BOGOTA/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Guatemala’s attorney general’s office announced arrest warrants on Monday for a group of people including Colombia’s attorney general and a former UN anti-corruption prosecutor, drawing condemnation from the foreign ministry in Bogota.
In a video on social media, the head of Guatemala’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity Rafael Curruchiche said a Guatemalan court had issued arrest warrants for Colombia’s Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo and Ivan Velasquez, a veteran Colombian prosecutor, on corruption charges.
Curruchiche alleged in the video that Velasquez led a “criminal structure” that benefited businessmen from the Brazilian construction company formerly known as Odebrecht.
Camargo and Velasquez were charged with criminal association, obstruction of justice, influence peddling and collusion, the video said.
In a post on social media on Monday, Velasquez said the arrest warrants amounted to persecution by corrupt officials.
An official at the Colombia Attorney General’s office declined to comment.
Velasquez won international praise for his work last decade as head of the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which in 2015 exposed a multi-million dollar graft case that led to the resignation and arrest of former Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina.
The CICIG later investigated Perez Molina’s successor, President Jimmy Morales, who ultimately shut down the commission in the country.
Curruchiche said Guatemala had requested Interpol issue an alert for the arrests of Camargo and Velasquez, as well as for several notable former Guatemalan prosecutors.
Colombia’s foreign ministry on Monday condemned the arrest warrants for Camargo and Velasquez, saying Guatemala’s calls for the arrest by Interpol were without legal basis and constituted an “attack on the fundamental principles of international justice.”
Velasquez was Colombia’s defense minister until earlier this year, and was named recently as the country’s ambassador to the Vatican.
Odebrecht has rebranded after pleading guilty to bribery in the United States in 2016 and admitting to bribing officials throughout Latin America for years.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta in Bogota and Brendan O’Boyle in Mexico City; Writing by Brendan O’Boyle; Editing by Tom Hogue and Kate Mayberry)
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