AmCham chairman: Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote, involved in corruption
Recently, the members of the North American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, briefly known as AmCham Guatemala, re-elected a Guatemalan attorney, expert in International Law, as their president. His name is Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote.
The American Chamber of Commerce is the International Organization that acts as a link between the Guatemalan people and the North American, relating to trading, although it also works on certain objectives that the North American government requires to implement in the seat country, Guatemala in this case, to ensure a good environment to the commercial transaction.
As a part of those objectives, or at least what we will discuss in this article, is the fight against corruption. Joe Biden, president of the USA, has recently declared war against corruption in Latin America, and therefore, AmCham Guatemala must accomplish that goal.
The contradiction
It is curious that, while on one hand, AmCham Guatemala has the priority goal to fight and eliminate corruption in Guatemala, on the other hand its members appoint a clearly and openly corrupt lawyer, as their president. Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote is involved in corrupt actions, and it is hard to think that the members of AmCham Guatemala would be so naïve to ignore those facts, and keep appointing him as their representative.
Yes. Let us think just that the name Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote appears nor more nor less than twenty six times in the famous files that exposed the most corrupt characters world wide. Those documents were public published through a large amount of media in the name of "Panama Papers". In essence, those files expose the names of offshore accounts owners, as well as false companies, which they use just to launder dirty money, that comes from illegal and criminal activities.
And there is more corruption in Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote
Internationally, it is also known that the company that was exposed in the Panama Papers, the one that was contracted by the corrupt characters in order to establish the false companies and open the offshore accounts, was Mossack-Fonseca. When that Firma was closed and its partners imprisoned, the lawyers' agency that continued its work, was Central Law. And the vice president and founder of the Firm Central Law, is Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote, the same attorney that leads AmCham Guatemala.
Besides, there are still ongoing open cases in North American courts against this lawyer, speaking of Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote, where he is the main suspect being the partner of an international drug-dealer and Narco-Airplanes trader, Federico Machado.
The participation of Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote in Odebrecht
The international law attorney also was the link between the Odebrecht executives and the public Guatemalan functionaries who received enormous amounts of bribes from that company, in order to authorize millionaire contracts related to road construction. Those roads were never finished, so the Guatemalan Government, and therefore the Guatemalan People, lost hundreds of million dollars.
Besides being the main negotiator and legal advisor working in benefit of Odebrecht, at the same time Juan Pablo Carrasco de Groote was also the negotiator in behalf of CICIG, the Guatemalan institution that fights corruption. Obviously, he acted in favor of Odebrecht, because the three agreements he wrote, were nullified by an apellate court, letting Odebrecht free of charges.
And even so, he keeps working as the President of AmCham Guatemala.
That sets on the table the question if the North American Government really promotes corruption in Latin America, and the supposed war against it is just a falsehood.