A Guatemalan anti-corruption prosecutor forced into exile after being pursued by the country’s conservative elite has said that leaving the country was the only way to save her life but was only “a little bit less than death”.
Virginia Laparra, 45, spent two years in prison for allegedly abusing her position after she reported her suspicion that a judge had leaked sensitive details from a sealed corruption case to a colleague in 2017.
The judge, Lesther Castellanos, was sanctioned, but then, with the backing of an extreme rightwing genocide denial group, the Foundation Against Terrorism, filed a joint criminal complaint against Laparra.
She was imprisoned ahead of trial in February 2022 and sentenced to four years in jail in December of the same year for her accusation against Castellanos.
In January last year, she was released under house arrest but in July was jailed for five years for another charge relating to her work.
Facing the prospect of going back to prison and further charges, Laparra left her two daughters behind to seek asylum across the border in Mexico.
In an interview with the Guardian in London after receiving the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk’s Sir Henry Brooke award honouring human rights defenders, Laparra said: “Nobody goes into exile voluntarily. Exile is the only thing left when nothing else has worked, it’s the only thing you’ve got left to defend your life and your freedom.
“Exile is just little bit different, a little bit less than death. [Your persecutors] take everything from you, take away your family, your children, your parents, your house, your way of life, your friends.’
Laparra headed a special prosecutor’s office working alongside the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig), a UN anti-corruption mission that was controversially expelled in September 2019 by the then president, Jimmy Morales. Widespread reprisals followed against those who had worked with Cicig.
When Laparra was taken taken into preventive detention, she said it was as “if I were the worst drugs trafficker in Guatemala. When we drove out of the underground parking in my building there were soldiers, the police, hooded, with heavy weapons on both sides of the street. It was like in a film.”
She spent her first five months in solitary confinement in a windowless 2.5 sq meter cell in a high security jail in Guatemala City, 200 miles away from her Quetzaltenango home, and allowed out for only one hour a day.
“Usually, the male prisoners in that place were only in solitary for two or three days, they can’t really deal with much more,” she said. “That’s what I had to suffer.”
She also endured bleeding to the womb in prison but waited months for treatment. Laparra eventually had a hysterectomy and four subsequent operations, during which she said police surrounded “the hospital, the gynaecology area, the operation room, and I had on each side of my bed a member of the police”.
She was later transferred to Matamoros prison, another notorious facility where drug traffickers and gang leaders are held, after she angered the authorities by speaking to a journalist. “My idea was that at least if I’m going to die [in jail], let’s make sure the world knows what happened,” said Laparra.
She considered pleading guilty in the hope that she might be released as both her sentences were commutable, which in Guatemala usually means no jail time is served, but her daughters told her: “Don’t do that, you’ve been here too long to give up now.”
When things reached their lowest ebb, Laparra said she decided to kill herself before remembering the promise she made to her daughters each time they visited – that she would be there the next time they came.
After her release on house arrest last year, she received an award from Guatemala’s current progressive president, Bernardo Arévalo, a surprise victor in the 2023 election. But Laparra believes the award only inflamed the pursuit of her by the public prosecutor’s office led by the attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, who had also tried to stop Arévalo from taking office.
Porras, who has pursued many other anti-corruption prosecutors and judges, also forced into exile her predecessor as attorney general and has been sanctioned by the US for corruption and the Council of the European Union for undermining democracy.
The Fund for Global Human Rights, which nominated Laparra for the Sir Henry Brooke award, and Amnesty International, which named her as a prisoner of conscience in 2022, said they were “deeply concerned about the systematic pattern of criminalisation imposed by the Guatemalan judiciary and the public prosecutor’s office against former judges, prosecutors, human rights defenders and journalists who have worked tirelessly for years to fight impunity and corruption in the country”.
Laparra says she feels proud to have received the award but adds that her persecutors reacted to the news with anger online. “I thought that it wasn’t possible to keep hate burning for so long,” she said. “Surely, two years in prison would have been enough for them, I thought, but it wasn’t.”
