Ana Isabel Antillón, coordinator of the legal certainty axis of the Guatemala No Se Detiene (GNSD) initiative, analyzed the position of the local authority and the message sent to the investment community.
He explained that the case of the Xochi corridor, in Mazatenango, sends an alarm signal that a country that aspires to attract productive investment cannot afford.
“It is a project that complied with the current legal framework and has technical support from the Inter-American Development Bank. For legal certainty, in accordance with articles 2 and 28 of the Constitution, it cannot be stopped on the eve of its inauguration through the deliberate administrative silence of a municipal authority,” explained the specialist.
According to Antillón, for investors, both national and foreign, legal certainty is a condition sine qua non of any long-term investment decision, so the message sent is that any investment may be subject to the discretion of a local authority.
This artificially raises the country’s risk profile and deters precisely the type of private investment in infrastructure that Guatemala needs most to close its road gap.
“We maintain that the modernization of the country cannot advance if the rules of the game are altered in the middle of the process or in the final stretch of a project, as in the present case,” he said.
Xochi Project sets off legal alarms
Antillón added that, from the perspective of Guatemala No Se Detiene (GNSD), this case leaves three lessons in terms of legal certainty.
The first is that the gap between the regulatory framework and its effective application constitutes one of the main obstacles to development.
“The development company requested the renewal of its construction license sufficiently in advance of its expiration, but the authority responded with administrative silence,” he stated.
According to Antillón, This behavior reflects a municipal institutional framework that lacks the processes and training necessary to manage projects of this scale and complexity.
He added that inter-institutional coordination is a condition for success, not an optional procedure.
“An infrastructure project that crosses six municipalities requires formal coordination mechanisms between the central government, the municipalities involved and the private sector. The absence of such mechanisms creates spaces of vulnerability to the detriment of the general interest,” he stated.
Finally, he pointed out that the system of legal guarantees must operate with the same speed as the economy.
“That the company had to resort to protection to safeguard an almost completed work shows that the ordinary mechanisms of administrative protection are insufficient. Guatemala needs expeditious, administrative and jurisdictional channels, as well as alternative methods of conflict resolution, to resolve in real time the controversies that affect projects of public interest,” Antillón remarked.