José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, founder and president of elPeriódico, Guatemala’s now-defunct leading independent investigative newspaper, is under house arrest, having spent almost three and a half years in detention.

His ordeal began in July 2022, when police arrested him on charges of blackmail, influence peddling and money laundering. The complaint came from a former banker, Ronald García Navarijo, who was under investigation for financial crimes. The arrest followed months of Zamora’s reporting on corrupt deals involving economic and political elites under then-President Alejandro Giammattei.

For almost three decades, elPeriódico exposed corruption, human rights violations and impunity in Guatemala, but it shut down within months of Zamora’s arrest, the result of intimidation of its advertisers and criminalisation of its staff. In June 2023, a court convicted Zamora of money laundering and sentenced him to six years in prison.

An appeals court overturned the conviction and ordered a retrial in October 2023, but by then the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity (FECI) had brought a second case alleging that Zamora conspired to obstruct justice and used falsified documents, so he remained in jail. A court granted him conditional release in May 2024, but an appeals chamber reversed it within weeks. By then he had been arbitrarily imprisoned for over 20 months, much of the time in solitary confinement in a military jail, held in near-constant darkness, deprived of sleep, subjected to forced nudity and arbitrary cell searches and left with an untreated mite infestation that affected his physical and mental health.

In May 2024, the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Zamora’s detention arbitrary, finding it was in retaliation for his work as a journalist investigating corruption, and recommended his immediate release and compensation. In August, six UN experts warned that his treatment could amount to torture.

In October 2024, a judge granted Zamora house arrest, only for an appeals court to send him back to prison in March 2025. The Supreme Court transferred the judge who’d freed him to a court in another part of the country. The Constitutional Court blocked a further bid for Zamora’s release that September. The following month, the Supreme Court confirmed the annulment of the money laundering conviction and ordered a retrial, finding the appeals chamber had failed to properly resolve the case.

On 12 February 2026, after spending 1,295 days in detention, Zamora was finally granted house arrest, where he remains. The following month, the Supreme Court voided the 2025 rulings against him, including the one that had returned him to prison, finding they violated due process and lacked legal foundation. The prosecution is still trying to overturn Zamora’s house arrest and send him back to prison. The Constitutional Court heard the prosecution’s latest appeal in June but hasn’t yet ruled.

The persecution has extended to Zamora’s defence. At least 10 lawyers who took up his case were forced to abandon it under pressure, and some were prosecuted and jailed after representing him.

A broader pattern

Zamora’s case exemplifies how the system works in Guatemala when it comes to those who challenge corruption, human rights violations, violence and impunity. These include journalists who investigate corruption, judges and prosecutors who pursue it, groups that mobilise for rights or document human rights abuses, particularly Indigenous, land rights and climate activists, and anyone who speaks up for those prosecuted. For many, exile is the only alternative to jail. Over 100 people, including around 50 judges and prosecutors, have fled Guatemala rather than face fabricated charges.

It starts with criminal complaints alleging illicit association, money laundering or terrorism; then people are fast-tracked into prosecutions and put in prolonged detention, their criminalisation reinforced by coordinated social media smear campaigns against them.

The machinery behind the pattern

The state has long been in the hands of what Guatemalans call ‘the pact of the corrupt’, a coalition of business leaders, drug traffickers, military personnel and politicians. The justice system has been instrumentalised to serve their interests, which means any serious attempt to dismantle entrenched networks of corruption and impunity requires external support. That’s why, in 2006, the UN and the Guatemalan government agreed to establish an independent body, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), to investigate corruption alongside the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP).

The agreement was signed by President Óscar Berger, whose administration was dogged by corruption scandals and later accused by CICIG of ordering extrajudicial killings. Berger’s calculation was likely shaped less by reforming zeal than by diplomatic incentives, including US backing, and by the fact that CICIG’s initial mandate was deliberately narrow, limited to a supporting role alongside the MP. It took the intervention of subsequent UN-appointed commissioners to turn CICIG into the far more assertive body that went after sitting presidents.

Over 12 years, CICIG and the MP investigated over 70 complex criminal structures, took over 120 high-impact cases to court and supported around 100 requests to lift officials’ immunity. The investigations led to over 1,540 people being charged. More than 660 were prosecuted and over 400 convicted. Those implicated included former presidents, ex-ministers, members of Congress, senior state officials, mayors, business figures and drug traffickers. The cases exposed how corruption cut across parties, and how fortunes had been built on monopolies protected through hidden electoral financing and political connections. The prosecutions helped counter the widespread perception that powerful figures were untouchable.

Beyond individual cases, CICIG worked to build the investigative capacity of Guatemalan state institutions, particularly the MP, the judiciary, the financial intelligence unit and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), and designed legal reform proposals and policy recommendations to combat impunity and prevent the re-emergence of illegal security structures. It worked with civil society and the media, and its proceedings respected due process in line with international standards.

CICIG’s success made it a target. After securing the resignation and prosecution of President Otto Pérez Molina in 2015 and contributing to indictments against three former presidents, in 2017 it investigated the finances of the sitting president, Jimmy Morales, a former comedian who’d campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. In response, Morales sought to end the CICIG. In August 2017 he ordered its head, Iván Velásquez, expelled from the country, a decision the Constitutional Court blocked. When that failed, Morales replaced the attorney general with a more compliant one, Consuelo Porras, and announced he wouldn’t renew CICIG’s mandate beyond its September 2019 expiry. He made the announcement flanked by military officials, days after jeeps had been stationed outside CICIG’s offices.

President Giammattei, who took office in 2020, dismantled what was left. He reappointed Porras, who fired FECI head Juan Francisco Sandoval and forced him into exile. She prosecuted or forced out dozens more judges and prosecutors who’d worked with CICIG.

Porras turned the MP into a tool of persecution, working with allied judges and the far-right Foundation Against Terrorism to criminalise activists, journalists and justice officials, while dismissing without investigation 74 per cent of complaints filed with her office. By the time her term ended in May, over 40 states, including the USA, had imposed sanctions on Porras and associated officials for corruption and anti-democratic conduct.

An outsider’s improbable rise

Bernardo Arévalo’s 2023 election win challenged the system. A little-known congressman and co-founder of the progressive Movimiento Semilla, a party that grew out of the citizen movement born from the 2015 anti-corruption protests, he wasn’t on pollsters’ radar ahead of the first round of voting. Several contenders who might have posed a stronger challenge to the establishment had been disqualified. Arévalo, however, scraped into second place with 11.8 per cent, largely because the establishment hadn’t judged him a serious enough threat to block.

That miscalculation triggered what Guatemalan civil society called an attempted electoral coup. Nine parties filed spurious complaints of irregularities, and the Constitutional Court suspended certification of the results and ordered a recount. When the TSE endorsed the results on 12 July, the MP announced Semilla’s suspension over registration issues. In the following weeks, prosecutors raided the party’s headquarters and the TSE’s offices twice.

The Constitutional Court blocked the suspension order and the runoff went ahead, although the suspension was reinstated weeks later. Death threats followed the election, and by mid-August the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had documented at least two credible assassination plots against Arévalo, one reportedly involving public officials, the other criminal networks. On 20 August, Arévalo won the runoff. Four days later, the Commission granted precautionary measures to protect him and his vice-president-elect.

Efforts to block Arévalo’s inauguration ensued, including further attempts by Porras’s office to suspend Semilla, right up to the swearing-in. On 2 October, Indigenous authorities called a national strike that grew into 106 days of peaceful resistance, with blockades and encampments across the country. Arévalo was finally sworn in on 14 January 2024, despite efforts that day to derail his inauguration by having Semilla’s representatives declared independents rather than part of a bloc.

New president, same system

Arévalo took office with no legislative majority. His party held only 23 out of 160 seats, with the rest controlled by establishment-aligned politicians. In May 2026, Semilla’s bloc split when several politicians, including the former president of Congress, formed a new party.

Unable to pass legislation, Arévalo has had to negotiate. In 2024, this included a budget deal that directed a large funding increase to departmental development councils, regional bodies that distribute public money for local education, health and infrastructure projects that mayors and local power-brokers have long used to reward political allies rather than meet genuine need. This brought criticism that Arévalo is continuing to use the patronage tools that sustain corruption to survive in a Congress he doesn’t control.

Arévalo also couldn’t remove the official most responsible for weaponising the justice system. A legislative change that would have allowed him to dismiss Porras didn’t pass. The government filed two requests with the Supreme Court to strip her of the legal immunity attached to her office, but after months of delay, the Court rejected the first, and it never ruled on the second, which remained pending when Porras’s term expired. In October 2024, the congressional majority selected 13 new Supreme Court judges and 156 appellate judges through a process widely criticised as opaque and stacked with candidates tied to corruption networks.

As Zamora’s case shows, the MP continued to criminalise dissent during Arévalo’s presidency. It also put pressure on Arévalo, repeatedly trying to strip him of immunity, and on his party. Movimiento Semilla’s legal status, suspended since 2023, was cancelled by judicial order in November 2024. The party appealed the decision, but the TSE upheld it in March this year.

Faced with a hostile Congress and Supreme Court, Arévalo has chosen modest reform over confrontation. He opened inquiries into 1,400 public contracts and created an executive-branch integrity network. Those who sustained the resistance that secured his inauguration believe he had the popular mandate to push harder.

A critical window

Porras’s successor, Gabriel García Luna, is a career judge with no ties to corruption networks. And he’s moving quickly. Within weeks he’s dismissed prosecutors linked to Porras and announced FECI’s closure. The institution he’s inherited, however, isn’t fit for purpose. Porras fired or drove out hundreds of prosecutors and staff. It also remains to be seen whether the fabricated cases against Zamora and dozens of others will be dropped.

García Luna’s arrival offers a genuine opening, the first in eight years. But it’s a narrow one. Congress remains in opposition hands, and the Constitutional Court, Comptroller General’s Office and TSE are all due for renewal this year, a process civil society warns corrupt interests will use to entrench their grip.

Much will depend on whether Arévalo backs García Luna’s efforts to rebuild the institution that Porras weaponised, and whether bodies up for renewal can be kept away from entrenched corruption networks. The clearest sign of change will come when Zamora and the dozens of others criminalised for exposing corruption and defending rights no longer face prosecution, and instead their persecutors face justice.

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