Alfonso Portillo
Alfonso Portillo was president of Guatemala from January 2000 to January 2004, the candidate of Ríos Montt's party who won the election of December 1999 with sixty-eight per cent in the run-off against Berger, having told the voters that a man who had killed two men in Mexico in self-defence, as he had, could be trusted to defend them. He was extradited to New York in 2013 and pleaded guilty to laundering two and a half million dollars of Taiwanese bribes through American banks. He was the first Guatemalan president convicted anywhere. He was born in Zacapa, studied economics in Mexico, where in 1982 he shot two students dead in a quarrel in Guerrero and fled. He taught, came home in 1989, and was a Christian Democrat deputy and then Ríos Montt's man when the general, barred from the presidency as a former coup leader, needed a candidate who was not. The four years were the general's party in the palace with the general in the Congress. There were the peace accords of 1996 kept on paper, the army budget raised, and the Ríos Montt loyalists in the ministries. There were the Guatemalan bishop Gerardi's murderers, three army officers, convicted in 2001 in the one trial that went ahead, and the compensation programme for the war's victims begun. There were the tax pact, the murder rate rising, and the corruption that the country called the government of the moreno, his own word. There were the sale of the state's banks' deposits, the defence ministry's missing millions, the Taiwanese embassy's cheques, and the jueves negro of July 2003, when the party bused its supporters into the capital to burn tyres and beat the press until the constitutional court let Ríos Montt stand for president, which he did and came third. He fled to Mexico the week his immunity ended in January 2004. He was extradited to Guatemala in 2008, acquitted there in 2011 of embezzling the defence ministry's money, and extradited to New York in May 2013 on the laundering charge, pleaded guilty in March 2014, and was sentenced to five years and ten months. He came home in February 2015 to a party that no longer existed. He stood for Congress in 2019 and lost. He is the president the American courts got when the Guatemalan ones did not. The country's prosecutors took that as the pattern for the next decade.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, economist, politician
