The United States Congress updated the Engel list with 60 new actors, including officials and former officials from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua involved in anti-democratic processes and acts of corruption.
“These are foreign nationals who the President has determined have knowingly participated in actions that undermine democratic processes or institutions; in significant corruption; and in obstructing investigations into acts of corruption, including the following: corruption related to government contracts; bribery and extortion; the facilitation or transfer of corruption, including through money laundering; and acts of violence, harassment, or intimidation directed at government and non-government corruption investigators,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee report states.
For El Salvador there are six indicated. Among these, three officials from the government of Nayib Bukele, the legal adviser to the presidency, Javier Argueta; the press secretary of the presidency, Ernesto Sanabria; and the head of the New Ideas caucus, Christian Guevara.
Likewise, the mayor of the department of San Miguel for the Nuevas Ideas-GANA political movement, Wilfredo Salgado, whom the United States points out to be involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.
Also included are former official René Figueroa and his wife Cecilia de Figueroa, accused of diverting 3 million dollars of public funds during the government of Antonio Saca, currently imprisoned for the embezzlement of 300 million dollars.
From Guatemala, the list includes José Rafael Curruchiche, head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity (FECI), the most mediatic office of the Public Ministry. Curruchiche was appointed to replace Juan Francisco Sandoval, who was removed in 2021.
Two magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice, Nery Oswaldo Medina and Vitalina Orellana, also stand out for “undermining democratic institutions.” Also, the former rector of the University of San Carlos, Carlos Gálvez and several businessmen.
In Honduras, the list reaches 15: three are officials and other former officials of the government of José Porfirio Lobo. Rasel Antonio Tome Flores, vice president of Congress, stands out from the list, whom the United States points out as incurring “in significant corruption when he used his position as president of the National Telecommunications Commission to embezzle approximately $327,000 in public funds.”
Edgardo Antonio Casaña, deputy of the Honduran Congress, also appears. Likewise, Enrique Alberto Flores, a former Honduran government official who was exiled in Nicaragua and returned to his country of origin after the Amnesty Law in Honduras came into force.
Of those identified in Nicaragua, the majority are judges and prosecutors who, according to the United States, “undermined democratic processes or institutions” under the government of Daniel Ortega.
What is the Engel list?
The ‘Engel List’ emerged in 2019 at the initiative of former Democratic congressman from New York, Eliot Engel.
Engel proposed legislation to “support the people of Central America and strengthen the national security of the United States by addressing the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” reads the summary of the law.
Since the approval of the legislation by the plenary session of Congress on December 22, 2020, it falls to the Secretary of State and the machinery of the State Department to detail the investigations to comply with the mandate to include those figures in the three countries linked to acts of corruption or attacks on democracy.
In 2021, Congress received two lists of “corrupt and undemocratic” characters.
The most notorious cases have been those of five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador, who assumed the title of the highest judicial instance on May 1 outside the process mandated by the Salvadoran Constitution, after the party’s legislative caucus Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele deposed the incumbents three years before their term ended.
The Attorney General of Guatemala, Consuelo Porras, and the Secretary General of the Guatemalan Public Ministry, Ángel Pineda, have also been named.
Porras, despite appearing on the 2021 Engel list, was chosen in May of this year by the Guatemalan government as the attorney general for the next four years.
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