CICIG recently announced that one of its main priorities during its remaining two years was to uncover the links between organized crime and political campaigns. CICIG is going to be looking into campaign financing which should make just about every political party uneasy and every citizen happy. However, the announcement sounded somewhat odd given what we thought that they had been doing for the last six years.
Yesterday, President Otto Perez Molina reiterated that CICIG instead should focus on mayors with ties to narcotrafficking. Vice President Roxanna Baldetti made that suggestion just a few days ago. They do not believe that CICIG has enough time and resources to complete its current investigations, help with transforming the country's legal institutions, and open a new front in the war on political party financing. I am sure VP Baldetti probably just does not want CICIG investigating her.
Investigating narcotrafficking's relationship with municipal government and campaign financing are both important areas that need attention from CICIG. If I had to choose, I would follow CICIG's lead and go big. CICIG will probably have more success investigating individual mayors and their connections to drug trafficking and organized crime but when it comes to transforming the system in Guatemala, there's no better place to start to learning where all the political contributions are coming from and what they are buying.
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