Guatemalan police on Thursday arrested a former prosecutor who had brought an ex-dictator to trial for genocide, the latest in a string of arrests that has worried the United Nations.
Orlando Lopez, once a senior human rights prosecutor, was arrested for alleged "abuse of authority" in a series of raids in Guatemala City, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
It said he had practiced as a lawyer and notary in 2019 when he was still in the employ of the prosecutor's office, in violation of his contract.
Lopez prosecuted former dictator Efrain Rios Montt 10 years ago for the killing of hundreds of Ixil Maya Indigenous people during the darkest days of the country's civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison, but the Constitutional Court overturned his conviction, citing procedural errors.
The retired general died in 2018, at the age of 91, during a retrial.
Lopez's arrest follows that of a number of former prosecutors and members of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed entity that helped unearth several corruption scandals. It was closed by the government in 2019.
Many former corruption prosecutors are in exile today, claiming to be the victims of persecution and revenge for the work they did.
The United Nations in January voiced "deep concern" over what it called threats, harassment and reprisals faced by justice officials and human rights defenders in the Central American country.
That came after a Guatemalan court jailed a senior anti-corruption prosecutor following a trial criticized as a bid to undermine the fight against graft.
Attorney General Consuelo Porras has been added by the United States to a list of "corrupt actors" for hampering and then firing an anti-mafia prosecutor.
Last year, Guatemala's then-human rights ombudsman Jordan Rodas, whose term has since ended, warned that corruption in the country was at unprecedented levels under an "authoritarian" government that punishes those who investigate organized crime.
