Gunmen ambushed the convoy of a Guatemalan congressman on a highway in the country’s east on Friday, killing him and three police officers in an attack that has thrown a harsh light on how far organised crime now reaches into the country’s elected politics.
Congressman Julio César Portillo Paz was travelling through Río Hondo, a town in the department of Zacapa, when attackers opened fire on his convoy. He was taken to hospital with serious injuries and died there hours later, his party confirmed. The three officers from the National Civil Police — Guatemala’s national police force — who were escorting him were killed in the attack.
Guatemala’s Interior Ministry described the shooting as a direct attack on the convoy. No motive has been disclosed and no suspects have been named.
President Bernardo Arévalo condemned the killings and said the three officers had died in the line of duty. He instructed the security forces to cooperate fully with prosecutors investigating the attack. Guatemala’s Congress, the single-chamber legislature where Portillo sat, said in a statement posted on X late on Friday: “President Luis Contreras, members of the Board of Directors and lawmakers mourn the tragic passing of Congressman Julio Cesar Portillo Paz, representative of the Zacapa district.” Congress is demanding a swift, transparent and impartial investigation.
Portillo won his seat in the 2023 general election representing Cabal, an opposition party, and later defected to the National Unity of Hope, known by its Spanish initials UNE. The party is led by Sandra Torres, a former first lady who is widely expected to run for president again. Guatemala holds general elections next year, and Portillo’s killing lands in the middle of the run-up.
Zacapa, the department where the ambush happened, sits on the drug-trafficking routes that run through eastern Guatemala towards Mexico and the United States. The region is known as the territory of the Lorenzana family cartel, a trafficking organisation with reported links to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. Investigators have not said the cartel was behind Friday’s attack, and no group has claimed responsibility.
The killing follows the fatal shooting of Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa, a former anti-corruption prosecutor, in Guatemala City about three weeks ago. Investigators have not linked the two attacks, but back-to-back killings of prominent public figures have sharpened public anxiety about whether Guatemala is seeing a return of politically motivated assassinations.
Guatemala has spent the past decade trying to rebuild institutions hollowed out by corruption. Arévalo, who took office in 2024 promising to clean up government, has faced resistance from entrenched political and business interests, and prosecutors who pursued corruption cases have themselves become targets. Portillo’s assassination — a sitting lawmaker, killed on a public highway alongside his police escort — is the bluntest test yet of whether the state can protect its own officials, let alone ordinary citizens, in the parts of the country where criminal groups operate openly.
It is also a reminder that the drug trade is not a distant problem for Guatemala’s neighbours. The routes through Zacapa feed the supply chains that end on the streets of the United States, and the money they generate buys weapons, bribes officials and, on Friday, appears to have bought the freedom to gun down a congressman in daylight. Paraguay’s Senate removed its president this week over a banking collapse, and the two events together sketch a region where democratic institutions are under pressure from very different directions at once. When gangs attacking state forces elsewhere in the region are added to the picture, the question facing Guatemala is the same one facing its neighbours: who actually controls the territory.
For now, the investigation is in its earliest stages. Police have given no account of how many gunmen were involved, what weapons they used, or how they escaped. Until those answers come, the killing stands as a warning — to Guatemala’s politicians, and to anyone watching the region — that in Zacapa, the people with the guns are not always the ones in uniform.
