Mac Margolis writes: At the height of the commodities bonanza, Latin Americans seemed willing to shrug at officials with sticky hands. Tolerance is thinking as regional gross domestic product is expected to expand by just 0.4 percent this year, the worst performance since 2009.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is mired in a political payola scheme that has pillaged the state oil company, sent a moguls and politicians to prison and put her own job on the line. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet is in a corner, and Mexico’s Enrique Pena Nietro may already have succumbed to a graft and influence peddling scandal that has tainted the president, his wife, the finance minister and government contractors.
And yet of all the Latin leaders under scrutiny, Perez Molina seems closest to the brink. Five of his cabinet ministers and the ambassador to the United Nations had resigned over the customs scheme, which comptrollers believe defrauded Guatemala of more than $300,000 a month. His vice president is in jail.
A green light from a parliamentary committee, the full congress will weigh stripping Perez Molina of his executive immunity, which could land him in a court of common law.
What happens from there is less certain in Guatemala’s lopsided justice system, where political manipulation and powerful interests often prevail, at times threatening to convert the country into an almost Mafia state.
Consider generalissimo Efrain Rios Montt, the former dictator who was condemned for genocide by a special court in 2013, saw that verdict overturned on a technicality days later.
Perez Molina, a respected former general, made no secret of his distaste for the prosecution of Rios Montt, whom he served during the bloody Guatemalan civil war and credited with rescuing the country from chaos. Still, he had taken care to avoid interfering directly in court decisions.
Faith in his impartiality was shaken last year when the constitutional court ruled abruptly to shorten the mandate of the Attorney General Paz, a combative prosecutor who was key to bringing his former comandante to justice.
Whatever lingering prestige Perez Molina might have enjoyed, it now has evaporated in the heat of the customs scandal.
Cartoon by Fernando Llera