Guatemala’s corruption conundrum
Today, Explained
Vox
4.3 • 10.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2019
⏱️ 22 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Support for this broadcast of today's explain comes from the good people at KiwiCo. KiwiCo |
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| 0:15.6 | of all ages, by the way. Visit KiwiCo.com slash explained. |
| 0:20.3 | I'm Daniel Alarcone of Radeon Blente, filling in for Sean, Ramas firm. |
| 0:31.4 | Guatemala is gearing up to elect their next president this Sunday. The only problem is their candidates |
| 0:36.3 | keep getting disqualified, arrested and threatened. There's something like 20 candidates for the |
| 0:40.9 | presidency, you know, more parties than you could possibly count. Jonathan Blitzer has been |
| 0:46.0 | covering it for the New Yorker and he says this election really comes down to one thing. Basically, |
| 0:50.8 | as I've sort of tried to report on it and as I've come to understand it, the election is a whole |
| 0:55.5 | boils down to this very pointed question about corruption and anti-corruption efforts in the |
| 1:00.6 | country. And there has been an internationally backed and US-funded anti-corruption body that's |
| 1:06.9 | been extremely successful called the Seseeg, which has for the last several years brought forward |
| 1:13.2 | hundreds of prosecutions against corrupt politicians from all political parties. And recently within |
| 1:19.1 | the last two years or so, the president of Guatemala has started to attack this anti-corruption body, |
| 1:25.8 | largely because he and his family have come under investigation. This is the comedian. This is |
| 1:30.2 | the comedian who no longer tells funny jokes. |
| 1:43.2 | And Morales has systematically attacked and tried to dismantle this body. And he's been more or less |
| 1:49.0 | kept it bay by the courts, but only to an extent. And so he has really chipped away the authority of |
| 1:54.4 | this body. And so when you look at the elections later this month, there are of all of the candidates |
| 2:01.5 | really only one major candidate who had supported this anti-corruption body. Her name is Del Maldana. |
| 2:08.8 | She had been the attorney general for four years in Guatemala and was the lead prosecutor in a |
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