Cabinet Shuffle in Guatemala

On Monday, President Otto Perez Molina announced several cabinet changes. According to what I read in Prensa Libre and here, none of the moves were particularly surprising. Foreign Minister Harold Caballeros will be moving on once he finishes a visit to the Middle East. Caballero will be replaced by another person without any significant diplomatic experience, Fernando Carrera. Caballeros will be remembered for terrible Twitter comments following the October massacre of seven peasants in Totonicapan and for, as of today, failing to get the US to move on TPS.  Caballeros' exit will mean that VIVA is now out of government.

The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (MAGA), Ephraim Medina, is also going to be replaced. The current Attorney General, Larry Robles, will be replaced by Vladimir Guerra. Also, President of the Social Security Institute, Luis Reyes, will be replaced by Juan de Dios Rodriguez, who was head of the Private Secretariat of the Presidency.

President Perez also announced that he was closing the National Peace Fund (Fonapaz) because of corruption.

He admitted that the body - founded in 1991 with the goal of eradicating poverty - has "too many procedural problems and a change of staff is no longer sufficient to stop corruption, so the decision is not to relieve anyone but to close the agency. Fonapaz is an institution that is totally discredited," Perez Molina told reporters.

He plans to establish a new organization that will answer directly to the Ministry of Social Development but no one exactly knows what this new entity will look like. There's got to be a bit more to this story as you can't shut down every corrupt institution in Guatemala.

More cabinets are expected as we lead up to Perez's one-year anniversary.