Marco Rubio urges State Department not to interfere in Guatemalan AG selection process
Kelly Hayes
April 30, 2022
3min
Sen. Marco Rubio is urging the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to complete a full review into the U.S. Department of State’s actions with regard to the ongoing Attorney General selection process in Guatemala.
Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, sent a letter to Blinken to address the matter in response to recent reports that employees of the DOS and U.S. Agency for International Development may be inappropriately influencing the appointment process for Guatemala’s Attorney General position, which is currently underway.
“Guatemala has had a long and difficult road in quelling the scourge of public corruption. That road has been made harder by the abuse of well-intentioned international support,” the letter reads. “Given this complex history of international involvement in Guatemala’s judicial system, the United States should be cautious when assisting Guatemalans’ path towards a just and equal application of the law.”
Guatemala’s Attorney General’s office has, in recent years, been accused of blocking corruption investigations, protecting powerful interests and even persecuting those who pursue the corrupt, according to a report from The Associated Press.
More:
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/520888-marco-rubio-urges-state-department-not-to-interfere-in-guatemalan-ag-selection-process/
= new reply since forum marked as read
after Honduran military personel, directed by opposition Honduran leaders dumped the elected President Manuel Zelaya, in his pajamas, after shooting up his home, onto a plane, refuled at the US airbase in Soto Cano before pitching him out, still in his pajamas, on the runway in Costa Rica. She arrived, conducting Republican "foreign affairs" with the brutal interum beast, Roberto "Goriletti" Micheletti, who was "officially replaced by a right-wing corrupt man who, with his son, was involved with narco-trafficking, and who was replaced with a following election, by a heavy duty right-wing narco-trafficking, corrupt President who also had a dirty criminal son, that President just extradicted to the US for trial. This should tell you what kind of President of Honduras really appeals to the non-interfering Florida Republican politicians!
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U.S. denies any role in Honduras coup flight
Aug. 16, 2009, 12:52 PM CDT / Source: The Associated Press
The U.S. military said Sunday its troops in Honduras did not know of and played no role in a flight that took ousted President Manuel Zelaya to exile during a military coup.
Aug. 16, 2009, 12:52 PM CDT / Source: The Associated Press
The U.S. military said Sunday its troops in Honduras did not know of and played no role in a flight that took ousted President Manuel Zelaya to exile during a military coup.
Zelaya says the Honduran military plane that flew him to Costa Rica on June 28 stopped to refuel at Soto Cano, a Honduran air base that is home to 600 U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen engaged in counternarcotics operations and other missions in Central America.
U.S. forces at Soto Cano "were not involved in the flight that carried President Zelaya to Costa Rica on June 28," Southern Command spokesman Robert Appin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. The American troops "had no knowledge or part in the decisions made for the plane to land, refuel and take off."
Appin said the U.S. troops at Soto Cano have stopped conducting exercises with the Honduran military since the coup. "The U.S. military recognizes that the situation must be resolved by Hondurans and their democratic institutions in accordance with the rule of law," he said.
More:
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32437809
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Supporters of coup: 3 Florida GOP members of Congress visit interim Honduras president
Updated: Oct. 06, 2009, 1:38 a.m. | Published: Oct. 06, 2009, 12:38 a.m.
LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ and BEN FOX, Associated Press
MIAMI -- Three U.S. representatives from South Florida who supported the ouster of Honduras' president traveled there Monday to meet with the interim government and to pressure President Barack Obama to sanction the upcoming Honduran elections.
It's the second trip there by a Republican delegation in a week and is part of a broader effort to challenge the Obama administration's Latin American policy.
Obama and many world leaders refuse to recognize interim President Roberto Micheletti, who took power following a June coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya. They say the Nov. 29 election will be illegitimate unless Zelaya is restored to power or comes to some compromise with the current government. The Organization of American States has refused to observe the elections.
U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, who say they're on a fact-finding mission, are among Republicans who view Zelaya's ouster as a legitimate response to his calls for a referendum on changing the constitution. Such a change they say could have enabled him to run again and remain president indefinitely, just as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has done.
More:
https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/10/supporters_of_coup_3_florida_g.html
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Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, shown not interfering in Honduras' affairs with the
interum coup President, Roberto Micheletti (called "Goriletti by Honduran citizens for his heavy-handed
treatment of abused citizens) and the absolute chaos and terror which ensued during his total of the
cutting of telephone service and electricity, creating deep problems for people needing food who had no
way to refrigerate food, and only enough time to run to and from their jobs, and no where to store food,
requiring them to try to grab food on their speedy trip from work to their houses before curfew again, etc.
There were also rolling waves of black unmarked police vans roaming the streets looking for anyone out
on the streets at night. Those they caught were kept in stadium areas, unable to return home, then some
of them started showing up dead, and clearly tortured prior to death.
That kind of brutality earned Micheletti, who lived in the US for years earlier, the nickname "Goriletti."
Wikipedia:
Political career
In 1963, Micheletti was a member of the honor guard of President Ramón Villeda, who was toppled by the military; Micheletti was arrested and jailed on 3 October[8] and jailed for 27 days.[7] In 1973 he moved to the United States, living in Tampa, Florida, then in New Orleans, Louisiana, for two years before returning to Honduras in 1976.[9] While living in the USA he finished high school and started his own business.[8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Micheletti
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Ros-Lehtinen Discovers Antidote to Honduran Tourism Crisis in Visiting US Congress Members
Coup Leader Admits that Lifting of Emergency Decree Does Not Apply to All Media Outl
ets
By Belén Fernández
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
October 6, 2009
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, OCTOBER 5, 2009: Two days prior to the scheduled visit to Honduras of a delegation from the Organization of American States (OAS), an abridged version of international diplomacy arrived in Tegucigalpa yesterday morning in the form of Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who was nonetheless defined as US Senator by prominent Honduran newspapers. Ros-Lehtinen starred in a mid-day press conference at the presidential palace, an event also qualifying as abridged based on the lack of representatives of the anti-coup press.
The absence from the conference of Channel 36 TV and Radio Globo – the two media outlets forced off the air last week with coup president Roberto Micheletti’s decree of a state of emergency – was called into question when Micheletti assured the audience that his decree had been completely revoked. The possibility that the coup government might thus return confiscated broadcasting equipment to its rightful owners was promptly declined, however, when Micheletti declared that said owners would have to earn back their rights in a court of law.
. . .
Ros-Lehtinen nonetheless stressed her commitment to Honduran democracy and conviction in the sacred nature of the Honduran Constitution – a categorization that had recently been challenged by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who had described it as the worst such document on the face of the earth. The Florida Representative proceeded to express her concern that US withholding of select funds and travel documents from the coup government was only harming the citizens of Honduras, although she later conceded that it was also harming the US war on drugs as narcotraffickers would quickly discover that a Honduras without funds was incapable of purchasing radars.
Accompanying Ros-Lehtinen to Honduras were her south Florida congressional companions Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Mario Díaz-Balart. Micheletti failed to establish whether the poster proclaiming “Alianza de Miami, por Honduras” had been hung outside the presidential palace in honor of their visit, although he did refer to Ros-Lehtinen as an illustrious woman whose presence in Honduras was a reward from God. Ros-Lehtinen returned the cordialities by proclaiming that Micheletti was not at all de facto and that presidential succession in Cuba would hopefully one day produce a leader like him.
More:
https://www.narconews.com/Issue60/article3858.html
The US state department said Ms Porras had "repeatedly obstructed and undermined anti-corruption investigations in Guatemala".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61477706
President Giammattei announced that Consuelo Porras would serve a second term (Reuters)
