Cheers Erupt As Guatemala Paves Way to Arrest School of the Americas-Trained President Perez Molina

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina speaking at the inaugural session of the 46th OAS Special General Assembly in September 2014. (Photo: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS via flickr)

Guatemala’s Congress on Tuesday voted unanimously to strip President Otto Pérez Molina of his immunity from prosecution over corruption charges in a case that one journalist says should ultimately lead to charging U.S. sponsors of the country’s notorious massacres of Indigenous communities.

Univision reports that hundreds of people cheered the decision and set off fireworks.

A judge on Tuesday also slapped an order on Perez Molina, a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, barring him from travel.

Xeni Jardin writes at BoingBoing that it is “[a] popular movement led by indigenous and working class people [that] brought justice to the office of the president himself, a man who belongs in prison for self-dealing, and for his part in the mass murders of entire villages full of innocents in the 1980s.”

But the charges he now faces are not for those deaths. As Agence France-Presse reports: “Investigators say Perez masterminded a system in which businesses could bribe corrupt officials to clear their imports through customs at a fraction of the actual tax rate.”

“In the eyes of the justice system he is now a common citizen given he no longer has immunity, and so there will be a criminal prosecution against the president,” Prosecutor Thelma Aldana told a news conference Tuesday.

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