Morales has few accomplishments after first five months as Guatemala's president.
| Autor | Reynolds, Louisa |
Five months after his inauguration, President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala, a former comedian who came to power promising to stamp out a deeply ingrained political culture of graft and corruption, has little to show for his time in office. Morales won a landslide victory in October 2015 with the slogan "neither corrupt nor a thief" (NotiCen, Nov. 5, 2015), which successfully exploited voters' disaffection with the political establishment in the wake of a massive corruption scandal that landed former president Otto Perez Molina, and his vice president, Roxana Baldetti, in jail.
A number of controversial appointments and actions have already taken a toll on Morales' public image. The first scandal that cast doubt over his claim that he was determined to stamp out corruption hit the headlines in late January, when the investigative journalism website Nomada revealed that the newly elected president and his family had spent three months in a luxury hotel before Morales' inauguration on Jan. 14, paid for by the Kong family, one of Guatemala's wealthiest clans. The Kongs own an African palm exporting company that faces an international lawsuit for failing to comply with labor standards established by the DR-CAFTA agreement. Morales said he had been forced to live there before moving into the presidential palace when he and his family received death threats.
Shortly afterwards, Morales came under fire from civil society organizations for choosing Judge Dina Josefina Ochoa as a magistrate of the Constitutional Court (CC), Guatemala's highest court. Following the procedure established under Guatemalan law, the five members of the CC are selected by the executive, Congress, the Guatemalan Bar Association, the Supreme Court, and the University of San Carlos. Morales' decision to appoint Judge Ochoa was controversial because in 2012 she was included in a report on corrupt judges published by the UN-funded International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comision Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, CICIG), even though the commission later stated that the file on Judge Ochoa had been closed.
Then, in April, Morales was heavily criticized for reneging on his campaign pledge not to accept deputies from parties tainted by corruption scandals when he allowed 16 deputies from other parties to defect to his own Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN). The move came days before a new law penalizing deputies who constantly switch from one party to...
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