing. That was when a teacher arrived, and she helped me. But I didn’t go back. It was hard for me. I felt like I was going to die.”

The teacher confirmed that the boy came close to dying. “On Saturday I was monitoring the playground when I realized that the girl was choking him. The boy was purple, and his eyes were white. She had him with both hands around his neck and her leg on his chest. When I got there and told her to let him go, she began to insult me. The boy took approximately one minute to come to.”

Another event documented in reports took place in December 2012, when the government of President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti was in the middle of official celebrations for Baktun, an important event in the Mayan calendar. Two teenage girls were walking together. One of them gave a statement as part of the complaint:

“She was walking with me when the policeman ask her if she was going to give him something. She told him yes. Then he took her up to the the little room that’s up there in the sentry box where the tower is. It was around six in the evening. They didn’t see that I had followed them, and I saw what they did through a hole in the door. She took off her clothes, and the policeman did too. Then he got on top of her. When we left, she told me she would beat me up if I said anything, so I didn’t say anything until now.”

In a letter from February 2012, a group of psychologists working at Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home denounced the exposure of minors to ill-treatment. “Young girls and teenage girls alike repeatedly reported having been subjected to physical, verbal and psychological abuse consisting of threats; humiliation using profanity and name-calling; and punishments consisting of excessive physical exercise, food deprivation and exposure in their underwear in the early morning hours in the rain. Furthermore, it is known that people working in this section [of the home] allowed these adolescents to attack others as a form of punishment.”

The names of six monitors were mentioned in the letter, and its authors emphasized that the authorities of the children’s home had already been alerted to the situation, but that they never obseved any follow-up or intervention measures taken in response to the allegations.

No Place for Innocence

All the boys and girls at the Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home were potential victims, including children with emotional disabilities and children with diverse sexual identities.

One case was William, who entered the home diagnosed with an intellectual disability and a compulsive disorder. He was receiving medical treatment and specialized education, but he was not safe.

“We were informed by a female teacher that the child had been sexually abused by a male teacher one day when he was on duty in dormitory seven. Said teacher was on duty with children and adolescents with special needs from January 16 to January 31 while the female teacher was on vacation.”

To address the allegations, the psychologists assigned to that sector of the facility conducted an interview, making accommodations to address the teenager’s intellectual disability. They obtained the following statement: “Professor César tricked me. He touched me with his penis (indicating on a drawing). He put it in my buttocks and put it in me. I was lying down. The others were watching TV. He also did this to me (using a pencil to make a gesture signifying masturbation).”

Those at the center of these cases had spent less than a month at the institution.

SEE ALSO: Guatemala News and Profiles

On October 10, 2016, an attorney for the Social Welfare Secretariat and the Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home reported that an adolescent girl had been “working to capture [other] adolescent girls housed at the shelter, forcing them to leave in exchange for money, clothes, housing and education, which was not true because security at the perimeter of the institution observed that when they leave, there are people waiting in vehicles to transport them. They abandon the home for two, three, four, even five days. Some return, but there are others whose whereabouts we don’t know.”

On October 13, 2016, a minor said that in September she escaped from the safe home with six other girls and that one of them convinced them to go to a house located in Colonia El Limón, in a section of Guatemala City called Zona 18, which is known for heavy gang activity. It was a two-level, unpainted cinder block house. Out front, there was a sentry box from which people saw the girls enter the house, but they said nothing.

“When we got to the house, they told us we were going to be okay, that they were going to give us clothes, money, phones, and what we had to do was watch the trucks. I don’t know what kinds of trucks they were. They are from the Barrio 18, and if we saw that people from the MS13 were doing anything, they were going to beat their asses, and they told us that they were going to tattoo and shave us so we could be something, and they turned the volume to the sound system up. Later that night, I could tell they were trying to open the door of the room we were sleeping in, but they couldn’t.”

Some of the girls escaped the next day.

After the Tragedy

On March 8, 2017, journalists from Nómada went to cover the massacre of the 41 adolescent girls. They began talking to neighbors of the Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home in an effort to understand what might have happened to cause the teens to rebel and attempt to escape the previous afternoon.

A woman who said she was a neighbor spoke with tear-filled eyes. She said that on March 7, she approached the safe home when she heard that they were having problems, and that she saw how the girls were throwing rocks at the facility staff and the police while yelling, “Rape us here, in front of everyone. Come here and rape us, then, if you want to do it again.”

“This was a revolt by young girls. Anyone who lives near here knows this is hell,” the woman finished between tears.

To remember the young female victims of the Virgen de la Asunción Children’s Home is to imagine them in flames, fighting for their lives, and it is to remember the sluggishness in the response of the Guatemalan government and its justice and child protection systems.

*This story was translated, edited for clarity, and published with permission from Nómada. It does not necessarily reflect the views of InSight Crime. See the Spanish original here.

The post Impunity in Children’s Home Massacre Stains Guatemala’s Justice System appeared first on InSight Crime.