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Hector Silva published this article in the Prensa Comunitaria the day before Jose Ruben Zamora was sentenced to 6 years in jail.
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Photo: EPA-EFE
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Like thousands of Guatemalans before him, over the past few years alone, Jose Ruben Zamora has been criminalized and jailed by the U.S., Canadian and western-backed “covenant of the corrupt”, ‘open-for-global-business’ regime in power – considered a “democratic allie”.
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Jose Ruben Zamora, Enemy Number One
By Hector Silva, June 14, 2023
https://prensacomunitaria.org/2023/06/el-enemigo-numero-uno/
The group of ultra-right politicians, businessmen and activists that have hijacked the State in Guatemala decided to annihilate everything long ago.
They decided to kill democracy, due process, and the possibility of fair elections in order to install, once again, a regime of terror in which it is clear to those who raise their voices that the only possible destinies, when defying them, are jail, death or exile.
Today, this group culminates the relentless persecution it undertook against Jose Ruben Zamora, the former director of elPeriódico and one of the journalists who exposed the corruption of those who are now persecuting him.
Today, this group - which like a cancer has invaded the presidency of the republic, the Congress, the courts, the Public Ministry and all the State's comptroller entities - will toast in their caves, in their offices and lairs for the triumph achieved.
Today, prosecutors, plaintiffs and corrupt people, even a Kazakh miner, will raise their glasses after the Guatemalan courts, that reek themselves of criminal cronyism, sentence Zamora to many years in prison. We did it, they will say; we put the journalist who denounced us out of circulation for a long time and, with that, we put terror in the bones of all the others, those who want to continue denouncing us, they will boast while they pat each other.
Today we annihilated our enemy, will be the battle cry that will follow on their Twitter accounts.
And this day, when the sentence is finally known, we will know that Guatemala's democracy will have gone back 30, 40, 50 years; that it will have returned to the dark ages in which the counterinsurgency mentality, fed by the hallucinated fears of the military and businessmen, worked to annihilate the internal enemy, in this case journalism.
A cursory review of this judicial pantomime, that is the criminal case against Jose Ruben Zamora, is enough to understand that the whole thing is a farce, a simulation of justice that pretends to give the appearance of legality to something that is nothing more than political revenge and an act of state terrorism.
The whole case is based on the accumulation of supposed evidence, all illegally obtained, on a witness with no credibility and on a rigged process that even prevented the accused from presenting witnesses in his defense.
Cinthia Monterroso, the prosecutor in charge of executing this persecution in court, never had any qualms in telling the country and the world that this was an operation of revenge, of political persecution. When she had to justify her actions in the final argument against Zamora, the prosecutor could not go beyond the conditional to describe the alleged actions of the journalist: not even she bought the accumulation of lies that she brought to the court. But that, in this country and in these courts, does not matter.
Even after closing the case for which Zamora is about to be sentenced, Monterroso went and crowned the absurdity by accusing the journalist of forgery for signatures he had stamped on the customs forms that are filled out when entering Guatemala.
Whoever has filled out those papers knows that nobody reads them, that they are filled out because they have to be handed in, in at a mechanical act at La Aurora airport or at the borders... What next? Prosecute Zamora because Monterroso or her bosses don't like the color of his shoes?
Monterroso is just a pawn who moves according to the decisions of her immediate boss, the ineffable Rafael Curruchiche, or the boss of both, Mrs. Consuelo Porras, or the Foundation Against Terrorism, a private plaintiff who, in practice, acts as the coordinator of all accusations in the office of the Attorney General.
There is no happy ending to this story. There is no happy ending for Jose Ruben Zamora and his family, who for more than two decades have been fearing a bullet, a car accident, a kidnapping, a revenge.
There is no happy answer for the Guatemala of the Monterroso, Porras, Curruchiche, Méndez Ruiz and [President] Giammattei whose persecution of all those he considers enemies will continue after the next election.
And there is none for Central America, which continues to see tyrants triumphing again in its big sister to the north.
Back in 2014, when I met him at an academic event in Washington, DC, Jose Ruben Zamora was talking about the narco-kleptocracy that had taken over his country.
Those were the years of Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti, when public looting reached spectacle levels, and Zamora and his newspaper were denouncing those corrupt acts as they had been doing since elPeriódico was founded after the signing of the Guatemalan peace agreement in 1996.
I remember that day, Zamora said this to the audience: journalism is a citizen's tool. In 2015, shortly after that meeting, Guatemala took to the streets to remove the looters in power.
But all that would be short-lived. In 2016 Jimmy Morales arrived and with him came the businessmen, politicians and criminals who, in record time, made their lists of enemies and rearranged everything they had to rearrange in the State to annihilate them. With Morales came Consuelo Porras, and then came Alejandro Giammattei.
And Jose Ruben Zamora was there to tell and explain the excesses of all of them. And to do so, he hung on by his fingernails to his newspaper which was also the newspaper of dozens of Guatemalan journalists who investigated power from there.
Related directly to [President] Giammattei, Zamora discovered the Russian bribes related to the Izabal [nickel] mines and use of the Santo Tomás de Castilla port, and discovered the role of Miguel Martínez in the government. That is why Giammattei made him his number one enemy, and that is why the MP and the others went on the rampage. That is why Jose Ruben Zamora awaits today an absurd and criminal sentence.
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