The past year has been a turbulent one for Guatemala. In September, months of mass demonstrations led to the resignation and arrest of President Otto Pérez Molina for his alleged role in a wide-ranging scandal that involved reducing tariffs in exchange for kickbacks.

Already the scandal — which erupted this past spring — involved the vice president, the vice president’s private secretary, as well as the chief of the tax authority. When even the business community turned against him, Pérez Molina’s defiant rejection of calls for resignation fell on deaf ears, and the Guatemalan congress decisively voted to strip him of legal immunity. He quickly stepped down.

This summer a damning United Nations report revealed that a quarter of the money funding Guatemalan politics comes from criminal organizations, mainly from drug traffickers. Meanwhile, in August, a Guatemalan court granted a retrial to former President Rios Montt — whose 2013 conviction of genocide and crimes against humanity for a series of 1982–83 massacres against the Ixil population of the Quiche region that resulted in 1,771 deaths and the forced displacement of 29,000 people was thrown out on a technicality — despite Montt’s dementia diagnosis, which in the event of another conviction would put him under house arrest instead of in prison.