The former president of Guatemala Álvaro Colom (2008-2012), sanctioned for corruption in 2021 by the United States, died on Monday at the age of 71 for reasons that have not been clarified, former members of his cabinet reported.
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I regret his death and I join in praying for his eternal rest,” the former Minister of the Interior, Carlos Menocal (2010-2012), wrote on Twitter. without specifying further details of the death of the former president who was receiving treatment for esophageal cancer.
“A just man who dared to (make) the invisible visible (…). Goodbye, President Colom,” former presidential spokesman Fernando Barillas tweeted. The former president was sanctioned in July 2021 by Washington, which included him on the list of “corrupt and undemocratic actors” in the so-called Central American Northern Triangle, or Engel List.
The United States prohibited Colom from entering its territory after the courts indicted him in 2018 for alleged anomalies in a public transportation contract entered into during his administration for $35 million.
. “I regret the sensitive death of Álvaro Colom Caballeros, former president of Guatemala, who tonight was ahead of us on the journey to eternity,” the current Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei, said on social networks.
“To his family and friends I express my heartfelt condolences, may God comfort them in the face of such an irreparable loss,” added the president.
Corruption
The former president was charged by the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity for alleged anomalies in the prepaid system for a passenger service in the capital.
Colom was arrested along with several former ministers after a judge opened criminal proceedings in that case. The former president was released from prison after paying bail.
The case was also investigated by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN body that operated from 2007 to 2019 and that uncovered several high-impact corruption scandals.
Colom’s social democratic government was characterized by the implementation of social assistance programs such as conditional transfers and the delivery of food bags, several emulated from Brazil.
His ex-wife, Sandra Torres, will participate for the third time as a presidential candidate for the general elections on June 25. “May a noble man who always carried Guatemala in his heart rest in peace,” Torres said on Twitter.
Politics and divorce
Torres divorced Colom in 2011 to register as a candidate for the presidency in that year’s elections, seeking to circumvent a constitutional norm that prohibits the relatives of the current ruler from aspiring to public office, but the courts frustrated his intentions.
The former first lady has lost in presidential runoffs to Jimmy Morales (2016-2020) and Giammattei.
In 2019, she was arrested for alleged corruption in the finances of her National Unity of Hope (UNE) party, although the case was later closed.
Colom was an industrial engineer graduated from the University of San Carlos (USAC), the only public higher education institution in Guatemala. He was a textile businessman and official of various state entities and was a founder of UNE.
He entered politics in 1999 as a presidential candidate for a coalition made up of the newly created ex-guerrilla party that three years earlier had signed peace and put an end to 36 years of fratricidal war, which left 200,000 dead or missing.
In that election he came in third place. He participated again in 2003 and lost in the second round to the right-wing Óscar Berger (2004-2008). The presidency was reached in November 2007 after defeating retired General Otto Pérez, who won the country’s first magistracy in 2011, in the ballot.
Pérez, president from 2012 to 2015, was also affected by the investigations by the Prosecutor’s Office and the CICIG that accused him of being the ringleader of a customs scam that forced him to resign four months before leaving the presidential chair.
On December 8, Pérez, 72, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the millionaire fraud. The court also sentenced his former vice president, Roxana Baldetti, to an identical sentence for that case.
AFP
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