On June 25th, 2023, Guatemalans cast their ballots to elect a new president. In the months leading up to the election, elites ensured that any genuine alternative to the decadence of the political establishment was disqualified. Three candidates were barred from running as swayable judges found inconsistencies in their applications, using technical and legal arguments to suppress opposition voices. Polls forecast that the 2023 election would be business as usual, with Guatemalan politicians insidiously presenting themselves as ‘alternatives’ despite their various shades of corruption. But one opposition candidate slipped under the radar, a blunder that is wreaking havoc in the capital as elites scramble to block his momentum. Having polled at just 2%, no one thought that Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla party would cause more than a ripple in the year’s election. However, in a performance that surprised Semilla itself, Arévalo won 12% of the popular vote, propelling him to the runoff election of August 20th, where he will face Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope party (UNE).
Torres received 15% of the vote, but 24% of voters cast null ballots, signalling a deep-seated disenchantment with Guatemalan democracy. Since the signing of the peace accords in 1996, which marked the end of the 36-year civil war, the struggle to build a functional bureaucratic state has been defined by the battle against corruption. In 2007, the country welcomed the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed body that collaborated with Guatemala’s top prosecutors to identify and dismantle the criminal networks that permeated the private sector and the government. By 2019, the CICIG had identified 122 cases of large-scale corruption, with 200 public officials facing charges, five of which were former presidents.
Despite widespread support for Guatemala’s historic anti-corruption drive, elite maneuvering eventually drove the CICIG from the country. The Morales government and its congressional allies lobbied in Washington to deliver a tacit agreement between the Trump administration and the “corrupt pact” –the informal alliance made up of politicians, businessmen, elites, and organized crime networks that render Guatemalan democracy nonfunctional. In exchange for reducing the flow of migrants to the US border, Washington would turn a blind eye to the dismantling of the CICIG. In 2019, President Jimmy Morales chose not to renew the CICIG’s mandate and defied the constitutional court ruling that found unilaterally ending the CICIG’s mandate to be illegal. Since then, attacks on anti-corruption activists, independent judges, and free press have intensified. More than 100 live in exile, and the judiciary now prosecutes at the behest of the executive.
In the 2023 elections, Guatemalan law was weaponized against anti-corruption candidates, but it did not touch household names like Zury Ríos or Sandra Torres. Ríos is the daughter of Efraín Ríos Montt, a former dictator who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya Ixil in 2013. His 17-month rule was the bloodiest in all of Guatemala’s civil war, with human rights organizations estimating that over 10 000 were murdered during the first three months. Despite this conviction, Ríos Montt never served his 80 year sentence. Under pressure from powerful businessmen and military officials, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court invalidated the final weeks of Ríos Montt’s trial on a technicality just ten days after he had been convicted. He died in 2018, awaiting retrial. Guatemalan law prohibits family members of coup leaders from running for president, but Zury appeared on the ballot nonetheless. Her illegal candidacy exposes that though the civil war may be over, the centers of power that drove it still hold disproportionate influence in the nation’s capital. Ríos’ sixth-place finish defied early polling and sent a clear message to her Valor-Unionista coalition. Her far-right platform, authoritarian sympathizing, and cunning interpretation of post-war ‘reconciliation’ did not garner any sympathy outside of her political alliances.
Former first lady Sandra Torres was arrested in 2019 by the CICIG for failing to report $3.6 million related to her 2015 campaign. She was imprisoned for four months, but because UNE has the largest congressional block in the legislature and aligns with of President Alejandro Giammettei’s Vamos party, she benefited from a series of favourable rulings that culminated in the charges against her being dropped. The judge assigned to her case cited insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Torres’ popularity can be read inversely to that of Ríos. Nearly despised in the capital, UNE is popular among rural voters who have benefitted first-hand from their social programs. This momentum has historically propelled her to the second round, after which opposition forces unite and deny her the victory that she seeks for the third time. Analysts feared that a victory for Ríos would mean the death of Guatemalan democracy, but voters fear that a victory for Torres will annihilate what little remains of the deteriorating rule of law. With every presidential campaign, millions are spent buying the votes of constituents. On her third attempt at the presidency, the balance sheet for Torres reflects a deficit that could plunge the country into levels of corruption that it has never before seen. This is what is at stake in the 2023 election: Guatemalans are bearing themselves against a possible future of greater inequality and lesser meritocracy than what currently exists, a sobering thought given what Guatemala looks like today.
Amid infamous candidacies, campaign financing crimes, and opposition suppression, Semilla laid a humble stake in the presidential race. Founded by a group of academics and activists during the 2015 nationwide anti-corruption protests, the movement vowed to set the country on a different path, aspiring to restore transparency, the separation of powers, and an independent judiciary in Guatemala. But in 2019, their presidential candidate, Thelma Aldana, was laid with criminal charges and barred from participating in the elections. As retribution for the high-profile anti-corruption investigations that she led as attorney general, she has been in exile for the past four years.
Elites thought they had cut the head of the serpent, but we now know that they merely underestimated Semilla. Bernardo Arévalo is a sociologist and former diplomat, but most people know him by his link to Guatemala’s fleeting democratic legacy. He is the son of Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, who served from 1945-1951. The statist reforms that he initiated are a far cry from today’s Guatemala because the United States and the United Fruit Company fiercely opposed his anti-colonial policies in education, labour rights, land reform, and economic protectionism. CIA intervention in Guatemalan democracy assured that any advancements made were swiftly undone and that subsequent governments were empowered to commit genocide, all for the sake of American capital.
Bernardo Arévalo is an outsider and an underdog. In a chaotic move that revealed a sharp division within Guatemala’s elite, the head of the country’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity suspended Arévalo’s candidacy just moments after the Electoral Tribunal certified the results of the first round. The controversial ruling alleged that the party was registered using falsified signatures, but it also violated Guatemalan law, which stipulates that parties cannot be suspended during an election. The Constitutional Court has since passed a provisional injunction which should allow the second round to proceed, but it is impossible to predict what the coming weeks have in store. Semilla threatens the interests of the country’s wealthiest, and they will be damned if they let Arévalo ascend to power unchallenged. The road to victory will not be easy, as the corrupt pact will weaponize whatever they can to orchestrate a more palatable election result. The threat of political violence looms large, and many fear that the worst is yet to come.
Edited by Sabrina Nelson
Clio is in her fourth year at McGill, majoring in Honours International Development and minoring in Hispanic Studies and Social Studies of Medicine. As a staff writer for Catalyst, she most enjoys writing about social movements, political violence, Indigenous rights, and feminism.