US court sentences former president of Guatemala to prison for taking bribes

[Judi Lynn]

US court sentences former president of Guatemala to prison for taking bribes

• Alfonso Portillo took $2.5m from Taiwan to recognise nation
• American judge sentences extradited Portillo to six years

Associated Press in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 22 May 2014 17.09 EDT

Guatemala's ex-president was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in prison for accepting bribes, as a US judge rejected leniency and said government corruption must be stamped out worldwide.

The $2.5m in bribes Alfonso Portillo admitted accepting from the government of Taiwan to continue to recognize the Asian nation diplomatically should be "bothersome to the government of Guatemala and all the other countries in the United Nations convention against corruption," US district judge Robert P Patterson said.

Patterson sentenced Portillo, 62, to a term of five years, 10 months – a month short of the top of federal sentencing guidelines. Rampant political corruption in some countries must be diminished "because it corrupts the political system of each of these countries", Patterson said.

"There's too much corruption," Patterson said.

Portillo was Guatemala's president from 2000 to 2004. He was extradited to the United States a year ago and remains in custody after pleading guilty to money laundering conspiracy in March.

~snip~
The prosecutor said the bribes also threatened the integrity of US banks because Portillo laundered the money through US financial institutions, making them "a vehicle for moving bad money".

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/22/guatemala-president-portillo-us-court-bribes-prison

[Louisiana1976]

1. A much-deserved punishment.

Pity there's no way Efr5ain Rios Montt can't be tried for genocide against the Maya in the US because Guatemala's courts fell down on the job.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Rios Montt did it all with Reagan's full awareness and his blessing. Horrendous.

Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line
Updated May 21, 2013, 1:54 PM


In 1966, the U.S. Army’s Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines summarized the results of a war game waged in a fictitious country unmistakably modeled on Guatemala. The rules allowed players to use “selective terror” but prohibited “mass terror.” “Genocide,” the guidelines stipulated, was “not an alternative.”

A decade and a half later, genocide was indeed an option in Guatemala, supported materially and morally by Ronald Reagan’s White House. Reagan famously took a hard line in Central America, coming under strong criticism for supporting the contras in Nicaragua and financing counterinsurgency in El Salvador.
Updated May 21, 2013, 1:54 PM

His administration’s actions in Guatemala are less well known, but even before his 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”

Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.

This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-does-the-us-bear-in-guatemala/guatemalan-slaughter-was-part-of-reagans-hard-line

[Judi Lynn]

3. He won't be doing any time for murdering 2 of his former students:

From an article published last year:

Alfonso Portillo, Former President Of Guatemala, Extradited To U.S. On Money Laundering Charges
By SONIA PEREZ DIAZ 05/24/13 09:49 PM ET EDT AP

In the U.S. case, Portillo allegedly deposited the money in Miami and transferred it to a Paris account in the name of his ex-wife and daughter.

Guatemala's highest court upheld the extradition last August after it was granted by former President Alvaro Colom as he left office in 2011.
Portillo has called the proceedings a political reprisal by powerful Guatemalan businessmen and the U.S. government for not bending to their interests. He has also said the court agreeing to his extradition constitutes a violation of his human rights.

Upon leaving office in 2004, Portillo fled to Mexico, where he began working as a financial adviser for a construction materials company.

He was extradited from Mexico to Guatemala in 2008 to face embezzlement charges at home.
Portillo was found not guilty in 2011 in Guatemala of charges that he stole $15 million from the country's Defense Department during his presidency.

In 2010, police captured Portillo at a beach preparing to flee Guatemala by boat, a day after U.S. authorities charged him with laundering money.

While running for president in Guatemala in 1999, Portillo acknowledged he had killed two of his former students while a professor in the Mexican state of Guerrero in 1982.
He said the killings were in self-defense and he fled the state because he could not get a fair trial. The case has since been closed, and he can no longer be charged in those killings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/24/alfonso-portillo-extradited-president-guatemala-us-money-laundering_n_3333344.html