Expanding Her Enemy List, Guatemalan AG Accuses Indigenous Leaders of Terrorism

On Wednesday, April 23, the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime arrested Luis Pacheco, the current vice minister of Sustainable Development at the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Pacheco gained a national profile two years ago as president of the Maya K’iche’ authority known as the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán, a key motor in the nationwide pro-democracy movement in 2023 and 2024 to stave off an electoral coup.

The 48 Cantons and other Indigenous authorities mobilized the country in peaceful marches, blockades, and sit-ins, demanding the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras for her illegal attempts to prevent President Bernardo Arévalo from winning the elections, and then from taking office.

They also regularly met with then-president Alejandro Giammattei, Arévalo’s team, the private sector, religious leaders, embassies, and civil society as part of an unprecedented peacetime national dialogue.

Hector Chaclán, a former treasurer of the 48 Cantons, was arrested along with Pacheco. They now stand accused of terrorism and obstruction of criminal proceedings.

They were shuttled to their first hearing on April 25 in an unmarked white panel van, a symbol of state terror alluding to decades ago, when dissidents were routinely disappeared, tortured, and assassinated by state forces and paramilitaries during the internal armed conflict.

Prosecutor Klayber Bladimiro Sical offered a threadbare explanation for the arrests: He stated in a press conference that Pacheco and Chaclán were captured based on a complaint about alleged violent acts during the demonstrations,“disrupting security and the constitutional state” of Guatemala — despite the fact that it was the coup effort, according to the OAS Permanent Council, that threatened the constitution.

On April 25, the preliminary hearing was held behind closed doors. They were sent to preventive detention in the former military brigade-turned-VIP prison Mariscal Zavala, where publisher Jose Rubén Zamora is also being held. The Prosecutor’s Office has two months to investigate the case.

The judge who signed the warrants for their arrest was Carol Patricia Flores, who attempted to annul the Ríos Montt trial in 2013 and who, two years later, was investigated by the Public Prosecutor's Office and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) for possible crimes of money laundering or other assets.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk expressed deep concern over the situation, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding democratic principles and the rights of Indigenous communities. “Participating in peaceful demonstrations is a human right that must not be punished,” he wrote on X. He said he has met Pacheco twice.

Organizations such as Human Rights Watch echoed these concerns, calling the case part of a broader strategy by Porras to suppress reform efforts and maintain impunity in Guatemala. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also expressed her solidarity during a morning press conference.

In a video on his official X account, Arévalo seemed to recover the tenor of resistance he had invoked on the campaign trail, calling the arrests “an attack on democracy and on the resistance struggle waged by the people of Guatemala in 2023.” He called on citizens to “peacefully but clearly demand an end to this dark cycle of harassment that these criminals hiding in the Public Prosecutor's Office are waging against the country.”

Arévalo and Indigenous authorities filed an injunction against Consuelo Porras, through the Presidential Commission Against Discrimination and Racism Against Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala (Codisra) and in consultation with civil society organizations, representatives of academia, and the religious sector. The president stated that the intention is to guarantee due process for “these leaders who have been spuriously criminalized.”

Arévalo’s failure to remove Porras, or get Congress to even discuss the matter, has been acutely felt amid her office’s newest offensive against Indigenous leaders. The president has tried to reclaim the narrative by shifting the onus back to Congress, urging legislators to consider his reform of Article 14 of the Organic Law of the Public Prosecutor’s Office to give Arévalo broader power to remove the attorney general for wrongdoing.

“A popular, broad struggle”

For four years, Porras’ office has enthusiastically criminalized her perceived political foes. Judges, prosecutors, and journalists have been forced into exile. Others, such as journalist Jose Rubén Zamora, who has been detained for more than 1,000 days, have been imprisoned on internationally decried charges.

José Santos Sapón, former president of the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán and lawyer for the Maya Ixil authorities, believes that the recent arrests are part of a strategy to scatter Indigenous leadership in the run-up to the next major political hurdle.

“They [Porras and allies] are attacking the institutionality of the Indigenous peoples,” he told El Faro English. “They are in a hurry to fix all this because obviously it will be Arévalo who will appoint the new attorney general next year,” he added. ”They will surely take a chance with a candidate with a very bad track record, but it won't be easy. It's getting tough for them. All they need is the coup.”

Sapón also says Pacheco and Chaclán are being charged with obstruction of justice because the demonstrations in 2023 obstructed the Public Prosecutor's Office’s effort to annul the election result. “If they had succeeded in declaring the elections [null and void], that would have brought Arévalo down,” he asserted.

“Since 2021, when Congress was burned down, we already saw signs and intentions to criminalize the fundamental rights of those who were protesting, monitoring, denouncing, organizing, and expressing their ideas,” adds Esteban Celada, a lawyer specializing in high-impact human rights cases and criminal science.

“Talking about terrorism, about a person who could carry out such an action, or the crime of sedition, is quite complex,” he adds. ”The social, political, and legal repercussions that the progress of this case could have should be a cause for concern for all of us.”

Pacheco is not the only Arévalo official to be jailed. In August 2024, Ligia Hernández, a former Semilla legislator and director of the Institute for Victims, was arrested on allegations of unregistered electoral financing as a part of a spurious investigation launched in 2023, after the first round of voting, into Semilla’s 2017 incorporation.

The attorney general is trying to do the same against the president himself: After Arévalo won, she mounted two criminal cases against him denounced by the OAS as baseless and politically motivated. In mid-2024, she doubled down on efforts to remove the immunity of Arévalo and a half-dozen officials. With the complicity of the high courts and Congress, she curbed the political participation of Arévalo’s legislators by suspending their party bloc.

“We are exercising democracy while still under conditions of democratic regression,” says political analyst Gabriela Carrera. “If that tension were not present, we may have already been seeing advances in public policy for education, how many hospitals are being built. But Arévalo at the same time must stop actors who want to return to a logic of corruption. He must play his cards more strongly against this anti-democratic tension.”

She also asserts that the same pro-democracy multitudes who took the streets for weeks during the elections should take a more active role. “The Guatemalan people must remember that the defense of democracy did not end with the election of a president and a few congresspeople,” she asserts. “It is a much more popular, broad struggle that requires a great deal of collective intelligence.”