The following is a transcript of episode 27 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
ZAMORA: In an absolutely arbitrary and illegal way, he decided to return to two days before I was released from prison. That is to say, if two days before my release I was in prison, I had to go back to prison.
GRESSIER, HOST: In mid-March, Guatemalan civil society watched in horror as the most renowned publisher in the country, Jose Rubén Zamora, was shuttled back to prison after almost five months under house arrest. Months of proceedings were simply struck down, and without any apparent legal basis. On Friday, April 25, Zamora reached 1,000 days since his arrest on internationally condemned money-laundering allegations. Zamora, a figurehead of Central American journalism, is now more embattled than ever.
You’re listening to the special May edition of our original podcast, Central America in Minutes. This month, we ask: Despite the lack of money-laundering evidence against him, despite three years of international advocacy for his release, despite his own denunciation of torture and humiliation in prison, despite the court’s own recognition that due process was violated, why is Jose Rubén Zamora back behind bars?
The hydra continues to grow
When Jose Rubén Zamora turned himself over to Guatemalan authorities on March 10 to return to prison, he seemed to have had every reason not to do so, and to instead flee Guatemala into exile, like a dozen of his colleagues.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and two U.N. Special Rapporteurs, denounced that the judiciary seemed more bent on keeping him in prison than on resolving the charges against him. The court had just publicly denounced threats and intimidation, as was the case throughout the trial. And the judge, Érick García, had ordered his release on house arrest just five months earlier, in late October, on the grounds that his over 800 days in prison had violated his due-process rights.
Newspaper La Hora reported last month that, contrary to the denials of Guatemala’s top prosecutors, the Attorney General’s Office has received at least two criminal complaints of death threats against Judge García.
Now, an appellate court was sending Zamora back to Mariscal Zavala Prison.
The answer, perhaps, was straightforward: In October 2024, Zamora had promised Judge García that he would not flee the country, that he would await trial from his home. And he had done so, without leaving Guatemala City, for weeks. This thus made it all the more contradictory when the court sent him back to prison: The implicit assertion was that he was a flight risk, despite the fact that he had demonstrated the contrary.
Meanwhile, the charges against him continue to spiral out of control. What started as money laundering charges almost three years ago bifurcated into two processes, the second for alleged obstruction of justice while on trial. He had his original June 2023 money-laundering conviction and six-year prison sentence struck down as baseless, and a retrial ordered. But in the process, almost a dozen defense attorneys resigned, and some, like former tax chief Juan Solórzano Foppa, were criminalized.
Meanwhile, his newspaper elPeriódico, which had already faced years of financial asphyxiation and threats, collapsed in May 2023, one month before that conviction. His former staff and family largely left for exile and prosecutors pursued a dozen journalists and columnists writing about the case.
The message was loud and clear: The Jose Rubén Zamora case was to be scorched earth.
In recent weeks, the knot thickened. As we covered in episode 21, the Foundation Against Terrorism, a plaintiff organization, filed a new round of money-laundering charges against Zamora in February, alleging that he received 750 thousand dollars not to publish about Juan Carlos Monzón, the secretary of imprisoned former vice-president Roxana Baldetti. But Monzón stated that he was not even sure that Zamora had received the alleged money.
Thirty-three months after police repelled down from the roof into Zamora’s house, the anti-Zamora hydra continues to grow.
The root of the problem
Even if Jose Rubén Zamora, who is 68 years old, successfully defends himself at retrial in the original case against him, he looks set to face years of legal challenges. To a great extent, it could hinge on the upcoming attorney general elections, which will be finalized in May 2026.
With a year left in Porras’ term, threats and attacks against journalism in Guatemala continue unabated and unpunished. The Foundation Against Terrorism is threatening lawfare against independent outlet Prensa Comunitaria, which covers Guatemala and its diverse territories from decidedly Maya perspectives. Milton Polanco, president of the Association of Journalists of Jutiapa, a rural eastern Guatemalan border department pierced by drug trafficking, disappeared in early February.
In the case of Zamora, he ran one of the leading newspapers in Guatemala for over two decades, running blistering stories on corruption, organized crime, and impunity. His prosecution continues to test President Bernardo Arévalo’s real commitment to press freedom. Arévalo has condemned Jose Rubén Zamora’s incarceration as political persecution. This is him in October 2024, right before Zamora was released on house arrest.
ARÉVALO: We are especially concerned by the events mentioned by his family, of illegitimate pressures and acts of torture suffered by Jose Rubén Zamora. No more inadequate use of the justice system! No more torture and terror against those who think differently! No more dark system pursuing the exercise of the press, which should always be free and uncomfortable to power, when necessary.
GRESSIER: True: Under Arévalo, prison conditions for Jose Rubén Zamora have improved, according to his son, Jose Carlos Zamora, and Guatemalan press freedom advocates. He is now much more free to receive visits, and no longer faces aspects of the psychological torture that he denounced early in his incarceration, such as sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and bug infestations. The government has also sent Executive Branch delegations to check on Zamora’s wellbeing.
In September 2023, prior to his inauguration, Arévalo promised to implement a journalist protection policy in the Executive Branch. On April 21, his administration said they are in the final stages of chalking one up.
But for independent Guatemalan journalism, any protection policy will be curbed if there are no changes at the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
“For years, the journalistic profession has asked that a protection mechanism be implemented to guarantee safety and freedom to continue doing our jobs,” wrote Guatemalan journalist and press freedom advocate Marielos Monzón in her column in Prensa Libre. “It is increasingly difficult to continue working when the Attorney General’s Office has become a parallel state and criminal law is a tool of persecution and punishment.”
That is the question for the defense of Guatemalan journalism: How to defend it without striking at the root of the problem?
Roman Gressier wrote this episode of Central America in Minutes, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.
