Ex-prosecutor Solórzano Foppa shot dead at a Guatemala match
The lawyer was shot at the Campo Marte sports complex in the capital. Police arrested two men; no motive or masterminds have been identified.
Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa, a Guatemalan anti-corruption prosecutor turned lawyer, was shot dead on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 17, while playing soccer on a field at Campo Marte, a sports complex in Guatemala City's Zone 5. The National Civil Police (PNC) said one other person was killed in the attack and five were wounded, according to AP, as published by El Financiero.
Police arrested two men, aged 30 and 28, in the northeast of the city and seized a carbine and a motorcycle. At least 50 shell casings were found at the scene, according to EFE, as published by RPP. EFE identifies the other victim as Gustavo Adolfo Aguilar Gamarro, 45.
An Army spokeswoman, Natalia Molinello Díaz, said one of the detainees served in the Army from February 2017 to February 2019 and then asked to leave. The Army has no record of the other man. No authority has said what the motive was or who ordered the attack.
President Bernardo Arévalo condemned the killing on X: "I strongly repudiate the cowardly murder" of the former prosecutor, he wrote, and said those who believe terror will break the population "are wrong."
Who he was
Solórzano Foppa headed the Criminal Analysis Division of the Public Prosecutor's Office from 2013 to 2016 and the tax authority, the SAT, from 2016 to 2018. In the "La Línea" corruption case, his expert analysis weighed in the 2015 resignation of then-President Otto Pérez Molina, according to EFE. He was a critic of former President Alejandro Giammattei and of former Attorney General Consuelo Porras.
In 2023 he faced criminal proceedings tied to his work as a lawyer for journalist José Rubén Zamora, and international organizations said at the time that Zamora's lawyers were being persecuted. Zamora's family expressed grief over the killing in a statement.
The number of wounded comes from the PNC; EFE does not give one. Still pending are the charges against the detainees from the Public Prosecutor's Office and its line of investigation.
