source: NACLA
On January 18, the notorious Barrio 18 street gang carried out at least thirteen attacks on police officers and police stations in and around Guatemala City in a single day, killing 11 officers. These attacks, which were unprecedented in their extent and coordination, came the day after police put down coordinated prison riots spurred by the transfer of gang leaders to a maximum security prison—a revocation of privileges that led prisoners to call for the overthrow of the government of President Bernardo Arévalo. The bloody events came months after 20 gang leaders escaped a prison by bribing officials, an event that generated a national security crisis for Arévalo and led to the firing of his Minister of the Interior.
When Arévalo responded with the congressionally-approved curtailing of civil liberties through a 30-day estado de sitio martial law decree, analysts wondered if he would follow the lead of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose model of gaining authoritarian powers by cracking down on gangs has inspired much of the region. But by all accounts, Arévalo, who oversees the first genuinely democratic government in Guatemala since 1954, has deviated from this playbook. After a month, he revoked the state of siege decree, restoring some rights that were temporarily abrogated while keeping others curtailed in a new estado de prevención.
Arévalo’s response is less surprising if we take into consideration the timing of the gang attacks, which came in the lead-up to Guatemala’s second-level elections throughout 2026, including important positions in the justice system. The importance of the Barrio 18 attacks are better understood through a lens of paramilitarism. While any outside orchestration of the gang’s acts remains unproven, the violence was unleashed alongside the well-established presence of politically powerful armed groups and Arévalo’s insistence that such networks seek to influence elections and destabilize his government. Seen in this way, the Barrio 18 attacks can be read as an act of organized violence against the government that heightens the ongoing battle over the future of state institutions and impunity in Guatemala.
State Capture Under Dispute
When Congress approved Arévalo’s state of siege, it was a rare example of the branches of government collaborating with the administration. Indeed, from the beginning, Arévalo’s leadership has been hamstrung by corrupt elites entrenched within state institutions. In 2023, before the elections of that same year, the previous government had secured the near total co-optation of the state in order to guarantee the impunity of its leadership after leaving office.
Continuing the persecution of political opponents and justice system workers in preceding years, the administration began a campaign of prosecuting opposition candidates and parties. After Semilla’s shocking electoral victory, these actors instrumentalized the justice system to stop the transfer of political power, starting with a refusal to recognize the results of the 2023 election.
President Alejandro Giammatei (2020-2024), together with Attorney General Consuelo Porras and other allies, went on to alter or delay results, suspend the Semilla party, denounce electoral irregularities, and criminalize members of Semilla as well as political opponents from within civil society, students, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and journalists. All told, at least 117 people were investigated or accused. The reaction in society was to launch an indefinite National Strike for democracy, which lasted 106 days, until the transition of power to Semilla was eventually secured.
The need to govern alongside a hostile structure entrenched within the justice system has prevented Arévalo from acting on his democratic ambitions.
As Arévalo’s third year in office begins, the political powers advocating for a coup have persisted spuriously, even in the face of their own failure and the denunciations and international sanctions that have been levied against their agents. The need to govern alongside a hostile structure entrenched within the justice system has prevented Arévalo from acting on his democratic ambitions. The fight against corruption and organized crime—two deeply entwined dimensions—has been particularly constrained.
The sense of an accelerated loss of power by those advocating for a coup has become even more acute in the current context of Guatemala’s second-level elections. This ongoing process selects members of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the Constitutional Court, as well as the Attorney General, the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and more. The elections are crucial not only for Semilla’s ability to govern during its remaining two years in office, but also for dismantling the co-optation of the state for future governance.
Over 40 years since Guatemala’s transition to democracy—which has been both co-opted and kleptocratic—the hidden and tangled structures known as Illegal Groups and Clandestine Security Apparatuses (Cuerpos Ilegales y Aparatos Clandestinos de Seguridad, CIACS) and Illicit Economic-Political Networks (Redes Económicas-Políticas Ilícitas, REPI) have continued to operate. Working from within the state, they seek their own protection and impunity, and maintain conflicts both with a perceived common enemy and among themselves, using organized violence to survive, reproduce, and usurp authority.
Between 2008-2019, the Public Prosecutor’s Office under the leadership of Claudia Paz y Paz (2010-2014) and Thelma Aldana (2014-2018) oversaw a notable reduction in organized criminal violence and an enormous drop in the homicide rate. These improvements resulted from the dismantling of around 70 criminal structures within the state, in collaboration with the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, CICIG) and CICIG Commissioner Iván Velásquez. The exposed criminal groups were composed of military officers, politicians, and death squads, some of which reached the highest ranks of government, including then-President Otto Pérez Molina and his administration.
In 2009, Guatemala had a homicide rate of 47.2 per 100,000 inhabitants. By 2019, through the support of the CICIG, this fell to 25 per 100,000. Under Consuelo Porras (2018-2026), however, the MP has been characterized by willful negligence and a perversion of the institution’s work, apparently contributing to a statistical resurgence of homicides between 2020-2025. In 2020, in the midst of COVID-19, the homicide rate had dropped to 15.1. By 2025, with Porras at the helm of the Attorney General’s office, it had grown by 9.4%, to 17.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.
A History of Organized Violence
The continued operation of CIACS builds on a history of organized violence in Guatemala. Enmeshed networks of public forces and non-state armed groups have long defended the economic and political interests of the Guatemalan elite. The colonial era and the early twentieth century saw rural militias and the military deployed to control land and Indigenous labour, a use of force that grew into the genocidal massacres and death squad terror of the armed conflict. During the war, dictatorial military control incorporated all state institutions into the counterinsurgent model, and military intelligence became a substantial branch of state power. Many of the configurations that would become CIACS formed during this era: groups such as La Cofradía, El Sindicato, and Red Moreno, as well as less-visible and unnamed groups.
The CIACS active today involve networks of former officers and military intelligence that merge their continued access to state institutions with violence against those who threaten their interests. Those interests include not only profit and political power, but also organized criminal activity and the defense of impunity in the face of post-war legal cases seeking justice for victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Mobilizing these armed actors to defend elite interests should be seen as a new chapter in a long history of paramilitarism in Guatemala.
Guatemalan human rights defenders—including Indigenous, campesino, and other political activists, lawyers and judges, journalists, and more—regularly face violent attacks. In 2024 alone, the UDEFEGUA human rights organization registered more than 4,100 acts of aggression against rights defenders, including 28 murders. Physical attacks rarely come from the armed forces or the police. Instead, they are delivered by sicario hitmen, private security, small-town armed groups, and others.
Mobilizing these armed actors to defend elite interests should be seen as a new chapter in a long history of paramilitarism in Guatemala. Common notions of paramilitaries see them as uniformed non-state militaries that exercise extreme, and ideologically right-wing, violence with the blessing of the state. However, as Jasmin Hristov and others show, the post-Cold War era has seen a diversification of armed groups that carry out organized violence in the defense of elite interests around the world.
The purpose of paramilitary violence is not only to eliminate a target, but to sow terror among a broader population—those who challenge elite interests as well as the public at large—to generate a climate of fear favourable to those behind the violence. The recent wave of attacks by the Barrio 18 gang in Guatemala once again suggests a threading together of elements that go hand-in-hand in the country’s recent history: the powerful CIACS networks, the paramilitarization of non-state armed groups, and the productive effect of terror for the elite and the organized far right.
The Politics of Gang Violence
Guatemalan president Arévalo has long alleged that gang members act on behalf of criminal structures with political motives. In his announcement of the estado de sitio on January 18, Arévalo referred to “the destabilizing political structures that are behind [the gangs].” He also revealed in an interview this year that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights protection measures ordered for the final days of his 2023 campaign responded to threats against his life by Barrio 18.
Supporting Arévalo’s assessment of the 2026 gang attacks, various Guatemalan experts on politics and violence assert that “gangs in Guatemala don’t act alone, but as an instrument of groups that seek to destabilize the state in the interest of putting a halt to the removal of key authorities within the justice system.”
The recent attacks on prisons and police fit a pattern of coordinated corruption and violence by the CIACS–a pattern that the CICIG commission proved in a number of cases. They also coincide with ethnographic research with gangs in Guatemala City that establishes a pattern of structural engagement between gangs, police, penitentiary officials, business elites, and politicians.
The January 2026 attacks can be interpreted as the mobilization of Barrio 18 as armed actors serving a paramilitary function that benefits the organized far right.
The January 2026 attacks can be interpreted as the mobilization of Barrio 18 as armed actors serving a paramilitary function that benefits the organized far right. Within a political climate dotted with ongoing attempts to destabilize the Arévalo administration and undermine free elections, the attacks further boost a general sense of fear. Although the election of officials within the Attorney General’s Office, the Constitutional Court, and more proceeded on February 12, that day was marked by the direct intervention of the Attorney General through attempted manipulation of the vote.
The gang attacks are also significant due to the nature of their target. Whether or not the attacks intended this outcome, the current administration perceives them as an attack on the government as a whole, and in particular its efforts to reform the justice system and counter impunity. This shifting of the terrain of paramilitary violence generates a familiar outcome of violence and terror, but it also opens a new period and a new front in a longstanding struggle between the co-optation or liberation of state institutions. The Attorney General’s office, long the epicenter of this institutional battle, has emerged as potentially aligned with the source of criminal and paramilitary violence aimed at the same state within which it is situated.
While the coordination of the Barrio 18 attacks on prisons and police by anyone other than gang members themselves has not been proven, the perception of manipulation of the events by CIACS runs deep in Guatemala. It is also true that struggles over the Attorney General’s office, the justice system, and the future of impunity and democracy dominate Guatemala’s current political reality. This context hangs heavy over recent gang violence and has shaped the response by President Arévalo. As is often the case, interpretation of these current events can be aided by an appreciation of the deep ties between elites, state institutions, and armed groups.
