Rubio Tied to Lobbyists for Latin American Elites
There's a powerful business component to the religious shadow diplomacy of the next secretary of state
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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the State Department, has multiple ties to lobbyists for the business interests of allegedly corrupt Latin American elites. One lobbyist is a veteran, with Rubio, of Christian shadow diplomacy that has had devastating impacts.
As I’ve previously reported, Rubio was a key player in destroying an effective and popular UN anti-corruption task force in Guatemala. A partner in that effort, now a lobbyist, was a friend and fellow insider of Rubio’s at the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive Christian group that uses prayer breakfasts to boost its global right-wing networks.
I’ve written before about the issues at stake with Rubio’s nomination. While Washington is speculating that Rubio will occupy a diminished position in Trump’s shadow, he’ll also hold the levers of America’s diplomatic machinery. That will give him vast powers and opportunities to facilitate Fellowship shadow diplomacy that was already at least tolerated even during Democratic administrations.
Ukraine has benefited from it, as I’ve reported, but the cost of that isn’t yet clear. Uganda and Guatemala, meanwhile, have paid high prices.
The Fellowship’s diplomacy typically benefits political leaders who follow The Fellowship notion that obeying God — or God’s supposed wishes — supersedes the obligations of civic leadership. This ministering to power, not surprisingly, is often funded by business interests who stand to benefit from the rule of political leaders indifferent to democratic norms.
Lobbyists with ties to Rubio include his former chief of staff, a friend and donor, another friend, and a past prayer partner. One client of one of the lobbying firms in question was, until a year ago, Tether, the multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency.
Other clients include big Latin American construction concerns. Their lobbyists push for more American investment — both private and public — in the Northern Triangle. That includes, obviously, investments directly benefiting their clients.
And the Guatemalan prayer breakfast — with ties to The Fellowship and to Rubio’s prayer partner — routinely connects those businesses with American politicians.
But it’s not just American investments on the table. One former diplomat who served in the region told me that Guatemala’s elites are deeply interested in preventing the appointment of an attorney general hostile to their agendas and committed to the rule of law.
Guatemala’s elites and political allies — some of them tied to The Fellowship — almost succeeded in preventing the new, lawfully elected president from taking office. Their next priority, the former diplomat told me, is likely that the attorney general’s office stays in friendly hands.
Rubio’s record includes stepping to the defense of that attorney general — officially labeled corrupt by the Biden State Department and strongly criticized by Human Rights Watch — but also, more recently, brushing her back.
As I’ve previously reported, Rubio was connected with Manuel Espina, Guatemala’s former ambassador to the U.S., through The Fellowship. (One of Espina’s Fellowship liaisons was Tim Burchfield, a Chik-fil-A franchise owner who figured into the Maria Butina prayer breakfast scandal.)
The Prayer Partner
Rubio and Espina prayed together with evangelical then-Pres. Jimmy Morales at The Fellowship’s infamous C Street townhouse. This wasn’t known publicly until after Rubio and Espina helped destroy CICIG, a UN anti-corruption task force, ending its investigation of Morales’s alleged corruption.
A source who knew Espina told me several years ago that “There was a friendship between [Espina] with Marco Rubio. They have a friendship from before and obviously Manuel used all of these friends to make this famous lobby [against CICIG] before.”
In between serving as Morales’s ambassador and registering to lobby for Guatemala’s business elites, Espina and several current and former members of Congress co-authored opinion pieces promoting investment in Guatemala.
On June 25, 2020, Espina co-authored an op-ed in The Hill with former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR).
“The United States should begin untangling our economy from China and investing in the markets of the Western Hemisphere,” the three wrote. “A first step toward this goal should be building a logistics hub using existing railways.”
Two months later, Espina joined Rep. Vicente Gonzales (D-TX) and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on a Newsweek opinion piece encouraging the use of U.S. dollars to hedge against China’s influence.
At the time, both Guatemala and Honduras recognized Taiwan. The Newsweek piece argued that, “This geopolitical situation gives the U.S. an advantage over China and the possibility of making an economic growth pole out of the Northern Triangle—while holding the line and curtailing the expansive CCP's influence in the region.” (Honduras and others later flipped to ally with China.)
The strategy, Espina and the House members wrote, was “to identify private companies with strong track records of transparency and business ethics to build stable and long-term partnerships with the U.S. government.”
At the time, reportedly, Espina was “offering his services as a lobbyist to Guatemalan businessmen.” With some success, apparently.
Because it turned out that the lobbyist shop of Rokk Solutions was paid to push Espina’s musings as of Aug. 3 that year. The Rokk contract says it was paid for by Ronaldo Maldonado, a Guatemalan attorney based in Washington.
The federal filing doesn’t say why, or indicate that anyone else was involved. Maldonado is described in Guatemalan media as saying Espina’s articles would highlight development opportunities.
The Guatemalan reporting identifies Maldonado merely as an independent consultant. But a LinkedIn profile for the Chamber of Industry of Guatemala lists Maldonado as an employee.
And in early 2022, when Espina himself registered as a lobbyist his first client was the Chamber of Industry of Guatemala. The mission was to promote investment.
Not long after, Espina was representing another Guatemalan client, Cemcal. The purpose: “General rule of law in Northern triangle and investment opportunities.”
It’s important to note that a certain amount of “rule of law” is a prerequisite for most U.S. investment, corrupt or otherwise. But an interest in “rule of law” can also serve as a fig leaf for challenging it — labeling political opponents criminals and jailing them, for instance. Which has happened in Guatemala.
And Espina is tied through the Guatemalan prayer breakfast, which he started, to the attorney general who made the Biden State Department’s list of corrupt officials. The attorney general, Maria Consuelo Porras, has been linked by Guatemalan media with Espina through both the U.S. and Guatemalan prayer breakfasts.
Porras’s work blocking some candidates from election ballots has been attributed to the desire of Guatemala’s business interests to keep progressives and reformers out of office.
On April 29, 2022, Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), another Fellowship insider, pressed Secretary of State Tony Blinken about alleged U.S. interference in the appointment process for Guatemala’s attorney general.
A slate of candidates for consideration by the president is supposed to be compiled by a commission, which has, in the past, been accused of corruption.
A few weeks after Rubio’s and Lee’s letter, the State Department added Porras to the list of sanctioned corrupt officials.
Nevertheless, Morales’s successor, fellow hard-liner President Alexander Giammattei, re-appointed Porras.
Earlier that year, another Rubio friend, lobbyist Brian Ballard, had taken on the Giammattei administration as a client. (In 2015, Ballard had ended his support of then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) over Bush’s attacks on Rubio.)
Ballard’s contact in the Giammattei government, the official who signed the lobbying deal, was Espina’s successor as ambassador to the U.S., Alfonso Quinonez. A former executive of Guatemala’s construction giant, Cementos Progreso, Quinonez’s family is well-connected to Guatemala’s power players and, in some cases, suspects.
A source once close to Espina told me during my original reporting on this that Quinonez was just one of many to get ambassadorships via Espina.
The Giammattei government, however, didn’t pay for Ballard’s lobbying. As OpenSecrets and others reported, Taiwan paid for it, presumably out of gratitude for Guatemala holding out against China’s growing influence. One of the people Ballard’s lobbyists met with on Giammattei’s behalf was Rubio.
If it all sounds as though Rubio will be in the tank for Guatemala’s corrupt wealthy, the former diplomat I spoke with pushed back on that. Even corrupt business leaders recognize the need for both some actual guardrails and, perhaps more importantly, the perception among potential investors that there are guardrails.
To the former diplomat’s point, in 2023, Rubio took the side of Guatemala’s current president, Bernardo Arévalo, against Porras when it looked like she’d try to disqualify him from office. A joint statement signed by Rubio and other senators said:
“The announcement by Guatemalan prosecutors on Friday to strip President-elect Arévalo of his legal immunity and call into question his inauguration on January 14, 2024, is a threat to Guatemala’s democracy…
“We urge Attorney General Porras to ensure that the Attorney General’s Office respects the rule of law and rejects efforts that would undermine the peaceful transition of power.”
It was not terribly dissimilar from the kind of influence campaign Rubio had accused Blinken of just a couple years prior. Arévalo took office.
Cemcal and one of its big investments, the Cementos Progreso company where Quinonez worked, are major players in construction and development in the Northern Triangle.
Some of their directors and family members have been tied to criminal conspiracies in Guatemala. That includes the alleged campaign-finance violations that helped elect Morales, the laissez faire evangelical president who made Espina his ambassador.
(Morales’s former intelligence chief, Mario Duarte, was another veteran of Espina’s prayer breakfast and ended up lobbying for Zury Mayte Rios, the right-wing daughter of Guatemala’s notorious 1980s dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who was connected to The Fellowship’s leader at the time, Doug Coe.)
Espina’s other client, the Chamber of Industry of Guatemala (CIG) is basically what it sounds like, a trade group representing some of the country’s richest and most powerful business interests. CIG, too, has had allegedly corrupt figures at the tiller.
And some have ties to Espina. Juan Luis Bosch, for instance, was CIG’s president at one time. He and his brother were also guests at one of Espina’s first successful Guatemalan prayer breakfasts, as I reported in 2022.
Bosch’s brother, a partner in the family’s massive business empire, met with other prayer breakfast attendees the following year, including a Cementos Progreso executive from another billionaire family, allegedly concocting an illegal campaign-finance scheme to elect Morales.
The meeting, prosecutors said, was convened by Espina’s college friend, Rodrigo Arenas, also a breakfast veteran, who denied the charges of criminality to me when we spoke for my earlier reporting. He denied other aspects of the claims, as well, and said the million dollars they raised was to ensure election integrity.
Espina founded an organization called Guatemala Prospera to run his prayer breakfast, a platform for right-wing agendas. The organization works closely with wealthy business interests. Congressional travel filings show that Guatemala Prospera has flown several members of Congress to Guatemala.
The trips invariably center on tours of businesses with a history of corruption, and meetings with their executives. The premise is explicitly — and not wrongly — that U.S. investment can bolster development that will create Guatemalan jobs (and not incidentally mitigate immigration).
The subtext is where specifically that money should go.
A travel filing for a trip to Guatemala by Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) notes that CIG stresses the “importance of the private sector to help decrease irregular migration.” The itinerary included a tour of Cementos Progreso’s headquarters.
Progreso and Guatemala Prospera co-hosted a dinner for the congressional delegation, to “discuss the opportunities available to grow the industrial presence of the US in Guatemala, particularly in one of the major industries in the country: construction.”
Despite — or because — of the fact that he’s now a lobbyist, Espina appears to still have a leadership role with Guatemala Prospera, showing up in a congressional disclosure form just last year as discussing the group’s agenda with a congressional staffer over dinner. That’s while Espina continued to lobby for both Cemcal and CIG.
And he’s not lobbying on his own.
Despite his lack of lobbying experience at the time, Espina got his new lobbying gig — advocating for his old Guatemalan business contacts – when he was hired in 2022 by a newly launched lobbying shop called Continental Strategy.
The firm, started by Florida political veterans, has been home to a number of Rubio alumni, some of whom know him from his days in the Florida legislature. Richard Corcoran was a founding partner and former Rubio chief of staff. (The “volunteer” chaplain for Florida’s legislature, as I reported last year, was secretly on The Fellowship’s payroll.)
A Continental Strategy
Continental Strategy founder and President Carlos Trujillo served alongside Rubio in the Florida House. According to the Associated Press, Trujillo and Rubio are “close friends.”
Trujillo told the AP that Rubio is an “exceptional negotiator.” (Trujillo is also connected to Rubio’s other friend, Ballard, who lobbied for the previous Guatemalan administration and co-hosted a Trump fundraiser with Trujillo.)
Like Espina, Trujillo, too, lobbied for Cemcal regarding “investment opportunities,” as well as “rule of law” in the Northern Triangle.
In fact, Cemcal was Continental Strategy’s first client. Until 2023, Continental Strategy had only three clients, all of them with at least a presence in Guatemala.
The biggest two were Cemcal and CIG. In other words, for the first two years of a lobbying shop founded by Rubio allies from Florida, most revenues came from Guatemalan outfits in the prayer/business network that worked with Rubio to knock out the anti-corruption task force there.
In the first quarter of 2022, Continental Strategy — specifically Trujillo and a former aide — was paid $60,000 by Cemcal to participate in a congressional hearing on “rule of law in Northern triangle and investment opportunities.”
The hearing isn’t specified. But that February, a House subcommittee held a hearing on Northern Triangle investment. It was chaired by Correa.
The “rule of law” agenda does occasionally slide into public view. Two congressional staffers reported last year that Guatemala Prospera arranged for them to meet with Guatemalan congressional leader Alvaro Arzu.
In 2020, Espina brought Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) to Guatemala for the prayer breakfast, facilitating a meeting with Arzu
Although Espina didn’t disclose any involvement in it, Continental Strategy reported lobbying for another client in 2023 with interests in the Northern Triangle. Trujillo was lobbying for Tether, a notorious cryptocurrency.
Over the course of the year, in which Tether paid Continental Strategy $600,000, Trujillo represented Tether’s interests regarding unspecified legislation concerning stablecoins. That’s a form of cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a currency or other asset, most often the U.S. dollar.
Tether is a big player in stablecoins and has a lot to gain or lose based on how they’re regulated.
(After Tether and Trujillo parted ways, Tether signed with Damian Merlo, a longtime Republican player who’s a fan of Rubio.)
Hard as it may seem to believe, there are other characters in this sprawling production of politics and business and religion, and their numbers expand as the aperture widens from Guatemala to encompass Honduras and El Salvador.
And Rubio isn’t even the only prominent Trump administration leader all of these lobbyists can call on, about the rule of law or the flow of U.S. dollars.
One of Trujillo’s managing partners at Continental Strategy is Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff. Both she and Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, are veterans of Ballard’s lobbying firm, as well.
It is, however, vanishingly unlikely Rubio will be asked about anything remotely relevant to his Fellowship connections, let alone these lobbying ties, at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee includes several Fellowship insiders, including both Lee and even a Democrat.
The Fellowship’s most visible congressional Democrat is Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE). In 2019, Espina had just succeeded in killing the anti-corruption task force before it could finish investigating his family or his president.
Coons gave him a glowing introduction at the National Prayer Breakfast.
I’m a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and TYT. You can support my work exposing extremist Christian infiltration of our government with a donation or paid subscription. Thank you.
Mike Lee has been one of Putin's nuclear terrorists who has been amplifying his nuclear bluff every week over 2022 and 2023, with one goal only: deprive Ukraine of real defences.
Also, wow this is a lot to keep track of. I imagine you with a bulletin board with strings connecting all of this stuff. How do we get this in front of the Senators? Are they all in on it?