By: Insight Crime
February 9, 2024
It was less than 12 hours after the new president of Guatemala had been sworn in that Ricardo Méndez Ruiz fired off his first challenge to the incoming government of President Bernardo Arévalo.
It was vintage Méndez Ruiz, who made his name as the head of the right-wing legal group, the Foundation Against Terrorism (Fundación Contra el Terrorismo – FCT). In a hastily filed legal appeal, the FCT alleged the new president of Congress, who is a member of Arévalo’s political party, should be barred from taking his leadership position.
He followed that up with a flurry of posts on X, formerly Twitter. Some were technical arguments or updates on the case. Others were online propaganda posters with words like “illegal” smeared in red over a diagram of the elected congressional leaders. Others were obscure quotes seeking to emasculate his enemies.
“Whoever does not know how to defend himself like a man, cries like a woman,” read one.
In his mind’s eye and to many of his supporters, he was like a soldier in a foxhole, firing off round after round of whatever ammunition he had within reach. But to his critics, he was more like a schoolyard bully, who exploited societal prejudices and trafficked in misinformation to undermine his rivals.
It had been a difficult few months for Méndez Ruiz. For years leading up to the 2023 elections, his lawsuits had helped drive dozens of top judicial officials into exile, or even to jail, amid calculated efforts to stall corruption investigations targeting Guatemala’s conservative elites and former military officers.
The FCT’s exploits had seen Méndez Ruiz become a powerful judicial crusader, but Arévalo’s shocking victory soon turned his world upside down. Arévalo quickly promised to reignite the country’s fight against graft and bring back prosecutors and judges targeted by the FCT.
Méndez Ruiz soon found himself on the sidelines, relegated to the role of cheerleader as more powerful factions of the conservative establishment sought to block Arévalo’s path to power.
But when those efforts failed – and Arévalo took office on January 15 – Méndez Ruiz retrenched and began his counterassault. The FCT’s appeal – one of five presented to Guatemala’s highest court – sought to block one of Arévalo’s closest allies who had been elected president of Congress. Two days later, the court ordered lawmakers to repeat the election.
It was a partial victory and marked the beginning of a new chapter in Méndez Ruiz’s quest for influence in the judicial sector. The battle was partly personal: His father was among those former military officials investigated for alleged wartime atrocities by prosecutors later targeted by the FCT; and investigators had once connected him to a multinational, illegal methamphetamine network.
But it was also political. For decades, powerful interests had disputed control of the Attorney General’s Office and the courts, which brought with it control of the country’s political trajectory and historical narrative. And Méndez Ruiz has been one of the most dedicated soldiers in this battle, never straying far from the front lines despite spending years in relative obscurity.
His swift return to the fray following Arévalo’s inauguration stands as a stark warning that, despite a change in government, the long battle for Guatemala’s political soul is far from over.
The Kidnapping
Méndez Ruiz has had many labels over the years: son of a prominent military general, veterinary student, exiled entrepreneur, importer/exporter, candidate for mayor. But his journey to judicial crusader began close to 10 a.m. on the morning of June 23, 1982.
On that day, the 22-year-old Méndez Ruiz was a student at the University of San Carlos, Guatemala’s only public university. As he and some other students took a break between classes, a white, four-door BMW – as he remembered it – pulled up alongside him. A group of men got out, surrounded him, cuffed his hands, and bundled him into the back of the car. No one said a word.
“They were very professional,” he recalled in an interview with InSight Crime. “They weren’t just anybody, they were no fools.”
Guatemala was then in the midst of a four-decades-long civil war that pitted the army against a variety of leftist rebel groups, and the kidnappers later identified themselves as members of the communist-inspired Guatemalan Workers’ Party (Partido Guatemalteco de los Trabajadores – PGT). They took Méndez Ruiz to a small, windowless room in a house. A single light dangled from the ceiling, he remembered. They sat him down on an old army cot and cuffed him to the bar at the head of what would become his chair, bed, and dining table for the next two months.
It was a long two months, and what got to him then, and what remains difficult for him to speak about now, was the loneliness. Méndez Ruiz, a lean man whose expansive collection of gray and dark suits compliments his thick head of silver hair, pristine mustache, and bushy eyebrows, is loquacious and has an infectious personality. But in that room, while there were two guards who took 12-hour shifts to keep an eye on him, they scarcely spoke to him. He had to turn away from them every time they came into the room to give him food scraps or help him with bathroom breaks.
Among the few things they did talk about was the World Cup, which Spain was hosting at the time. Méndez Ruiz said he is not a big soccer fan, but that one of the few things they could agree on was to root for Argentina, in part because the Argentines were then defying the British’s claim to the Falkland Islands. At their core, they were all anti-colonial. After all, Guatemala is for Guatemalans, as they say.
Méndez Ruiz’s kidnapping was a chess move in the wider war. The PGT had targeted him because his father, Ricardo Méndez Ruiz Rohrmoser, had become interior minister following a military coup led by General Efraín Ríos Montt in March 1982. In the months that followed, Ríos Montt’s army would lead a scorched-earth campaign against Indigenous populations, annihilating entire villages in what a Guatemalan Truth Commission report would later qualify as “acts of genocide.”
The guerrillas hoped to swap captured rebels for the interior minister’s son, but the elder Méndez Ruiz did not bite.
“With the pain that comes with the possibility that my son is uselessly sacrificed,” he said in a brief statement following the kidnapping, an anguished look across his face. “As a father, as a citizen, as a minister of the state, I am required to reject the cowardly blackmail of the Communist Party.”
For Méndez Ruiz, it was a defining moment. His father, the soldier, was separating his personal feelings from his public duty. It was an ethos, Méndez Ruiz told InSight Crime years later, that he has sought to emulate in his own public life.
About four weeks into the kidnapping, Méndez Ruiz’s captors told him he’d been tried and convicted by their revolutionary tribunal and that he was to be executed the next day. That night, he lay awake thinking about his father, mother, and girlfriend, and about how he would never have children. But morning came, and, to his surprise, no one mentioned the revolutionary tribunal.
A few weeks later, his captors ordered him to take a bath and shave. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a scrawny figure staring back. His hair hung over his forehead, and he had a patchy beard – akin to that of Che Guevara, in his words – that was covering his shrunken cheeks.
After putting on clean clothes, the guerrillas blindfolded him, bound his hands, and put him in a car. Around 6 p.m., they stopped, let him out, stuffed some loose change in his pocket, and took off the blindfold. The car sped off, and Méndez Ruiz sprinted towards his neighborhood.
“I think I would have won the Olympics,” he told InSight Crime years later.
Instead of going home, he said he went straight to his girlfriend’s house, who lived next to his family. But no one answered the door, so he went to his parents’ house, where he was welcomed by military personnel and the nanny. He then phoned his parents, who were with his uncle. His aunt picked up and started crying before passing the phone to his father.
How are you? his father asked, dispassionately.
I’m fine, he answered.
The Birth of the FCT
Guatemala’s civil war officially ended with a 1996 peace accord, but from that moment on, a new war began: a war for control over Guatemala’s state institutions, but also over narrative – over history itself. It was in this war that Méndez Ruiz would find his calling as a judicial provocateur and cultural warrior. And it was the kidnapping that would provide him with an entry point.
In November 2011, Méndez Ruiz went to the Attorney General’s Office alongside a prominent lawyer and former military officer named Moisés Galindo to file a criminal complaint against the 26 people they said were responsible for Méndez Ruiz’s abduction.
The complaint foreshadowed the strategy that would come to define the FCT: From the beginning, it was clear Méndez Ruiz was more worried about politics than justice.
Numerous people on the list were not linked to the case; others had died, and others were too young to have been part of the plan. In fact, none of the 26 people he and Galindo named in their complaint had actually participated in his kidnapping, Méndez Ruiz said in an interview with the now-defunct newspaper elPeriódico, reported in a Plaza Pública story in 2013. His real target, he admitted in the same interview, was Guatemala’s new attorney general at the time, Claudia Paz y Paz. “For God’s sake, I am pointing directly at her,” he told elPeriódico.
Paz y Paz was a human rights lawyer. Many of her relatives, who may have been in the guerrillas, were named in the complaint filed by Méndez Ruiz and Galindo. Paz y Paz had never been a guerrilla, but that mattered little to Méndez Ruiz. She had worked to document wartime atrocities with progressive Guatemalan non-governmental and human rights organizations, a bracket of society commonly dismissed as “communists” or “terrorists” by Méndez Ruiz and other far-right factions of Guatemala’s elites.
For Paz y Paz and many other Guatemalans – as well as the official truth commission set up to chronicle wartime atrocities – the military was responsible for around 90% of the thousands of war crimes committed during the civil war. But for staunch conservatives like Méndez Ruiz, the guerrillas were to blame. And even if there were some atrocities, the time for litigation had ended.
“The civil war was something we had left behind,” Méndez Ruiz vented when speaking to InSight Crime. “Claudia comes in, and she divides us again, she pushes us into confrontation.”
But Paz y Paz and others working to uncover the dark secrets of Guatemala’s recent past were not the only targets of Méndez Ruiz and his cohorts. There was also the supranational judicial body backed by the United Nations and funded largely by the US government, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad de Guatemala – CICIG).
Launched in 2007, the CICIG was tasked with the daunting mission of investigating and dismantling a web of elite corruption networks that had successfully captured the main branches of government.These groups, collectively termed the Illegal Clandestine Security Apparatuses (Cuerpos Ilegales y Aparatos Clandestinos de Seguridad – CIACS), were formed by powerful military intelligence officials who had cut their teeth in the civil war. When the war ended, they leveraged clout in politics to play puppet master from the shadows, employing clandestine tactics to arrest, murder, or disappear activists, even targeting top church officials who were investigating war crimes. Many considered the CIACS to be one of the blocs that represented the real power behind a string of Guatemalan presidents.
The CIACS also had allies in key justice institutions, pivotal to shielding military officials from prosecution over suspected wartime atrocities.
In other words, the CICIG had been brought in to deal with a dangerous, well-protected, and largely hidden bracket of Guatemala’s underworld that was actively seeking to undermine institutional progress and sustain the military’s influence in the post-war era. And in Paz y Paz it had a natural ally.
With his 2011 complaint to the Attorney General’s Office, Méndez Ruiz set himself up as an evocative counterweight to what he saw as a liberal agenda led by non-governmental organizations, the CICIG, Paz y Paz, and others like her in the judicial system, who he saw as a modern version of the guerrilla insurgency.
Within a year of filing that first complaint, he had formed an unofficial board, which included Galindo and five ex-military officers. And while Méndez Ruiz had never been in the military, he had long considered himself a dedicated patriot in the mold of his father. He did not grow up in a “military family,” he told InSight Crime, he grew up in a “family of a soldier.”
The board needed a name for their new organization. It has to be something impactful, they told each other at a meeting held in 2012. Something hard. Something strong…Who are we fighting against? All these NGO leaders were in terrorist organizations. The Foundation Against Terrorism. There. Let’s go with that name.
They voted, and the Foundation Against Terrorism was born.
A Precursor Chemical Network
In the beginning, Méndez Ruiz’s crusade was seen as a sideshow of sorts, and it was as personal as it was political.
Among his targets were prosecutors who had investigated his father, who had been a commander at an army training facility that investigators said had been converted into a clandestine cemetery where the remains of more than 500 people, many of whom had been illegally detained and disappeared, were found.
The CICIG, meanwhile, had embroiled Méndez Ruiz and his allies in its investigations. Early on, the CICIG filed a case against several lawyers that landed FCT co-founder Moisés Galindo in jail on money laundering charges. Another case they filed targeted some of Méndez Ruiz’s political allies and former military associates of his father. And around 2012, the CICIG began investigating a drug case that involved Méndez Ruiz and several people close to him.
InSight Crime spoke to the former CICIG investigators who led the probe and obtained several documents related to the case. While not at the center of the investigation, the documents alleged that Méndez Ruiz was connected to members of a network suspected of moving precursor chemicals through Nicaragua and Guatemala. The chemicals were to be used by Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel for the manufacturing of methamphetamine, according to the CICIG’s preliminary investigations.
One of the alleged members of this network was a man named Eduardo Ruiz Umaña, who investigators said used his connections to a Nicaraguan woman – from whom he rented properties in Nicaragua – and companies owned by his sons to manage logistics of the precursor trafficking.
CICIG investigators connected Méndez Ruiz to various parts of Ruiz Umaña’s logistical network. One of the companies allegedly linked to the scheme, Químicos del Caribe, was founded by Ruiz Umaña’s son, Carlos Raúl Ruiz Vásquez, with Méndez Ruiz, according to commercial registry documents obtained by InSight Crime. The company’s business, according to the documents, was importing and exporting chemicals and other substances for resale. Méndez Ruiz was also listed as the “general manager” in Químicos del Caribe’s founding documents.
Químicos del Caribe shared an address with Azúcar del Caribe, a sugar-import company that Méndez Ruiz had formed in the early 2000s. Another of Ruíz Umaña’s sons, Jorge Eduardo Ruiz Vásquez, was listed as a general manager of Azúcar del Caribe in the firm’s founding documents. Jorge Eduardo was also listed as the “owner” of Melpo’s Candy – a company Méndez Ruiz told InSight Crime he had created in the early 2000s.
When InSight Crime asked Méndez Ruiz about these connections, he said he once knew and worked with both Carlos Raúl and Jorge Eduardo Ruiz Vásquez and did not dispute the company records. But, he added, he had not done business with them since around 2007. He also said he never worked with their father and vehemently denied being part of any illicit business connected to precursor chemicals.
“Those companies that you mention imported sugar at the beginning of the century,” he said. “But I had nothing to do with what they did a decade later.”
In September 2012, investigators raided a warehouse, several safe houses, and logistical hubs operated by the precursor network. During the raids, authorities arrested the Sinaloa Cartel operative and the head of security at Guatemala’s largest shipping port, Puerto Quetzal. They also confiscated various chemicals and a safe house where they found $158,000.
Authorities found two barrels of methamphetamine and dozens of barrels of chemicals, which they said could be used to manufacture methamphetamine. Months earlier, authorities had captured Ruiz Umaña’s Nicaraguan accomplice. And with time, they would also arrest the mayor of another port city, and the mayor’s wife, whom they connected to the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug ring.
A few months after the raids, CICIG investigators went to New York to give a presentation to various US law enforcement agencies. In it, they said Méndez Ruiz played a direct role in the network.
But that is where the investigation into Méndez Ruiz ended. While the coastal mayor’s wife, several of his accomplices – including the head of security at Puerto Quetzal – and the Sinaloa Cartel operative were eventually convicted, Ruiz Umaña, his sons, and Méndez Ruiz were never charged in the case. CICIG investigators told InSight Crime the evidence was not strong enough to support claims that Méndez Ruiz had played a direct role in the network.
The CICIG and the Attorney General’s Office later linked Ruiz Umaña’s sons, Jorge Eduardo and Carlos, to a separate corruption case, but they fled before they were captured. InSight Crime’s efforts to reach Ruiz Umaña and his sons were not successful.
“What did they do later with their lives? That is not my problem,” Méndez Ruiz told InSight Crime about Jorge Eduardo and Carlos. “Do they have problems with the law? I am very sorry about that because I like them a lot. The truth is that I like them, and it’s been ten years since I saw them.”
In some ways, the case was illustrative of the CICIG’s hit-and-miss record during its 12-year stint in Guatemala. At the behest of the CICIG, the Attorney General’s Office accused 1,540 people of crimes between 2007 and 2019, including a sitting president and vice president who were jailed and later convicted. But Méndez Ruiz was not one of them.
“This is definitely a campaign designed to hurt me,” he told InSight Crime. “But if I had really been involved in a problem like this, I would be in jail right now.”
In fact, prosecutors reached over 400 convictions against an array of ex-military officers and high-level politicians. But some of these cases were upended in Guatemala’s notoriously corrupt high courts. Other cases failed because they were poorly constructed or strung together with piecemeal evidence. The commission’s shortcomings were seized upon by a growing list of critics, who, like Méndez Ruiz, saw the CICIG as part of an internationally backed liberal agenda that needed to be stopped.
A Reversal of Fortune
As the FCT took shape, Méndez Ruiz and his partners developed a judicial playbook to deploy against the CICIG and the Attorney General’s Office of Paz y Paz. Over time, the playbook would catapult Méndez Ruiz from relative obscurity to the front lines of this new judicial war, which was being fought in the dreary courthouses of Guatemala City.
Their first line of attack became to file an official criminal complaint, or querella. The querella can be presented directly to the Attorney General’s Office or to a court. By filing a querella, the FCT can, if given permission by a judge, play an active role in the prosecution with full access to the investigation. Ironically, it was the exact mechanism the CICIG had used to file its cases.
However, some of their targets had immunity from prosecution. In these cases, the FCT can present a petition calling for an antejuicio, or pretrial, to strip them of that immunity, including elected officials.
Finally, the FCT can file an amparo, or appeal, of judicial decisions or other administrative matters, such as the appointment of top judges or the registration of electoral candidates. When it comes to judicial rulings, the amparo will send the case back through the courts, where it may be assigned to a more favorable judge.
At the beginning, the FCT’s querellas, antejuicios, and amparos were directed at prosecutors who went after former military officers for suspected war crimes. This included prosecutors and judges involved in the historic conviction of the former military dictator Ríos Montt for genocide in 2013. (The Constitutional Court overturned the conviction just ten days later, and Ríos Montt died during his retrial.)
But in those early years, the FCT’s petitions were resoundingly rejected, with Méndez Ruiz and his allies repeatedly failing to break enemy lines. And opponents ridiculed Méndez Ruiz’s inability to gain traction in the courts, as judges routinely dismissed the FCT’s cases.
It was a tricky time for elites of all colors, who were losing sway in the courts as the CICIG gained steam. In 2015, the commission led a customs fraud probe that forced the resignation of a president linked to the CIACS networks – an unprecedented success for Guatemalan justice. The victory helped the CICIG impose itself as the dominant force in the judicial sector.
But Méndez Ruiz fought back, this time in the realm of public opinion. Media reports identified him and his FCT allies as part of a sophisticated public relations network, mounted on Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, used to berate anti-impunity prosecutors and institutions like the CICIG. In an interview with InSight Crime, Méndez Ruiz disputed that there was any coordinated campaign; he called the efforts “spontaneous” and thanked the “anonymous citizens” for their support.
Regardless, the social media posts provided new ammunition for Méndez Ruiz to attack his adversaries, and critics of the FCT eventually began referring to the concerted effort as the “netcenter.” Media investigations revealed a network of opinion shapers, troll accounts, and fake accounts, in which Méndez Ruiz was identified as a central node. The right-wing media, along with sympathetic public officials and politicians, reinforced misinformation spread by these accounts, the Intercept wrote in a similar report.
While it incorporated anti-Communist rants and a steady stream of patriotic bluster, the netcenter’s main purpose was to shift the balance of power within the judicial sector by vilifying its anti-corruption and pro-human rights crusaders. And by 2018, that was exactly what began to happen.
New Allies
In May 2018, then-President Jimmy Morales appointed María Consuelo Porras as the country’s attorney general. Porras, a lifelong bureaucrat and a wife to a once-aspiring military cadet, had little sympathy for the CICIG. At the time, Morales was seeking to put the brakes on the commission as it increasingly targeted political elites, including investigations into the president’s party and his family.
His message was spurred on, in part, by the prolonged and vicious campaign led by the netcenter and crusaders like Méndez Ruiz.
The campaign culminated in January 2019, when Morales unilaterally decided to terminate the CICIG’s mandate. Eight months later, the commission had packed its bags and left the country. The balance of power had shifted again.
However, things did not immediately get better for the FCT and Méndez Ruiz. After the commission was expelled, a special branch of the Attorney General’s Office took over its work, becoming a kind of mini-CICIG.
Known as the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (Fiscalía Especial Contra la Impunidad – FECI), for a while it continued with uncomfortable corruption probes implicating a range of powerful business elites and politicians. Among those were investigations into Morales’ successor, President Alejandro Giammattei, for corruption related to the COVID-19 pandemic and for allegedly receiving kickbacks from construction companies.
True to form, the FCT filed dozens of complaints against FECI’s top prosecutor, Juan Francisco Sandoval, who had worked closely with the CICIG, in addition to other FECI officials.
At first, the complaints continued to fall on deaf ears. But the FCT’s fortunes changed radically midway through 2021, when Attorney General Porras controversially fired Sandoval just as his unit’s investigations were inching closer to the president. Porras replaced Sandoval with Rafael Currichiche, a previously unknown prosecutor who would quickly transform FECI into a vehicle for shielding officials accused of corruption and persecuting those connected to the CICIG.
At the same time, the FCT expanded its purview significantly. In an interview with InSight Crime, Méndez Ruiz admitted that prosecuting war crimes was no longer a prerequisite for the FCT to file a complaint, and that “FECI had nothing to do with the military.” The battle was now being fought on multiple fronts.
With Currichiche’s arrival, the FCT’s interests aligned perfectly with those of the country’s top prosecutors. It marked the beginning of a golden era for Méndez Ruiz, which was defined by a novel pattern: The courts finally began to accept his petitions.
While over 110 of the FCT’s petitions were rejected between 2014 and 2020, the courts accepted dozens of petitions after June 2021, according to an analysis by the consortium Guatemala Leaks.
Méndez Ruiz’s access to the Attorney General’s Office also improved. He told InSight Crime that he began regularly meeting with Currichiche after he was named FECI’s top prosecutor. The pair were frequently seen amicably shaking hands and discussing cases in the halls of courthouses and justice buildings.
‘In Jail or On the Run’
Soon, the FCT-FECI partnership started to work like a well-oiled machine. After years on the sidelines, Méndez Ruiz and his FCT allies began litigating in court alongside state prosecutors, with the FCT’s complaints providing ammunition for a blitz against anti-impunity crusaders led by Currichiche and Attorney General Porras.
The list of those being investigated or formally accused of crimes by the Attorney General’s Office was long. It included the previous two attorneys general and over 20 current and former FECI prosecutors. Porras and Currichiche – both sanctioned by the US for alleged corruption – have repeatedly defended their actions in videos posted to social media.
Other targets included prominent judges. The FCT filed a petition against Miguel Ángel Gálvez, a seasoned judge presiding over a high-profile trial of former military officials accused of wartime extrajudicial killings. Méndez Ruiz and his allies also filed a petition against Erika Aifán, the judge presiding over the corruption probes into Giammattei. In both cases, the petitions succeeded in stripping the judges of immunity, exposing them to investigation from the Attorney General’s Office.
Both judges fled the country, a common theme among those targeted by FCT complaints and petitions. As of January 2023, at least 45 former justice operators were currently in exile, Ana María Méndez-Dardón, Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told InSight Crime. Many legal attacks were initiated by the FCT, which was gleefully reeling through a hit list of its most wanted targets.
Other FCT complaints landed prosecutors, former CICIG officials, and prominent journalists in jail or under house arrest. Each time the FCT saw success, the country’s judicial infrastructure was left with one fewer prosecutor or judge with a track record of fighting corruption.
Through its exploits, the FCT derived its trademark catchphrase: “in jail or on the run.” The slogan served as both a statement of intent and a means of designating the FCT’s next target on social media.
For many, an FCT designation was followed by a torrent of netcenter abuse, with troll accounts launching deeply personal tirades – often violent, homophobic, or sexist – to vilify opponents.
By mid-2023, Méndez Ruiz had gone from a figure of ridicule to one of the most influential actors in the judicial system, finally scoring victories in a battle in which he had spent years launching dud grenades from behind the front lines. The FCT was participating as an accuser in at least two dozen cases against officials that had once prosecuted or ruled on high-profile corruption, according to the media consortium Guatemala Leaks.
And as presidential elections loomed, the FCT also looked to politics. That year, its lawyers lodged an appeal seeking to block a high-ranking former human rights official from running for office. Meanwhile, Méndez Ruiz publicly backed the candidacy of the daughter of former dictator Ríos Montt, who, for a period, was at the top of the polls. The future looked bright.
Even international condemnation did not slow their advance. When the United States added Méndez Ruiz and Galindo to its “Engel List” of corrupt actors in Central America, Méndez Ruiz included the designation as a badge of honor on his X profile.
After all, Guatemala is for Guatemalans.
Back to the Foxhole
In late August, the bubble burst. Bernardo Arévalo, a center-left academic running on an anti-graft platform, won a landslide victory in the 2023 presidential elections in a historic rebuke to the country’s conservative political establishment.
Arévalo – a globalist, anti-corruption crusader, and the son of a former president who had defined his political philosophy as “spiritual socialism” – was everything Méndez Ruiz did not want in a president. What’s more, Arévalo had eclipsed a string of high-profile conservative candidates – including the daughter of Ríos Montt – on his way to victory.
Others shared Méndez Ruiz’s distaste for the president-elect. Arévalo’s opponents – a coalition of establishment forces led by Méndez Ruiz’s allies in the Attorney General’s Office – quickly weaponized the legal system to contest the elections. Weeks before his inauguration, prosecutors asked the courts to lift Arévalo’s immunity over dubious criminal allegations supported with incoherent evidence. It came amid months of protests calling for Attorney General Porras’ resignation as her office made increasingly brazen attempts to stop Arévalo from taking office.
The battle was poised for Méndez Ruiz to enter the fray, but, to the surprise of some, the FCT head remained on the sidelines in what Arévalo and international observers labeled a coup d’état. He told InSight Crime the FCT had not lodged any complaints against Arévalo or his party in the wake of the elections.
Instead, Méndez Ruiz took to social media. His X account became a vehicle for heaping praise on Porras, while deriding Arévalo as a communist and spouting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories on how the elections had been stolen.
“Confirmed: There was fraud,” Méndez Ruiz wrote on X in December, when prosecutors presented their investigations into Arévalo and his party.
But while Méndez Ruiz was reduced to the role of cheerleader, the legal maneuvers by Porras and her allies were laced with political undertones that echoed the FCT’s playbook, and their chances of success were contingent on the hollowed-out judicial system Méndez Ruiz and his allies had helped construct.
Nevertheless, the coup failed. And on January 14, 2024, after a timely intervention by the country’s highest court ensured that all elected officials could assume office, thousands gathered in the capital city to celebrate the new president. In a last ditch effort to thwart him, conservative lawmakers engineered a ten-hour delay. But, shortly after midnight, Bernardo Arévalo took the oath and was sworn in as president of Guatemala.
That was Méndez Ruiz’s cue to re-enter the fray. The FCT’s first appeal, which was one of several filed by opponents of Arévalo, helped overturn the election of an Arévalo ally as president of Congress.
Then came a second attack, this time a petition to strip the subsequently-elected president of Congress of immunity for trying to reverse a prior ruling that forced lawmakers from Arévalo’s party to take office as “independents.” True to form, Méndez Ruiz announced the petition on X, accompanied by a rambling tirade ending with a jab against the United States Embassy.
In early February, the FCT went a step further, filing a petition to strip Arévalo of his presidential immunity. The FCT argued Arévalo had abused his power by calling for Attorney General Porras to resign in what it described as an illegal attempt to block ongoing investigations into his party.
The attacks were likely a sign of things to come. The election of Arévalo will almost certainly not mark the end of the war for control of Guatemala’s past and its future, and the FCT’s work in gutting the country’s judicial infrastructure may have helped shackle the country’s fight against impunity for years to come.
That war will likely continue to be fought, not on the battlefield but within the judicial system and the court of public opinion. And Méndez Ruiz will doubtless remain somewhere near the front lines, exactly where he wants to be. After all, as he likes to say, he did not grow up in a “military family,” he grew up in a “family of a soldier.”