Word: guatemalans
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...when I traveled. Sure, there was that time I almost inadvertently enlisted the services of a St. Lucian hooker. And that other time when an angry Czech masseuse ripped off my boxers after I failed to understand her Russian tirade. And maybe losing 50 pounds to a Guatemalan parasite wasn’t ideal, but I got to eat as many Big Macs as I wanted for five months. No, I told him, we did not need to run for our lives. Like I do with the Greenpeace volunteers in Harvard Square, I simply needed to politely decline the hooded...
...Guatemalan officials say Portillo's efforts paid off - at least in his case. Wednesday night, a panel of judges approved Portillo's extradition to the U.S. on charges that he laundered tens of millions of dollars that he had embezzled while he was President, including $2.5 million in donations from the Taiwanese government that was meant for children's schoolbooks. Portillo, who was captured by authorities in January near Guatemala's Caribbean coast days after a U.S. indictment was handed down, denies the accusations and calls them a political witch hunt by the U.S. and U.N. But to analysts like...
...prosecutors portray Portillo, 58, as a man ready to exploit his presidency for illicit gain from the moment he took office. Preet Bharara, a U.S. attorney in Manhattan, says Portillo turned "the Guatemalan presidency into his personal ATM." Guatemalan media, quoting Guatemalan government sources, have reported that Portillo's alleged take was approximately $70 million. Aside from the Taiwanese funds, he's also accused of embezzling about $4 million from Guatemala's Defense Ministry. He allegedly laundered the money through accounts in Guatemala and through U.S. and European banks. It was a financial shell game that involved overdrafts so massive...
...Guatemala in 2008 from Mexico, where he had gone to live after leaving office under a cloud of suspicion. Until January he had been free on bond in Guatemala, awaiting trial there. When the U.S. indictment was announced in January, he tried to go underground but was arrested by Guatemalan police backed by U.S. officials as well the U.N.'s Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG. Created in 2007, CICIG (separate from Portillo's proposed 2003 U.N.-backed anti-crime commission, which was aborted when the Guatemalan high court at the time ruled it unconstitutional...
...crimes are never solved. The country's murder rate is eight times that of the U.S. - a plague that was underscored on Wednesday when Portillo's extradition hearing was delayed because the judges had received telephoned death threats. Crime watchers say Portillo, elected in 1999 from the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front Party, presided over much of the deterioration of law and order despite his anti-corruption pledges. "Portillo was the person in charge of weakening the national police," says Mario Polanco, a Guatemalan human-rights activist...