Bogotá, 3 June (EFE) – Colombian Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo rejected on Tuesday the arrest warrant issued against her by a Guatemalan Court of Appeals related to her work with the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
“We are seeing that the fight against corruption and organized crime, both in and outside Guatemala, is generating an unprecedented counterattack,” she said at a press conference.
Camargo asserted that she is confident of her innocence and that the warrant responds to “politically biased allegations.”
She also pointed out that there is no international arrest warrant and that it will not be issued given that the Guatemalan government has rejected the Public Ministry’s request.
On Monday, the Guatemalan Court of Appeals issued arrest warrants for two former CICIG : former Defense Minister and Ambassador to the Vatican, Ivan Velásquez, and former Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo.
The warrants allege irregularities in the Odebrecht case related to company bribery of state officials.
The arrest request was made by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, whose leadership has been sanctioned by the United States on corruption charges and for attempting to overturn the 2023 election results that brought Bernardo Arévalo to the presidency.
Between 2014 and 2019, the CICIG dismantled over a hundred corruption structures within the state, most of which were led by politicians, businesspeople, and officials, including former President Otto Pérez Molina (2012–2015), imprisoned for a million-dollar corruption scandal.
Camargo, who headed CICIG’s Investigation and Litigation Department between 2014 and 2017, described the court’s decision as a flagrant violation of the agreement between the United Nations and the Guatemalan government, which establishes that CICIG foreign officials have immunity.
“The court’s ruling disregards the parameters of international law and human rights, lacks legal basis, and jeopardizes collaboration between countries and international organizations in the fight against impunity, corruption, and the criminal activities that undermine democracies,” she said.
She also recalled that last month, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite, had warned of “serious institutional concerns” regarding the leadership of the Guatemalan Attorney General, mentioning a pattern of intimidation and silencing of human rights defenders and anti-corruption campaigners. EFE
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