Top corruption prosecutor held in jail as Guatemalan elite bids to purge foes
Source: The Guardian
Top corruption prosecutor held in jail as Guatemalan elite bids to purge foes
Virginia Laparra detained in conditions ‘bordering on torture’, which critics say is retaliation for her efforts to fight corruption
Jody Garcia in Guatemala City and Nina Lakhani in New York
Thu 1 Sep 2022 10.30 BST
Last modified on Thu 1 Sep 2022 10.31 BST
A Guatemalan anti-corruption prosecutor has been locked up for six months in conditions “bordering on torture”, as the country’s ruling elite pursues a strategy to purge the justice system and derail corruption investigations against their allies.
Virginia Laparra, 42, a senior anti-corruption prosecutor, was accused of abuse of authority in apparent retaliation for reporting her suspicion that a judge had leaked sensitive details from a sealed corruption case to a colleague in 2017.
The judge, Lesther Castellanos, was sanctioned by a disciplinary board, but then filed a joint criminal complaint with the Foundation against Terrorism (FCT) – an extreme-right genocide denial group with a long track record of bringing spurious charges against prosecutors and judges considered adversaries.
The case against Laparra went nowhere until she was arrested in February. A court ordered pre-trial detention, and Laparra was sent from her home in the city of Quetzaltenango to a high-security prison in Guatemala City – 200 miles away from her children – where military commanders and former presidents are jailed for war crimes and corruption.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/01/guatemala-prosecutor-jailed-virginia-laparra-corruption
