Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) has called on U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to dismiss two State Department officials she says are “interfering in the judicial elections in Guatemala.” The officials’ intervention is strangely discordant with the Trump administration’s foreign policy to date and comes at an unusually significant inflection point for Guatemala’s legal system.

Salazar charged that “The Deputy Chief of Mission in Guatemala, Patrick Ventrell has called at least three Guatemalan judges to threaten them if they vote for center-right candidates in next year’s judicial elections.”

The threats appear to be part of a campaign to influence the political makeup of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court (CC), which is up for election next spring. The court, Guatemala’s highest authority for constitutional interpretation, is composed of five primary judges and five alternate judges.

Five different bodies each select one primary and one alternate judge on the CC. These authorities are: the Guatemalan president, seven out of 13 members of the Guatemalan Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), an absolute majority (81 out of 160 legislators) in the Guatemalan Congress, the Higher University Council, and the General Assembly of the Guatemalan Bar Association (CANG).

With only five judges on the CC, every vote can sway the majority, and the judiciary’s vote may become the deciding one. (The current president and the university council lean to the left, while the Congress and bar association lean to the right.) And, with one CC judge selected by only seven members of the CSJ, attempting to sway three such judges goes a long way towards changing the outcome of the judiciary’s election.

Changing the ideological makeup of Guatemala’s constitutional court can have far-reaching consequences, such as legalizing abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism. These progressive values are at odds with Guatemala’s Constitution and conservative culture, but such trivialities didn’t stop the U.S. Supreme Court when it issued its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Ventrell’s calls appear to be a continuation of a Biden-era pressure campaign against Guatemala’s conservative constitution. In May 2024, Salazar joined 10 other representatives in a letter complaining that State Department and USAID officials were lobbying the Guatemalan Congress “for ideological changes in Guatemala that compromise their Constitution or deeply held values concerning life and family.”

In 2025, that strategy appears to have morphed into a pressure campaign against the Guatemalan judicial system. In the first half of 2026, Guatemalan entities will elect the entire CC, the Congress will elect the entire Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), and the president will appoint the next attorney general. This is an unusual alignment of elections, since TSE judges serve six-year terms, CC judges serve five-year terms, and the attorney general serves a four-year term. The Congress will also elect a new position, comptroller general, to provide fiscal oversight against corruption.

(The Congress also elected 13 judges to the Supreme Court of Justice in October 2024, for five-year terms.)

Salazar’s letter reserved its most severe criticism for Ventrell, the senior career diplomat in the Guatemala office, who acted as Chargé d’Affaires from August 2023 to February 2024 (meaning there was no appointed diplomat, so he effectively ran the embassy).

However, Salazar also called for the removal of U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Tobin Bradley. Bradley also held a long career as a permanent employee within the State Department. However, in 2023 President Biden nominated him to become ambassador to Guatemala, and he arrived in the post in February 2024.

In other words, if Salazar is correct, America’s diplomatic embassy to Guatemala is currently run by two career bureaucrats who seem opposed to both Guatemala’s conservative culture and President Trump’s agenda.

“These members of the State Department are undermining President Trump’s policy in Central America. That cannot be tolerated,” Salazar insisted. “Guatemala is a conservative bastion in Central America. The values of Guatemala are the same values of President Trump and his administration. No State Department personnel remaining in their positions from the Biden Administration should be allowed to pursue their own socialist political agendas. We need to let Guatemala choose its judges on its own.”

We have no wish to see the careers of two men (at least one of whom has a young family) end without hearing their side of the story (perhaps Salazar has, but it is not public knowledge). Perhaps, with some oversight and specific instruction, these men can implement President Trump’s agenda in Guatemala just fine. But initial reports suggest that this incident is a bona fide sighting of the elusive “Deep State,” and those reports are at least worthwhile for the State Department to investigate thoroughly.