Guatemala’s President-elect Bernardo Arévalo, who won a landslide victory in August, is scheduled to take office on January 14th, but nobody is certain that he will. Not Arévalo, who has repeatedly denounced an “ongoing coup d’état” attempt orchestrated by the country’s entrenched political system, which has been mired in corruption for decades, including under the current President, Alejandro Giammattei. Not the Biden Administration, the European Union, the Organization of American States, or the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, all of whom are backing Arévalo’s claim to office. And not the huge crowds of peaceful protesters who have taken to the streets during the past two months to demand that the election results be respected. As autocrats are being voted into office across the region and the world, Guatemala, a country with a long history of dictatorships and corrupt governments, is fighting to insure a victory for democracy. In an unprecedented step, the protests are being led by Indigenous communities, who lost more than a hundred thousand people in a three-decade-long genocidal war, from 1960 to 1996, and who remain, still today, deeply marginalized.
Arévalo is a sixty-five-year-old center-left sociologist and former diplomat who, before the elections, was best known in Guatemala as the son of Juan José Arévalo, the country’s first democratically elected President. Bernardo Arévalo’s Semilla (Seed) party ran on an anti-corruption campaign, and has been fighting against the efforts of a special-interest network that includes politicians, businessmen, and people involved in organized crime widely known as el pacto de corruptos, the pact of the corrupt. The pact has attempted to use the judicial system, especially the electoral tribunal, the highest authority in electoral matters, to invalidate the election results, and the Congress to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the twenty-three Semilla legislators who won the election and, if seated, would constitute the third-largest congressional bloc. At midnight on November 30th, the pact lifted the immunity of the four of the five judges on the electoral tribunal who refused to overturn the election; three of them immediately fled the country. A week later, the special prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, who last year was named on the U.S. State Department’s list of corrupt and undemocratic actors, requested in a press conference that the results of the runoff be annulled.
“Even the most optimistic are losing hope,” Claudia Méndez Arriaza, a respected journalist who is still working in the country, despite a crackdown on the independent press, told me, on the phone from Guatemala City. Juan Francisco Sandoval, a lawyer now living in exile in Washington, D.C., but who previously headed the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, which was tasked with dismantling the corrupt networks, in collaboration with the independent International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), told me, “We are at an inflection point.” The likely next step, he added, “is to call a new election in which independent parties will be excluded.”
In early December, the Biden Administration, in its latest effort to prevent that, sent Jose W. Fernandez, the Under-Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, as an envoy to Guatemala to signal its support for a democratic transition of power. Two days earlier, the U.S. Department of the Treasury had sanctioned Luis Miguel Martínez Morales, who has no official position in the government but whom the department described in a statement as “one of the most influential individuals in the Giammattei administration.” (The statement notes that Guatemalan prosecutors had investigated him “for his role in a controversial payment tied to the purchase of 16 million doses of Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccines.” Martínez Morales said the U.S. government was being “manipulated” by “bitter leftists” and was “displaying an attitude of revenge.”)
In the past, of course, the United States played a decisive role in Guatemalan history. In 1954, it spearheaded the ouster of the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz (Juan José Arévalo’s successor), in the name of fighting Communism. A succession of U.S.-backed military regimes ensued. The U.S. eventually moved on, but the local forces it allied with did not. After thirty-six years of conflicts with leftist guerrillas that included a genocidal counter-insurgency campaign against the Maya population, the security apparatus directed by the military morphed into a series of criminal networks that infiltrated state institutions, including the judiciary, and worked to preserve the status quo that benefitted the country’s élites. (According to a report posted earlier this year on the Social Science Research Network, those élites are still “among the most rapacious in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Guatemala currently ranks a hundred and fiftieth out of a hundred and eighty countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.)
In 2007, following years of demands from civic organizations, Guatemala signed an agreement with the United Nations to create the CICIG, which helped local prosecutors conduct hundreds of investigations. One led to the resignation of President Otto Pérez Molina, a retired military officer and hard-line conservative, in 2015. Two years later, President Jimmy Morales tried to get rid of the CICIG. After a legal strategy failed, Congress passed reforms to ease certain criminal sentences and to weaken campaign-finance rules. Mass protests forced the reversal of those reforms, but this episode gave el pacto de corruptos its name.
Morales finally managed to expel the CICIG in 2019, and, the next year, the Administration of the newly installed Giammattei began to openly persecute independent journalists, judges, and prosecutors, who were forced to choose between exile and prison. One of the last vestiges of democracy was the national elections. Giammattei could not seek reëlection, because Presidents serve a single four-year term, but the electoral tribunal disqualified three candidates who were deemed a threat to the status quo. The next President appeared likely to be either Zury Ríos, the daughter of the late dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was convicted of genocide, in 2013, or Sandra Torres, a former First Lady who was cleared of criminal charges involving the violation of campaign-finance laws just in time to launch her campaign. A few other candidates, including Arévalo, were allowed to run “just to offer the appearance of legitimacy,” Sandoval, the lawyer, said.
Sixty per cent of registered voters went to the polls for the first round of the elections, on June 25th. The winners, with twenty-four per cent, were blank and invalid ballots. Sandra Torres came in second, with almost sixteen per cent. To everyone’s surprise, Arévalo came in third, with almost twelve per cent of the vote, and advanced to the runoff.
The system swung into full motion to prevent the possibility of an Arévalo victory. On July 1st, the Constitutional Court requested a recount—something that is very rare in Guatemala. On July 12th, the government-run Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) ordered the suspension of Semilla, alleging irregularities in the gathering of signatures required to be registered as a political party, a charge that Semilla denied. On July 13th, the Constitutional Court ruled that Arévalo could remain on the ballot. Curruchiche, the special prosecutor, then ordered raids on both the electoral tribunal’s office and Semilla’s headquarters. He also threatened to investigate members of the Party.
On August 20th, Arévalo won the runoff with fifty-eight per cent of the vote. Sandra Torres claimed fraud, but eight days later the judges on the electoral tribunal voted to confirm Arévalo’s victory. However, given the suspension order against Semilla, Congress refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Party’s elected legislators, and still has not done so. On September 12th, the Public Ministry, overseen by the Attorney General, María Consuelo Porras, who also appeared on the State Department’s list of corrupt and undemocratic actors two years ago, seized ballots from a facility where they were stored, on the ground of possible fraud. The electoral tribunal deemed the action “illegal.” The tension between the tribunal and the Attorney General escalated again on November 30th, when the four judges’ immunity was revoked. On November 16th, Porras had requested that Arévalo’s immunity also be lifted, after claiming that he had participated in a student occupation of the public university to protest an alleged fraud in the election of the school’s rector. (Arévalo called the accusation “spurious and unacceptable.”)
Porras, a veteran bureaucrat of the Guatemalan court system, had gone mostly unnoticed until, two years into her appointment as Attorney General, Giammattei came to power. Since then, she has become, in Sandoval’s words, Giammattei’s “enforcer.” Edgar Gutiérrez, a former foreign minister and a frequent contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País, wrote, “She has viciously persecuted independent justice figures and dissidents, stating that she is ‘saving Guatemala from communism.’ ”
Porras’s resignation is a central demand of the protests led by the Indigenous communities. They have built more than a hundred roadblocks and set up an encampment in front of Porras’s office, where they held fire ceremonies and chanted. “Informed and active participation is essential; only our united and firm voice can shape our future,” the protest leaders said, in a statement.
Can Guatemalans save their democracy? On December 1st, Arévalo released a short video on X in which he said that the people are defending and protecting democracy, and that, “no matter how much they try, the corrupt will lose again.” But Sandoval thinks that it will take the efforts of Arévalo, his party, the protesters, the U.S., and the rest of the international community, including Latin American governments, to get the new Administration inaugurated on January 14th. The next weeks will show if those actors are more powerful than an ingrained élite willing to go to any lengths to guarantee its survival. ♦
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