In April of 2015, a telephone wiretap exposed Guatemala’s then-President Otto Pérez Molina, his Vice President Roxana Baldetti, and and other high-ranking officials in the tax and customs administration as having been part of a kleptocratic network involving fraud in customs revenues. The La Línea case, a reference to the wiretap, is known as one of the most high-profile corruption cases in the country’s history, enraging the people of Guatemala, who joined mass protests to demand accountability and dislodge kleptocracy.
Hugo Novales Contreras, a political researcher and advisor to the Bernardo Arévalo presidency and the Movimiento Semilla legislative bloc, joins the host, Max Levites (Senior Governance Specialist, International Republican Institute), to discuss the history and context of the La Línea case, and the driving motivations and results of collective action. Contreras’ insight into the case outlines the nature of Guatemala’s generational shift in how citizens view the role of the government, and how this turned into a mass movement to hold the country’s leaders to account. He also discusses the importance of international cooperation as one of many key successes of and lessons to take from this collective action movement.
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Transcript
Announcer (00:03):
Welcome to the Collectively Combating Kleptocracy Podcast series. This podcast is supported through a project on identifying successful collective action approaches against kleptocracy, as part of the United States Agency for International Development Funded Democratic Elections and Political Processes Cooperative Agreement, carried out by the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. It is co-implemented by the International Republican Institute and the Center for International Private Enterprise and accompanied by related case studies. The views expressed in this podcast are that of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States government.
Max Levites (00:38):
Welcome to another episode in this series of podcasts on Collective Action Against Kleptocracy. My name is Max Levites and I’m a senior government specialist at the International Republican Institute. In this episode we’ll be discussing Guatemala and the collective action that took place in 2015 following the La Línea corruption case. With me here today is Hugo Novales, a Guatemalan political researcher, whose work has mainly concentrated on contemporary Central American regimes, transitions and institutions. He holds an undergraduate degree from the Universidad Rafael Lantiva in Guatemala and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. And currently he’s an advisor to the Bernardo Arevalo Presidency and the Movimiento Semilla Legislative Block. Welcome, Hugo. Thanks so much for being here.
Hugo Novales Contreras (01:20):
Thank you very much for having me.
Max Levites (01:21):
So can you start off by providing a little bit of background for us on the La Línea corruption case, and maybe talk about why it inspired such a massive response from the public when it did.
Hugo Novales Contreras (01:30):
Sure. So in order to understand the La Línea case, we need to understand just a little bit of Guatemala’s history, right? So during the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Guatemalan Armed Conflict, which lasted about 36 years, the Army, which was the main institution that governed the whole state, had control over several institutions, which, in other contexts would be civilian institutions, right? The customs offices were part of this set of institutions that the Army controlled, mainly because in order to monitor incoming weapons, or incoming resources for guerrillas, they had to keep control of customs and border agencies, this kind of thing.
(02:08):
So what happened is that even though the war ended in 1996, and even though we had a transition to democracy 10 years before that in 1986, certain officials remained in the customs office from the time when we had a war, when we had a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime. And what happened is that their activities morphed from implementing security measures in order to prevent incoming weapons or incoming resources for guerrillas into developing this corruption scheme in which they would take bribes in order to allow contraband or illicit goods to come in.
And the La Línea investigation discovered this corruption scheme, and it actually evidenced that this wasn’t just a low level corruption enterprise, but that Otto Perez Molina, the president at the time in 2015, was actually involved as the ring leader within that corruption scheme. And this was relevant, and the reason why I was relating this to the Guatemalan Civil War and or no authoritarian past, was basically because Otto Perez Molina was a former general who had grown within the ranks of the Guatemalan military and eventually became a civilian who ran for president, and apparently had been involved in this corruption ring for a while, even before his presidency. So, that’s the summary of the whole case.
Max Levites (03:32):
Why do you think it was such a tipping point to bring so many Guatemalans out into the streets when that case was revealed?
Hugo Novales Contreras (03:38):
So, I think there’s several factors that are involved. Some of them are very structural and contextual. So as I was saying, this happened 29 years after the transition to democracies happened about 18, 19 years after the end of the Civil War. So what you’re looking at is a new generation of Guatemalans who did not grow up in an authoritarian regime, did not grow up in a civil war, who have enjoyed civil liberties that people before us had not enjoyed, who are maybe not as afraid to speak up, or to protest, or to stand up against injustice. So that’s the more long-term context that I think is important to understand why this hadn’t happened before, even though we’ve had corruption scandals practically every year before that. So, I guess there’s a new generation of Guatemalan young citizens who were able to mobilize using resources that maybe our parents or grandparents didn’t have.
(04:28):
Also in this particular government or in the government of Otto Perez Molina, the Perez Molina administration, corruption grew to points that we hadn’t seen before. And there were certain actions by government officials, including the vice president, that seemed even offensive to the public. So you could actually see this attitude towards the media decided towards public opinion that was very disdainful and seemingly very disrespectful towards the Guatemalan citizenry in general. And this just generated this impopularity, or this animosity towards the government, that was helpful in mobilizing against the government when this tipping point came.
(05:09):
I would say also one important part of this context here is that in around 2007, so eight years before 2015, which is when this case was uncovered, we had the installation of a UN sponsored commission, which is meant to help the Guatemalan state in correcting or preventing impunity. What we had at the time in Guatemala was this justice system that was sort of penetrated by, again, officials or elites that were remnants from the authoritarian regimes, which were strategically placed there in order to prevent the prosecution of crimes committed against civilians, or of the human rights abuses that happened during the Civil War and during our authoritarian period.
(05:55):
So this was instrumental in strengthening the justice system in sort of cleaning it up, identifying corrupt individuals who were protecting public officials from being prosecuted. And after eight years of intense work, that’s when things start to work. We start to see sort of the fruit of intense and hard work by this commission. We see the results of judicial reform, which was initiated by the commissioner, which was promoted by the commissioner. And what we had at that time was just a stronger, more independent, more resourceful justice system. So before CC, which is the name of the commission, the commission against Impunity in Guatemala, before CC, what we had was a justice system that was very rudimentary that couldn’t really offer scientific proof when prosecuting high-profile corruption cases. Whereas La Línea case was one of the first times that in Guatemala we were able to witness the use of wiretapping, for example, or the use of large-scale data analysis in order to identify trends that would signal corruption.
(06:58):
So this was something that really was very notorious at the time, and it was something that I guess made people realize that we are against something that was unequivocally wrong. The La Línea case was not a weak accusation of corruption. It wasn’t an indictment where there were many doubts. You could actually hear the participants in this corruption ring actually planning what they were going to do and how they were basically defrauding the state. So this was something that really resounded with a lot of people in Guatemala who were fed up of what seemed as this rampant and ubiquitous corruption in the state.
Max Levites (07:33):
Thank you so much for that context. It sounds like it was really a perfect storm of a particularly bad case of corruption that was revealed combined with a more robust judicial environment and just a citizenry that was not ready to accept just anything from their leaders. So can you talk a little bit about who are some of the actors who were really mobilizing citizens and getting people out there, or do you think it was a bit more organic? Who were the people involved?
Hugo Novales Contreras (07:54):
So, I’d like to say no. There’s two categories in civil society in Guatemala at that very moment with La Línea case. So you mostly have this very traditional civil society which is organized around human rights demands. For example, it’s a civil society that inherited this agenda from the end of the Civil War, and this is mainly people in their forties or fifties who are leading think tanks or leading advocacy groups, but that don’t really have this grassroots pool. It’s civil society, but it’s not civil society that’s able to mobilize crowds. So you have that category of civil society. And then what emerged during the La Línea case was this sort of group of anonymous citizens who mobilized through social networks, particularly at the time I would say, Facebook and Twitter. So the protests really did begin just with a small Facebook group with about five or six people who were particularly angry at the situation and began this Facebook group or Facebook community that was called [Spanish 00:09:02], which means resign now.
(09:04):
And this group eventually morphed into something called [Spanish 00:09:09] or justice now, which after the protests after Otto Perez Molina and Roxana Baldetti resigned, the demand sort of morphed into this demand for them being brought to justice and that’s why it’s afterwards called [Spanish 00:09:24]. What’s interesting about this, I guess, is that this group of individuals who organized this whole protest were just a bunch of students at the time. So there were university students who weren’t even organized as students within their universities. They were just a small group of individuals, but somehow, and it’s really hard to identify the reason why, they became central to this whole effort. I guess part of the reason would be that when you have a political class that’s under such criticism or that’s under such questioning from the citizenry or from civil society as a whole, it’s really difficult to identify leaders who are able to mobilize large amounts of people or large crowds.
(10:08):
So there’s just not a lot of people that will trust the social leadership or the political leadership that we had at the time. So the fact that this began as an anonymous group, I think was very relevant for it to grow in such an organic and then massive way. So interestingly, some of these people are now leading think tanks. For example, one individual in this group is now a representative in our Congress, which is interesting. And what happened with the protests is that they sort of began as this very amorphous, disorganized group of people, and as they grew, they sort of articulated with more traditional civil society first. So the human rights groups, the National Chapter of Transparency International, that kind of very traditional civil society, but also with other groups that were also traditional, but that weren’t really involved in a anti-corruption agenda. So I would say for example, rural organizations, indigenous organizations, more traditional student organizations.
(11:11):
Like in Guatemala, we only have one public university, which has campuses across the country. And this only unique public university has had a very strong student movement throughout the seventies, eighties, and then it sort of weaned during the nineties, after the end of the Civil War. But the new civil society in Guatemala sort of merged with the more traditional older civil society, and that’s when we started having these massive protests. The fact that this was so, so huge, the fact that it was so large at some point, it seemed like everybody you knew was participating in the protests somehow, some way or another. It seemed also that since social media was a newer thing than it is right now, the fact that you were able to see that all the people that you knew were participating in the protest because you could actually see it on your Facebook feed, actually helped generate the sense that there was a consensus against what the government was doing and that there was a consensus that the government had to go.
Max Levites (12:16):
Yes, it sounds like it was a really collaborative effort in the end by traditional civil society and like you said, anonymous groups. So getting a whole bunch of different stakeholders essentially together with this one objective. You did mention that the objective was to get President Molina and Vice President Baldetti to resign and then bring them to justice. Did civil society, or the student groups, or the other actors involved, did they have any objectives beyond that to maybe ensure that this kind of thing couldn’t happen again to strengthen the system against corruption at all?
Hugo Novales Contreras (12:44):
So this is something that happened eventually, and it was a few years of mobilizing, a few years of protests, a few years of getting together and figuring out what we had to do next. Let’s just get our timeline straight. In April, around April, I think it was April 14th when we found out about the La Línea case. That’s when CC was this commission against impunity that’s sponsored by the UN, when they hold this press conference and they say there’s this corruption ring in the country’s custom system, it involves high-level government officials and that’s when the protests really started. But it wasn’t until August that Otto Perez Molina actually resigns. And then in September, we had elections. So in a way, it was a long process in which people mobilized against two individuals, particularly Otto, Perez Molina and Roxana Baldetti, president and vice president. But then after that, we had this sense, and I could say the leadership and the movement or the leadership in more traditional civil society realized that there was an opportunity to channel this energy towards reform that would prevent this from happening in the future.
(13:51):
So after we had the election, the result was sort of inconsequential. Jimmy Morales, who was president after Otto Perez Molina, wasn’t really much different in terms of the way he handled corruption and his relationship with CC. There’s a lot of elements here, but I’m not sure that’s how it was. But protests and mobilization continued during 2016, and in 2016, there was an effort to articulate with the newly elected legislator in order to enact reforms that would prevent corruption from reaching the high levels that it had before. So there were proposals that came from think tanks and that were supported by the movement for reforming the regulations that we have for public acquisitions and public purchasing. So that’s one line of reform that was very strongly supported by public opinion, by the protest movement. Then there was another channel of reforming, which I was particularly involved, which is reforming the regulations and campaign finance.
(14:48):
Basically, our intuition and the way we understood this was that very flexible or very weak regulations that we had with political finance somehow contributed to generating this context in which politicians would respond to their campaign donors more than they would respond to their constituency. So we had that line of reform as well, and it was, I would say, pretty successful in which we had a very structural and very important reform in 2016 that was implemented in future elections 2019 and 2023. And then there was this very conscientious or very dedicated [inaudible 00:15:24] to reform the judiciary or the judicial system.
(15:27):
And what you had there was, again, this mixture of very traditional civil society experts from think tanks or from advocacy groups that had been involved in the PISA course and had been involved in basically in every debate that there had been before about the judicial system in Guatemala supported or articulating with less traditional groups like student groups or youth organizations that had participated in the protests alongside with public officials and personnel from this UN-backed commission from CC just working toward developing this constitutional reform that would basically make the judiciary more independent.
(16:05):
And that would also address this particular situation that we have in Guatemala in which about 40 or 42% of the Guatemalan population is indigenous. What has happened in Guatemala over generations is that certain forms of organization and certain forms of conflict resolution have survived all through colonialism and also after our independence, and then after the authoritarian regimes and in democracy, we still have this set of indigenous authorities who basically carry out justice tasks within their communities. And this constitutional reform would’ve actually strengthened those organizations and strengthened those communities so that the justice system would be in a way more inclusive, but also more efficient.
(16:45):
In the end, what happened is that this particular part of the judiciary reform was very controversial, and it ended up breaking up this coalition that had formed in order to support judiciary reform. Something that’s important here is that Guatemala has a very rigid constitution, maybe not as rigid as what you have in the United States, but it still takes two thirds of a multi-party Congress in order to initiate a reform process after that requires a referendum and some other steps that are hard to explain at this time.
(17:14):
And since this coalition sort of weakened after the introduction of this, I would say more controversial part of the reform, and since the process is just so complicated that it requires this large national consensus in order to go through, in the end, this reform didn’t pass. And I would say that this particular piece of legislation or this reform was probably the key that would’ve opened up the justice system and made it so that what was happening before wouldn’t happen again.
(17:44):
In the aftermath of 2016 and this very intense reform process, what we was some actions that CC undertook that made them, I would say, pushed them away, I guess, from the government, including initiating prosecutions against Jimmy Morales who was the president after Perez Molina. And in the end we had this backlash from corrupt politicians, former military leaders, and certain very prominent business people who basically saw that their interests or their position within society was being threatened by this whole reform process and by what had been happening since 2015.
(18:23):
And if you are at all familiar with what has been happening in Guatemala in the last year or so, the justice system is now even less independent than it was at the time when CC uncovered this corruption case. And the backlash has been pretty strong at the point of almost being able to overturn the legitimate election results that we had last year.
(18:45):
So it’s this very, I don’t want to say tragic story, but in a way, we were very successful for a couple of years in fighting for kleptocracy, we were very successful in putting a check on politicians. We had relevant reform that was enacted and implemented, but then I guess the holy grail of reform against corruption, at least in the Guatemala cases, making sure that you have a justice system that works, a justice system that’s able to check politicians, that’s able to check business elites, that’s able to make the powerful accountable for what they’re doing when they’re doing something wrong. This holy grail is what we weren’t able to acquire or to achieve. This was one of the main challenges, and it’s still an ongoing battle, I guess.
Max Levites (19:28):
So what are some of the key lessons from the Guatemala case that other folks around the world interested in organizing collective action against hypocrisy can take away from this case?
Hugo Novales Contreras (19:36):
Well, I think one of the most important takeaways is the relevance of building broad coalitions across ideological lines. I don’t see why anybody should disagree with taking action against kleptocracy or with having more transparency, less corruption. I mean, that’s something that should appeal to everyone else, but there’s always a challenge when it comes to mistrust between different ideological, or political groups, or political tribes in a way. And I think that’s an important challenge, but if you’re able to overcome that, then there’s a good chance that you can build a majority or a coalition that’s large enough to have an effective fight against kleptocracy.
(20:17):
Now, this broad coalition takes us to another, I guess, takeaway in that you actually need to look further than just resignations and look further than just individual public officials or individual decision makers who may or may not be involved in corruption. A big issue here is how to move from that towards reform and building those coalitions will actually enable you to build consensus around reform. And I believe that in the Guatemalan case, reform has played an important role, even though we weren’t able to complete all the reforms that we wanted, but for example, what we’ve done with campaign finance reform, for example, that’s been relevant. And we’ve already had two electoral processes two elections, two general elections with new rules regulating campaign finance, and that’s been relevant.
(21:07):
And I don’t think that there’s anybody who would, from a goodwill point of view, actually want to reform or who would publicly speak against them. This is something that’s really important, and I think that certainly is relevant. The other thing is in the Guatemalan case, something that was key was international support. So international support means several things. It means the people, local domestic actors will actually feel pressure in order to move forward with reform, for example, or with whatever course of action you’re taking against kleptocracy. It also means having more and better resources. So it may mean training, for example, it may mean cooperation, or technical cooperation, that enables you to pursue investigations which are much more supported and much more reliable, that allow you to trace money to trace wrongdoing with much more substantial proof.
(22:01):
And I believe this is something that’s really important, but it also means that external actors can, even though they cannot directly intervene in a country, and this is usually not something that’s going to end well, but they can certainly tilt the balance in favor of actors who are fighting against kleptocracy. And I believe this is something that happened in Guatemala as well. So in a nutshell, I would say build broad coalitions. Keep your eye on reform and gather what you can from international support, because in a strategic, competitive environment such as whatever political process you’re involved, international support will very likely tilt the scale in favor of what if you’re doing is something that’s of interest to people around the world.
Max Levites (22:43):
Yeah, I think those are some very important takeaways and lessons that I think go even just beyond collective action against Kleptocracy, but for any kind of social movement in general. Thank you so much, Hugo. This was a really enlightening conversation. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
Hugo Novales Contreras (22:56):
Thank you very much for having me. It was fun to remember that very intense and very interesting process.
Announcer (23:02):
Thank you for listening to this podcast. For more episodes from the Collectively Combating Kleptocracy series and the full report with case studies, please visit acgc.cipe.org. That’s acgc.cipe.org.
Published Date: September 19, 2024