The scandal prompted the resignations of the police director and the security minister. CICIG started operating a few weeks later, but officials soon realized that the organization would accomplish little unless it purged both the attorney-general’s office and the police department. Perez Molina’s predecessor, President Álvaro Colom, found hidden cameras and microphones in his office: his own security personnel were spying on him.
Claudia Paz y Paz, a lawyer with a long career in human-rights work, was appointed attorney general in 2010. With the help of CICIG, she started dismissing prosecutors with dubious records. Since Paz y Paz started her work, more than thirty drug rings, gang cliques, and other criminal operations have been dismantled, and more than a hundred public officials have been charged with crimes.
When I met Paz y Paz, in 2012, she was extraditing high-level drug dealers to the United States. She had been receiving death threats, and I had to go through several security checks to reach her office in downtown Guatemala City. I asked her if, given the fact that these drug barons had committed crimes in Guatemala, sending them to the United States was an admission that the Guatemalan system was too weak to deal with them. “Of course, that’s exactly what it is,” she told me