Former Guatemalan president faces US criminal charges in New York

Former Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo pleaded innocent to money laundering charges before a US federal judge in New York on Tuesday.

Portillo, who governed from 2000 to 2004, was extradited on May 24 from Guatemala City following a legal battle that lasted more than a year.

He was indicted on January 25, 2010 by a federal grand jury on charges of diverting some $80 million in aid that was later deposited in US bank accounts while he was president.

This is the first time that a former Latin American leader has been brought to the United States to face a criminal indictment since Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega was captured by US forces in 1990 and taken to Miami to face drug trafficking charges.

The 61-year-old appeared in the US District Court in Manhattan wearing a dress suit and speaking through an interpreter. His lawyer, David Rosenfield, called it “a clear case of over-reaching by the US Department of Justice and the US government.”

Portillo was acquitted in Guatemala in 2011 of diverting some $15 million from his country’s defense budget.

He was arrested in January 26, 2010 at the luxurious beach resort town of Izabel as he was trying to flee to neighboring Belize. His capture came just days after the United States requested his extradition.

His defense lawyers had tried to stop the extradition but the country’s Supreme Court had rejected three petitions to block the process.

Portillo, who governed under the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party, was indicted in his home country and extradited in 2008 from Mexico, where he had been living for four years after he fled the country when he left office. At the time of his capture in January 2010, Portillo was out on bail awaiting trial.

According to the charges lodged in the United States, Portillo diverted donations by the Taiwanese government from a program called “Libraries for Peace” to accounts in the United States controlled by his friends and family. His extradition was signed in 2011 by then-President Álvaro Colom before he left office and upheld by the Guatemala Supreme Court last year. He is being held at the Metropolitan Correction Center pending a bail hearing.

In another matter, the criminal case of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt remains in limbo after the three members of a judges’ panel that convicted the 87-year-old former general on genocide charges recused themselves as he faces another trial.

Guatemala’s Constitutional Count on Tuesday reaffirmed its May 20 decision to order the retrial of Ríos Montt base on a technicality. The former dictator, who ruled the country from 1982 to 1983, was convicted and sentenced on May 10 to 80 years in prison for the deaths of 1,771 Ixil Indians in a counter-insurgency campaign during the country’s brutal civil war.

The judges on the original panel announced that they were recusing themselves from presiding over the new proceedings because Ríos Montt’s lawyers continue to challenge their jurisdiction in the case. It will now be up to the country’s court of appeal to designate a new tribunal to retry the case.

Meanwhile, Ríos Montt, who is suffering from heart and prostate problems, is being held in custody at a military hospital as he awaits his new trial.