The sabotage of President Donald Trump’s deal with Guatemala to alleviate the illegal immigration crisis is part of a broader problem involving pervasive corruption in the Central American nation and embedded leftists in the U.S. State Department’s Western Hemisphere Division.
With a compromised electoral system and a presidential election looming in Guatemala, the impoverished nation of about 16 million could easily slide into the Cuban or Venezuelan camp of failed socialist countries. Socialist Sandra Torres, a former Guatemalan first lady and radical leftist guerrilla, could become the country’s next president.
Why should Americans be concerned? Because Guatemala is essentially the United States’ southern border, given Mexico’s status as a failed narco-state with its first leftist president (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) in decades. Torres will run off against conservative Alejandro Giammattei in August and if she wins, many believe her leftist administration will sink the country back into civil war.
That will likely translate into more illegal immigrants heading north, even though hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans have already been apprehended at the U.S. border since outgoing President Jimmy Morales, a conservative populist, took power in 2016. Before Morales’s victory marked a renewal of conservatism and pro U.S.-sentiment in the country, Guatemala rejected a resurgence of leftwing leaders throughout Latin America by electing former General Otto Pérez Molina to the presidency. Guatemalans apparently learned a lesson after electing their first leftwing president in half a century in 2007, Álvaro Colom, whose tenure was plagued by rampant corruption.
A recent poll conducted by Gallup Latinoamerica shows that Giammattei, a medical doctor who ran Guatemala’s prison system, leads Torres 40.6% to 33.4%. But government officials and other activists in Guatemala tell Judicial Watch the country’s electoral system is totally compromised and extremely vulnerable to fraud.
They worry that a rigged Torres victory, with the support of U.S. Ambassador Luis E. Arreaga, will be disastrous for the country. Arreaga’s predecessor, Obama appointee Todd Robinson, also colluded with leftist forces—including a key figure for the violent Marxist guerrilla known as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)— to illegally promote changes to the Guatemalan constitution.
Little has changed since the Trump administration replaced Robinson with Arreaga, according to knowledgeable sources in Guatemala’s private and public sector. Arreaga was called to Washington D.C. in the aftermath of the failed third country asylum debacle, according to Guatemalan media, but no further details have been made available. High-level government sources in the country say Arreaga is a leftist who is doing everything possible to subvert and sabotage the Trump administration’s efforts to collaborate with the country in several key areas. Most important among them is immigration.
This week Trump was scheduled to meet Morales in Washington to sign an agreement making Guatemala a buffer zone by temporarily absorbing illegal immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. Guatemala’s Constitutional Court reportedly blocked Morales from going through with the deal, but other forces were at play behind the scenes. A top Guatemalan government source said the U.S. State Department collaborated with local leftist groups to kill the planned safe country asylum deal between Trump and Morales. Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the State Department seeking all records related to the planned meeting between Trump and Morales as well as information involving the proposed safe third country agreement.
In the last year Judicial Watch has exposed the U.S. government’s outrageous financial and political support of leftist forces in Guatemala. Specifically, the government uses taxpayer dollars to back leftwing billionaire George Soros’ radical globalist agenda in the Central American nation. In a special investigative report Judicial Watch provides in detail the connection between U.S.-funded entities and Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) to further the Hungarian philanthropist’s efforts in Guatemala.
The goal is to advance a radical globalist agenda through “lawfare” and political subversion, the report shows. The American taxpayer dollars flow through the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID), which works closely with the State Department and receives foreign policy guidance from the agency and Secretary of State.
