Budna Investigation: ‘Too Late to Put the Genie Back in the Bottle’ 

Attorney Arthur Saldivar says the State’s handling of the Joseph Budna abduction case has gone far past the point of repair. He said it is “too late now to put the genie in the bottle,” and that the government’s thread of actions created a pattern of concealment that the court must now resolve.

Saldivar confirmed that two strikeout applications have been filed by the government. He described the move as a standard attempt by the government to delay or dismiss the proceedings.

Saldivar insists that the government has withheld essential information. “Given that the state has deliberately concealed and avoided disclosing information, they want to use that as a basis to say that there’s speculation on the part of the claimant in respect of some of the persons who have been identified as parties in this matter,” he said.

This includes video footage that he argues must be disclosed in its original form. Saldivar added that omissions by police officers form part of the case. “When it comes to persons with a legal duty, not doing something is also an offense. A mission to act is an offense when you have a legal duty to act,” he said.

The matter returned to public focus this week when the Director of Public Prosecutions, Cheryl-Lynn Vidal, confirmed receiving the case file after Prime Minister John Briceño handed the matter to her office. The DPP described the file delivered to her office as “less than nothing,” adding that based on that, “there cannot possibly be an arrest of anyone because very few people saw anything, and what they saw, they are not too sure about what they saw.”

Saldivar argued that the file should have been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions from the outset. “If it went to the DPP at the initial stage on the 23rd of August after the incident occurred, there wouldn’t have been as much furor over what has transpired since,” he said.

Budna was abducted in Orange Walk in August. Constable Barrington Flowers was accused of assisting in the abduction before being moved from interdiction to a full-pay suspension. Flowers denies all allegations, and Budna remains in a Guatemalan prison serving time for a conviction there.