The mid-term hearing against former anti-corruption prosecutor Stuardo Campo was suspended again on Tuesday, August 13, due to the failure of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP), which has delayed the trial by almost a year, judicial sources reported.
The hearing has been postponed since October 5, 2023, when it was first scheduled, Campo explained to Judge Selman Portillo, head of the Ninth Criminal Court of First Instance, who is in charge of the Alfa 7 case.
The former prosecutor claims that the delay is due to “malicious litigation,” since circumstances have arisen from the beginning that lead to the suspension of the hearing.
Campo said that the delay is almost a year and that this is due to recusals from the MP and the Foundation Against Terrorism, which at the beginning of the process appeared as an additional plaintiff.
“Then there were unjustified failures to appear by the parties involved in the proceedings,” said the former prosecutor.
This Tuesday the hearing was suspended because the MP did not appear and instead an excuse was sent signed by a prosecutor who, according to Campo, is not part of the process, so he asked the judge to summon the MP to prove that the person signing is related to the case.
He demanded that “human rights and procedural guarantees be respected.”
The prosecutor presented a memorandum in which she excused herself from participating in the hearing because she had another hearing scheduled in Villa Nueva.
“Once again, the malicious litigation on the part of the Public Prosecutor’s Office is evident. I do not understand the reasons why the MP does not want the proceedings to move forward,” said Campo.
He added that “this is not an exclusive practice within the proceedings against me. We know that in many of the cases in which inconvenient actors have been persecuted, especially former justice operators, this has been a repeated pattern, the suspension of hearings and unfounded excuses.”
Telematic Control
In this case, Campo is entitled to an alternative measure and must wear a telematic control device, which he has paid for for almost a year; however, this Tuesday he explained to the judge that since he does not have a job because he is in prison for another case, he can no longer pay the established fee, so he requests that the State of Guatemala cover these expenses.
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