SAN SALVADOR – Facing the risk of losing their freedom or life has led judges and prosecutors in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to decide to leave their countries of origin and take refuge in others where they can start from scratch.
A year and a half ago, Juan Francisco Sandoval was still the special prosecutor against impunity in Guatemala. Today he lives in Washington, the US capital, where he arrived without a job or knowing how to speak English. Despite his exile, the Guatemalan government continues to claim him.
“They considered it a mistake to have allowed me to leave because if they had me detained, I would not have the window that has given me to be outside to speak,” he said in an interview with the voice of america.
Sandoval has four arrest warrants and one extradition request approved by a Guatemalan judge. In the Central American country, he is accused of hindering criminal proceedings and breach of duty, as well as influence peddling when he held the position of prosecutor.
But the conditions in which he left his country —without saying goodbye to his family and with what he had on hand— put the international community on alert about what they say today is a “regression” in the rule of law in Guatemala.
“Former colleagues and my own family recommended that I leave. ‘If they are looking for you, the first place they are going to try to locate you is your house,’ they told me. For that reason, I went out with only the clothes I was wearing. My colleagues and my friends bought me clothes later,” added Sandoval.
Ana María Dardón, director for Central America at the Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (WOLA), said there is a “hunt” for jurists in Guatemala. “There is a wave of criminalization and attacks on justice operators,” she told the voice of america.
According to Dardón, 35 Guatemalans are in exile, including former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, an asylum seeker in the United States for three years and who has three arrest warrants issued by the Guatemalan authorities.
A similar case was that of former judge Erika Aifán, who after being awarded by the United States with the “Mujer Coraje” award for her role in cases of illegal electoral financing and drug trafficking, resigned and fled.
The same has happened to former judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez, known in Guatemala for sending former President Otto Pérez Molina and former Vice President Roxana Baldetti to trial. Gálvez resigned from his position from exile at the end of 2022.
The exiles of El Salvador
The first plenary session of the Congress of El Salvador on May 1, 2021 was a nightmare for many: the majority of the deputies agreed to dismiss the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber, whose term lasted until 2027.
Rodolfo González was one of the dismissed jurists. A year and a half later, the former magistrate confirmed to the voice of america who is in exile.
González, known as one of the “Fantastic Four” for opening military files from the time of the armed conflict in El Salvador, was one of the most critical voices against what he considered a “coup” against the country’s judiciary.
Another of the best-known cases of exile in the Central American country is that of the lawyer and human rights defender Bertha María Deleón.
Deleon was a lawyer for Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and later an opposition political candidate. At the end of 2021, she decided to go into exile with her daughter in Mexico. The fact became known after the El Salvador Prosecutor’s Office accused her of deprivation of liberty and child abuse.
“I decided not to return to the country, especially because of the specific threat of being deprived of liberty due to absurd criminal accusations, several coming from followers or people close to Nayib Bukele. I decided not to return because although our justice system has historically been fragile, since May 1, 2021 there are no judicial guarantees, ”he said in a release posted on March 8, 2022.
Deleon became a spokesperson for what she called authoritarian measures in the Bukele government. Today she is in exile with precautionary measures issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Likewise, Germán Arriaza, who headed the anti-corruption unit within the attorney general’s office in El Salvador, said that his team collected documentary and photographic evidence that the Bukele governmentreached an agreement with the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs and Barrio 18 in 2019 to reduce murder rates and help the ruling Nuevas Ideas party win legislative elections in February.
In an interview with the agency Reuters, the former prosecutor confirmed that he decided to go into exile hours after the new attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado, prohibited him from accessing his office and his computer. Arriaza was a prosecutor for 18 years in El Salvador.
The Honduran case
The era of Xiomara Castro as head of the Honduran presidency brought with it the return of Ramón Sabillón, who was director of the Police.
In 2014, Sabillón fled the Central American country after ordering the capture of the Valle Valle brothers, designated by the United States as drug traffickers.
That capture led him into exile in Costa Rica and then in the United States, after being ousted by former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is in the US where he was extradited on drug trafficking charges.
Today, Sabillón is the minister of the Honduran Secretary of Security.
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