Otto Pérez Molina

Otto Pérez Molina was president of Guatemala from January 2012 until he resigned on 2 September 2015 and was in a cell the next day. He was the retired general who had won on the iron fist and who was brought down by the UN commission he had promised to keep, the CICIG, and by the largest demonstrations the country had seen. There were twenty Saturdays of them in the capital's central square through the summer of 2015. The commission had revealed in April that the customs service was a bribery machine called La Línea, in which importers paid half the duty to officials instead of the whole to the state, and that the telephone intercepts led to the vice-president, Roxana Baldetti, who resigned in May, and to the man the intercepts called number one. Congress lifted his immunity on 1 September by a vote of a hundred and thirty-two to nothing. He resigned the next day. He spent the next eight years in custody, convicted in December 2022 and sentenced to sixteen years. The election of 2015 was won, a week after his fall, by a comedian. The presidency before the fall was the four years he had promised. There were the army back on the streets, the murder rate down from thirty-nine to thirty, the proposal, made at the UN in 2012 and to nobody's expectation, to legalise drugs, and the genocide trial of Ríos Montt in 2013, which he had said was not genocide because he had been there. He had been there. He was a Kaibil officer in the Ixil triangle in 1982 under the name Major Tito, the head of military intelligence under Serrano, the man who helped remove Serrano in 1993, and the army's signatory on the peace accords of 1996. That was the career he ran on. He was born in Guatemala City and founded the Patriotic Party in 2001. He lost to Colom in 2007 and won in 2011 against Manuel Baldizón. The bishop Gerardi's murder in 1998, two days after the church published its report on the army, is a thing his name has never quite been separated from.

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