Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — A court in Guatemala convicted former President Otto Pérez Molina and his vice president, Roxana Baldetti, on fraud and conspiracy counts Wednesday.

Their sentences have yet to be announced. Both were acquitted of illegal enrichment charges.

Pérez Molina and Baldetti resigned in 2015 and have been in custody on charges of permitting and benefiting from a customs graft scheme known as La Linea, or “The Line.”

The scheme involved a conspiracy to defraud the state by letting businesses evade import duties in exchange for bribes.

GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 11 (NNN-PRENSA LATINA) – Guatemalan President, Alejandro Giammattei, declared a state of calamity yesterday, to address the damage caused by tropical storm Julia, now downgraded to a tropical depression.

The decision, made during a cabinet meeting, will be sent to congress for ratification in the coming days, the president said, on social media.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Former Hurricane Julia has dissipated, but is still drenching Guatemala and El Salvador with torrential rains Monday after it reemerged in the Pacific following a pounding of Nicaragua.

At least 28 people were reported dead as a direct or indirect result of the storm.

Guatemala’s disaster prevention agency said five people died after a hillside collapsed on their house in Alta Verapaz province, burying them. And in Huehuetenango province, near Mexico, nine people died, including a soldier killed while performing rescue work.

HUEHUETENANGO, Guatemala (AP) — Guatemalan authorities arrested more than a dozen alleged members of a migrant smuggling network near the shared border with Mexico early Tuesday, including four sought by the United States in connection with the death of a migrant in Texas in 2021.

The arrests came a month after 53 migrants, including 21 Guatemalans, died in a failed smuggling attempt when they were abandoned inside a sweltering trailer in San Antonio, Texas. There was no indication those arrested Tuesday were involved in the San Antonio tragedy.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador started a lightning, five-day tour to four Central American countries and Cuba on Thursday, stopping first in neighboring Guatemala.

Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard wrote in his social media accounts that meetings with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and other officials focused on development, migration and strengthening bilateral ties.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Eager to show it’s trying to slow the steady flow of its people north to the United States, Guatemala recently tripled prison sentences for migrant smugglers.

The day after Guatemala’s legislature approved the measure in February, 18-year-old Yashira Hernández left her home near the Mexican border for the trip north — hiring a smuggler to help.

A month later, Hernández was back, deported from the U.S., fretting over her family’s debt and contemplating a second attempt — again with her smuggler.

Guatemala City, Mar 1 (AP) Health authorities in Guatemala say over a million doses of the Russian Sputnik coronavirus vaccine have expired, because nobody wanted to take the shot.

Francisco Coma, the country's health minister, said Monday that there was a rejection among the population toward the vaccine, even though a lot of Guatemalans remain unvaccinated.

GUATEMALA CITY, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Guatemalan authorities working with the U.S. Homeland Security agency on Friday arrested 10 people in raids against a migrant smuggling group linked to the massacre of 19 people in Mexico last year, Guatemalan officials said.

Guatemala's Public Prosecutor's Office said 19 raids were being carried out in the western town of Comitancillo to dismantle the human smuggling network that took the Guatemalan migrants to Mexico.

"An operation is underway," said Juan Luis Pantaleon, spokesperson for the Public Prosecutor's Office.

GUATEMALA CITY, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Guatemala asked a group of international donors, including the United States and United Kingdom, to avoid meddling in its election for attorney general, a powerful anti-corruption office in the Central American nation.

Guatemala has come under scrutiny by the international community over anti-graft efforts. The United States last month said it was concerned that Guatemala's fight against corruption had not advanced enough. Rampant corruption is considered a major factor driving an uptick in U.S.-bound migration from Central America.

15 Oct 2021; MEMO: Israeli authorities have stopped dozens of Jewish families of the Lev Tahor ultra-Orthodox sect from fleeing to Iran where they had applied for asylum.

"Israel and the U.S. are working to prevent members of an extremist ultra-Orthodox sect from moving to Iran, amid fears they could be used as a bargaining chip by Tehran," the Times of Israel newspaper reported, noting that the group; which is anti-Zionist, applied for political asylum in 2018.