
Cementing Judicial Power: The Case of Néster Vásquez and Guatemala’s High Courts
On April 15, 2024, a seasoned Guatemalan magistrate, Néster Vásquez, became president of the country’s highest legal authority – the Constitutional Court (Corte de Constitutionalidad – CC). It capped an impressive rise for Vásquez, from a nondescript lawyer to Guatemala’s most senior judge – a position that afforded him outsized influence over the country’s 2024 elections for high court magistrates. This presented a troublesome reality for Guatemala’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, as Vásquez has long been an ally of elite networks that oppose his government’s anti-corruption agenda, and the court elections were seen as crucial step to reforming a judicial system that has long responded to corrupt interests.
Vásquez’s ascent through the courts began hundreds of miles away from the corridors of power. In the 2000s, he worked as a regional prosecutor and then as a lawyer in the remote departments of Alta Verapaz and San Marcos, in northern and western Guatemala, respectively. It was in San Marcos that Vásquez began to gain power, twice serving as president of the departmental association of lawyers and notaries. In 2009, Vásquez became an appellate court magistrate, assigned to a courthouse in the western Quetzaltenango department.

This is a case study taken from an in-depth InSight Crime investigation into Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo’s stumbling anti-corruption agenda. Download the full report or explore additional case studies here.
But the real breakthrough for Vásquez came when he was elected a magistrate of Guatemala’s Supreme Court (Corte Suprema de Justicia – CSJ) via the 2014 high court elections. CSJ magistrates hold significant clout with elite power networks, in part because the court can block investigations into state actors accused of corruption. These networks go to great lengths to position allies on the Supreme Court, and Vásquez was one of many candidates who did not reach the post on merit alone. Rather, he was groomed by a group of political operators – including cabinet officials, party leaders, and wealthy businessmen – who backed Vásquez and other CSJ candidates in exchange for their loyalty, according to an investigation led by an anti-impunity commission supported by the United Nations that was later expelled from the country. On the day of the election, the candidates were asked to swear their allegiance to the operators during a surreptitious meeting in a Guatemala City hotel, one of the court operators involved in the scheme later confessed.
The power that came with Vásquez’s seat on the CSJ – in this role, he also served a one-year term as president of the judiciary – transformed him from beneficiary to benefactor for the subsequent high court elections, which began in 2020. In 2021, prosecutors linked Vásquez to a network allegedly trying to manipulate the selection of top judicial officials. (Vásquez was then part of a special commission tasked with shortlisting candidates for the 2020 high court elections.)
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The US State Department sanctioned Vásquez for his alleged role in the scheme, but protection from the Supreme Court made sure he never faced formal charges in Guatemala. Bizarrely, the court-rigging investigation may have actually aided Vásquez in his continuing rise through the courts. Aside from the postulation commissions, Vásquez was also seeking the bar association’s nomination for seat on the Constitutional Court, and his path was cleared when the Attorney General’s Office arrested his main adversary, Estuardo Gálvez, who was also embroiled in the court-meddling investigation. Prosecutors later said that Attorney General Porras had instructed them to avoid targeting Vásquez while fast-tracking Gálvez’s arrest.
Upon reaching the CC, midway through 2021, Vásquez played an important role in aligning the court’s interests with those of elite power networks linked to the former president, Alejandro Giammattei (2019-2024), whose administration oversaw a period of rampant corruption and graft.
Now heading the country’s most powerful court, Vásquez could draw from alliances cultivated during his journey through most branches of Guatemala’s judicial infrastructure to surpass even those political operators that facilitated his rise. Vásquez’s clout in Guatemala’s bar association, appellate courts, and the CSJ, ensured over a dozen lawyers purportedly linked to the CC magistrate sat on the special commissions shortlisting candidates for the 2024 court elections, according to interviews with legal analysts and information compiled by ProJusticia, a Guatemalan NGO.

Vásquez also leveraged the CC’s powers to ensure the commissions’ proceedings did not adversely affect his own interests. For instance, the CC ordered CSJ commissioners to avoid any delays to the selection process. Electing a loyal crop of CSJ magistrates would, in theory, provide Vásquez with a route to re-election, as the Supreme Court will appoint one CC magistrate and one alternate in 2026.
The political nature of the high court elections, which culminated in October 2024, followed a familiar pattern to past votes, with several questionable actors reaching top judicial posts. For instance, most of the 13 magistrates elected to the CSJ had previously been named in investigations into court-rigging networks, according to the local press.
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In a report published after the high court elections, NGO Impunity Watch identified Vásquez as one of the main political operators influencing the selection process for magistrates. Though it remains too early to tell how the court reshuffle will impact the CC president’s standing in the judiciary, some press reports and former prosecutors have suggested that the newly elected CSJ president, Teódulo Cifuentes, has Vásquez’s blessing. (Vásquez was one of three CC magistrates to vote in favor of appointing Cifuentes as head of the Supreme Court, a role that doubles as president of Guatemala’s broader judiciary.)
In a written response to a request for comment sent by InSight Crime, the CC president categorically rejected the allegation that he influenced the selection of high court magistrates. Vásquez pointed to his track record of passing rulings in defense of democracy and the rule of law. He also stressed that his mandate as a CC magistrate is independent of external interests.
The CC president is also a close ally of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, whose relentless legal attacks on Arévalo and his allies have distracted the government from implementing its anti-corruption agenda. Vásquez was the only CC magistrate to vote against granting Arévalo constitutional protection so that the president-elect could take office amid Porras’ pre-inaugural legal attacks. The CC has since shielded Porras from Arévalo’s multiple efforts to oust her.
The breadth of Vásquez’s alliances creates an uneven playing field in the battle to control Guatemala’s courts. Elite networks have long understood how to use the system to their advantage, relying on operators like Vásquez to concentrate power across multiple judicial bodies. That power both serves as a shield for actors accused of corruption and a means of stifling Arévalo’s ambitions for judicial reform.
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