After eight years as Guatemala’s Attorney General, lawyer Consuelo Porras was left out of the race for re-election for another four years. This marks a shift in Guatemala’s justice system, as during her tenure Porras dismantled the unit that investigated major corruption cases against prominent politicians and businesspeople, as well the one that brought retired military officers and politicians to face trials for human rights violations and war crimes committed during the country’s 36-year internal armed conflict (1960-1996).
At the end of April, after two months of work, a Nominating Commission compiled a list of six candidates and sent it to President Bernardo Arévalo, who was due to select the Attorney General that would lead the criminal investigations in the country.
Porras ran for a third time in office but was left out of the final list. Her chances of being re-elected for a new term were minimal, since in 2023 she accused Arévalo and his party, Movimiento Semilla, of winning the presidential elections after alleged irregularities in the party’s registration. This accusation, which has not been proven to date and was denied by international and national observers of the elections, led a judge to cancel the legal status of the political party that brought them to power. This ruling prohibits its members from using the Party’s name for a decade, has limited their ability to control the legislative agenda, and interferes with their capacity to run in the 2027 elections.
“A sigh of relief”
Porras became Attorney General in 2018, appointed by President Jimmy Morales, and was re-elected in 2022 under President Alejandro Giammattei. She protected Giamattei by ignoring public complaints of alleged corruption during his administration. Both Giammattei and Porras were sanctioned by the United States during the Biden administration, who revoked their visas and barred them from entering the country. Porras was also sanctioned by the Council of the European Union for “actions that undermine democracy and the rule of law”.
“For all of us who have sought justice and fought against impunity, this is a sigh of relief,” Rosalina Tuyuc, an Indigenous leader and head of the National Coordinating Body of Widows of Guatemala (Conavigua), an organization that brings together family members and survivors of massacres committed during Guatemala’s civil war, told Justice Info regarding Porras’s imminent departure from the Attorney General’s Office.
However, Tuyuc emphasized, “this will not pave the way for justice,” as she believes that the legacy of Porras’s tenure is having left uninvestigated cases of individuals implicated in international crimes, including genocide, enforced disappearance, and conflict-related sexual violence, as well as high-level government corruption.
The purging of the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office
Porras’s departure comes in the year that Guatemala commemorates the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Agreements. This occurs within a context where the judiciary system has increasingly distanced itself from the promise of providing answers to victims and survivors of the civil war.
One of the clearest examples is how Porras transformed the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office, which, before her arrival, had achieved historic milestones in the country and the region in terms of transitional justice, including bringing General and former head of State Efraín Ríos Montt to trial and winning a genocide conviction for massacres to the Ixil Maya Indigenous population, who suffered killings and forced disappearances in the early 1980s for being considered enemies of the state and accused of collaborating with the guerrillas. On May 10, 2013, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide. Although the conviction was overturned days later by the Constitutional Court under pressure from the private sector, the decision recognized the testimonies of victims and survivors who commemorate the sentence every year around this time.
Before Porras’s tenure, that same Office also prosecuted other military personnel and civil patrollers for massacres in other Indigenous communities, including the villages of Dos Erres and Plan de Sánchez. However, Porras purged the unit, removing the prosecutors who conducted those investigations and appointing Noé Rivera, a lawyer that prior to that position had initiated cases against anti-corruption prosecutors and judges. Since Rivera’s appointment in December 2024, the Human Rights unit has not announced any cases related to the internal armed conflict in Guatemala.
“Another year has passed since the Ixil genocide sentence, and it is clear that there has been no will to continue investigating. They want to forget the past, while we, the surviving victims, have no support,” said Tuyuc.
The uncomfortable election at the Constitutional Court
Now, with Porras's expected exit, the question remains: will the institution once again prioritize transitional justice?
On May 5, Arévalo announced that he has picked Gabriel García Luna as the next Attorney General. None of the six final candidates for the position explicitly proposed continuing investigations related to transitional justice if elected. García Luna was the only one who mentioned "human rights" in his work plan, but even then, it was only in the context of ensuring the office's compliance during its operations.
From January to March 2026, the Constitutional Court, the country's highest judicial authority, also underwent renewal. The Court is composed of five full and five alternate magistrates appointed by various actors within the country, Congress, Supreme Court, executive authorities as well as the Bar association and one university. The NGO Impunity Watch stated in a report published on April 16 that international standards were not met during the selection of the new magistrates, and that the process was “untransparent” and driven by “political interests”. Two judges who were re-elected alongside their alternates “protected” Porras during her tenure, according to the NGO, “endorsed the release of people accused of corruption and human rights violations, and allowed the criminalization of former prosecutors and anti-corruption judges, and have supported the persecution of human rights defenders, journalists and indigenous authorities”. Porras even attempted to be elected for a seat through two separate processes but failed to secure any votes, underscoring the loss of her allies. Therefore, among the Court’s challenges for the next five years will be to demonstrate that its rulings respond to “judicial, not political, interests” and serving as a check on the powers of the Attorney General's Office.
“One of the central problems the Constitutional Court will have to face is curbing criminalization, particularly against justice system operators, journalists, Indigenous leaders, and human rights defenders,” Impunity Watch noted.
An uncertain future
Porras's departure has provoked many reactions among the population and civil society, many of them celebrating. Her eight-year legacy is defined by the exile, imprisonment, and persecution of dozens of judges, prosecutors, activists, journalists, and Indigenous leaders, two of whom, Luis Pacheco and Héctor Chaclán, have been imprisoned for over a year.
One of the first judicial officials to go into exile from Guatemala due to Porras's persecution was Juan Francisco Sandoval, the former head of the anti-corruption unit. He described a “mixture of relief and caution” in an interview with Justice Info.
“Relief because by being excluded from the process to become Attorney General for a third time, Porras receives the message that justice cannot be used as a tool for selective persecution, and it sets a limit for her,” he said. And caution as he believes that no major changes can happen in the short term because “the Attorney General's Office is weakened, has lost the public's trust, and lower-ranking prosecutors have stopped investigating certain cases for fear of prosecution”.
Against the remaining uncertainty, Porras's exit nevertheless opens a window of hope for those in exile and those facing politically motivated charges. It may allow for an investigation into the accusations that the institution was used to benefit powerful figures linked to corruption while weaponizing its machinery against human rights defenders.
The Assembly of Social Organizations, an umbrella organization that brings together around 35 NGOs, said in a statement on April 27 that the new Attorney General must “restore public trust” and have the capacity to evaluate the institution in order to make decisions that strengthen it. As the new Attorney General takes office only a year before Guatemala's general elections, the political context for the resumption of the fight against corruption and impunity for past crimes from the judicial institutions may not be too promising.
