New Guatemalan AG Starts Cleaning House After Years of Corruption and Lawfare
<p>A new attorney general took office in Guatemala amid calls to restore confidence after his predecessor fueled the ranks of exiles and prisoners of conscience. This removes what President Arévalo had long called an obstacle: an adversary as top prosecutor.</p>
Yuliana Ramazzini
El Faro English translates Central America. Get reporting like this in your inbox.
A new attorney general has taken the helm in Guatemala. For eight years, Consuelo Porras —the top prosecutor sanctioned by more than 40 countries for election meddling— ran a lawfare machine against judges, prosecutors, journalists, and human rights defenders.
On May 17, she left office, with surprisingly little public fuss.
After months of bitter political tensions over the nomination process, President Bernardo Arévalo chose Gabriel García Luna, an understated career judge and discipline official, to lead a Public Prosecutor’s Office ailing from lost international and domestic credibility.
In his first press conference, García Luna announced he would dissolve the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI), which oversaw that lawfare. He sacked Rafael Curruchiche, the internationally sanctioned head FECI prosecutor and a key Porras operative.
García Luna also said a new special commission will review all cases of criminalization.
Reading the writing on the wall, two of Porras’ trusted deputies resigned: top advisor Juan Luis Pantaleón and Secretary General Ángel Pineda. The latter, similarly sanctioned, stepped down amid allegations of running an online troll farm and leaking case information.
Speaking of their boss, Porras, former U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland wrote on X, “The AG politicized justice like no other AG had done in 41 years of democratic rule.”
Now García Luna faces multiple challenges: on one hand, whether to go after ancien régime corruption; on the other, what to do about the pending cases facing political prisoners and Guatemalan exiles alike.
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That very exile fueled a brain drain. In the last five years, many internationally respected prosecutors fled the country, while back in Guatemala Porras dismantled prosecutors’ career track and launched internal purges.
One of the highest-profile exiles, former FECI chief Juan Francisco Sandoval, fled the country in July 2021, denouncing Porras’ corruption in an interview with El Faro: “I can now say that everything Porras has done is shady.”
Now, Sandoval says, “replacing the attorney general does not automatically mean that an institution reorganized around internal networks of control will be transformed.”
For Sandoval, García Luna raises expectations and some questions because his rhetoric is not confrontational: “the real challenge is not that he is moderate, but that he demonstrates independence from day-to-day decisions.”
A high-ranking diplomatic source in Guatemala City told El Faro English that “the new attorney general is fairly neutral. It doesn’t sound very impressive, but here that’s a lot.”
“He won’t stir up hatred or pick fights with the big players,” the source added. “He’s like Arévalo: There won’t be any criminalization or transitional justice. He’ll seek stability for the country.”
Porras misses the cut
For two years, Attorney General Porras obstructed President Arévalo’s agenda, securing the dissolution of his party and imprisoning several members. Meanwhile, Porras and aligned lobbyists billed her to Trump’s Washington as a defender of conservatives.
Despite this lobbying, the Trump administration did not publicly lift visa restrictions imposed on Porras in 2022 for her “involvement in significant corruption.” Canada, the U.K., and the E.U. had issued sanctions of their own.
On the issue of sanctions, Trump’s proposed ambassador to Guatemala, Florida international arbitrage attorney Juan Rodriguez, has kept his cards close. In his confirmation hearing in late April, he declined to tell the Senate whether he would continue.
“I’m not aware of the particulars as to why Consuelo Porras has been sanctioned,” he claimed. The State Department, he added, striking an odd chord as an ambassador nominee, “told me the information was classified and as a lay person I’m not entitled to receive that information.”
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As for Porras, she has tried to remain in an influential post. At first, she ran for magistrate of the Constitutional Court, where she had an old home-court advantage that four years ago gave her cover to be appointed to a second term.
But when she failed to make the cut, she ran for a third term as attorney general, stirring questions over whether she still maintained the core backing from political elites that was key to her time in office.
The standoff between Arévalo and Porras began in 2023, when the attorney general attempted to prevent him from taking office and fruitlessly declared the elections null and void, despite obviously lacking that authority.
A national protest movement grew against Porras, so Arévalo promised to remove her once he took office. But the president failed to sack her under congressional deadlock. He offered the interpretation that the law —or the high courts— didn’t allow it.
This setback was a blow to Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples who led those protests to ensure Arévalo could take office, becoming a key national voice opposing political persecution and defending democracy.
In retaliation, Indigenous leaders Luis Pacheco and Héctor Chaclán were imprisoned in May 2025 on terrorism charges. Amnesty International has declared them prisoners of conscience.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office was protecting the corrupt, and we are the ones affected by corruption,” Maya Ixil authority Feliciana Herrera Ceto told El Faro English.
As for García Luna, she added, “we hope he will create a special prosecutor’s office to address the criminalization of Indigenous leaders.”
Despite Arévalo’s statement that Porras had no chance of being appointed to a third term, she achieved the highest score on the initial list, edging out candidates such as Arévalo’s current Minister of the Interior, Marco Antonio Villeda.
But then the nomination committee did a total about-face and left Porras out of the shortlist of six finalists.
The new Constitutional Court —on which she had just failed to become a magistrate— played its last hand and granted an injunction to the Foundation Against Terrorism, a Porras ally, ordering the nomination committee to select six finalists again.
But the committee had made up its mind, and Porras missed the cut again.
With defeat imminent, Porras received a visit from Salvadoran Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado, who awarded her for her work — even though that work led to her being named “Corrupt Person of the Year” in 2023 by OCCRP.
Arévalo loses an “excuse”
For years in Guatemala, high-stakes political nominations have been rocked by influence-peddling scandals. The path for the new attorney general, García Luna, was similarly fraught with Guatemalan uncertainty.
On May 5, Arévalo announced that he would pick him. A week later, the Constitutional Court dismissed a series of last-second appeals.
The court referred a final appeal to an appellate chamber, considering whether to restart the selection process altogether. But by May 15, it was too late: Arévalo swore in García Luna. He took office two days later.
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García Luna’s arrival poses the question of whether Arévalo will take a more proactive style of governance. For constitutional lawyer Édgar Ortiz, this will not necessarily be the case.
“I believe his governing style will change because there will be less repression,” he told El Faro English. “But I don’t think any substantive changes he makes without Consuelo will improve things significantly.”
Arévalo has now removed the foremost thorn from his side, but an election year is already looming in 2027, and a host of old adversaries are already revving their engines.
“Now Arévalo has no excuses for governing and being accountable,” said the senior diplomat in Guatemala City. “He has spent two years in hiding and has refused to take on a visible leadership role.”
But the change at the Public Prosecutor’s Office could help Arévalo attract a more qualified team: “It may be that they manage to bring in capable people without the risk of them being criminalized,” the source says.
As for Ambassador McFarland, he says wealthy Guatemalans and their lobbyists “at the best are skeptical about García Luna’s appointment and its implications for their ambitions.
“Underlying this is a lack of consensus on what judicial independence and accountability really mean for persons with power,” McFarland added. “García Luna has the opportunity to define them as Attorney General.”
This article first appeared in the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here for more journalism translating Central America.