Three months after taking office on May 15, Attorney General Gabriel García Luna — a career judge and former president of the Judicial Disciplinary Board — has closed FECI, the politicized special anti-impunity prosecutor’s office, and dismissed at least eight high-profile prosecutors aligned with his predecessor María Consuelo Porras. Porras, sanctioned for corruption by more than forty countries, had run investigations aimed at criminalizing judges, prosecutors, journalists, and human rights defenders, at least seventy-nine of whom were in exile by 2023, and in 2023 launched what the Organization of American States called an “attempted coup” to block President Bernardo Arévalo from taking office. García Luna has created a committee to review the cases of those criminalized and is working with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which held a hearing on political persecution complaints in early August. Exiled former FECI head Juan Francisco Sandoval and former Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz express cautious hope while warning the office has been hollowed out. The article is a rare in-window case of partial reversal, and a reminder that prosecutorial offices can be both the instrument and the object of democratic repair.

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