These were the right things for the US government to say and to do, and it mattered that the message came from the top of the administration. The trouble was that the influence of the US was waning. Top Guatemalan officials now feared the US less than they did the sprawling network of corrupt homegrown players. Harris traveled to Guatemala and said her piece to President Alejandro Giammattei, who countered that the corruption investigations were the partisan fixations of an overzealous left. In conspicuously perfunctory terms, he vowed to cooperate with Washington, then proffered a sharp
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