Guatemala’s 2023 election cycle has begun, as the country’s Supreme Electoral Council officially convoked elections on January 20 to fill the seat of current President, Alejandro Giammattei. The current elections come as Giammattei and his allies have overseen one of the most expansive, systematic assaults on Guatemala’s political system in nearly thirty years.
“The elections are taking place in a context marked by democratic regression, the advancement of different expressions of authoritarianism, the contraction of rights of any kind, and the dismantling of state institutions, including the electoral body,” Renzo Rosal, an independent political analyst, tells The Progressive.
“So these elections are taking place in a turbulent, chaotic environment,” he adds. “This does not motivate citizens to vote.”
Guatemala has seen the rollback of anti-corruption and anti-impunity efforts in the three years since the end of the United Nations backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, commonly known as CICIG, in September 2019. This rollback has led to attacks on the independence of the judicial branch and the concentration of power within the executive branch. It has also resulted in the prosecution of former investigators and prosecutors, and the exile of judges who were involved in cases of corruption.
“These elections are taking place in a turbulent, chaotic environment. This does not motivate citizens to vote.”
“There is no counterpart or great figure on the part of the Public Ministry in which one can have some kind of guarantee or confidence, that they will ensure that the best candidates [participate],” Marielos Chang, a Guatemalan independent political analyst, tells The Progressive. “There is a big and wide door for those who are going to favor the interests of the current government and who are going to maintain the interests of the status quo.”
On top of this, various scandals in the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), which oversees elections, have generated a lack of confidence in the electoral process. These scandals include the falsification of the doctorate of the head of the TSE and ties between members of the body and the ruling party.
“The TSE has failed to build trust with respect to the ability to guarantee elections that are free of fraud and transparent—guarantees that this is a process where people can freely vote and exercise their right to vote,” says Chang.
While candidate registration begins on January 21, a number of the nearly thirty political parties have already announced their candidates for the presidency. Many of these candidates have previously been accused of corruption or otherwise involved in scandals.
Among those considered to be a frontrunner in the 2023 elections is Zury Ríos, the daughter of late dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was convicted of committing genocide against the Maya people and died in April 2018. Ríos is running with the far-right Valor Party in coalition with the Unionist party. She had been blocked in 2019 from participating in the election due to her father’s part in the 1982 coup d’etat that brought him to power. Her vice-presidential candidate, Héctor Adolfo Cifuentes, was accused of acts of corruption in 2019.
Another candidate, Edmond Mulet, who will be running for president for the Cabal Party, is accused of participating in a scheme to sell stolen children as part of an adoption racket during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict.
Sandra Torres, who divorced her husband, former president Álvaro Colom in order to run for office, was herself accused of acts of corruption and illicit campaign financing during the 2015 and 2019 election cycles before her case was closed in 2022. Her vice-presidential candidate, Romeo Guerra Lemus, is an evangelical pastor with the Sion Church—even though Guatemala’s constitution prohibits religious leaders from running for higher office.
Frontrunner Zury Ríos—daughter of late dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was convicted of committing genocide against the Maya people—is running with the far-right Valor Party.
Roberto Arzú, the son of ex-president and former mayor of Guatemala City Álvaro Arzú who died in 2018, has launched a campaign with the Podemos Party, casting himself as a populist candidate. His vice-presidential running mate, attorney David Pineda, was involved in a scandal on public roads in 2014 and defended former President Alfonso Portillo in a corruption case.
Meanwhile, the country’s left wing remains divided and unable to provide a cohesive challenge to the Guatemalan right.
It is yet to be determined if all of these candidates will be permitted to register to participate in the elections. Arzú, Mulet, and Torres have all already faced challenges to their registration. Blocking these candidates would favor the ruling party of Alejandro Giammattei, though the president himself is prohibited by law from running for re-election.
This will be a “trial by fire” for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Chang points out, to see if they have been co-opted by the ruling party.
Legally, campaigning does not begin until March 27. The first round of voting is scheduled for June 25, and a second round is scheduled for August 20 if no candidate is able to achieve 50 percent of vote in the presidential race.
Given the number of candidates, anyone can gain a measure of traction as was the case in 2015, which saw the obscure candidate, Jimmy Morales, win the election in a runoff. There is a sense of fatalism for those who have suggested that Ríos will win.
“This electoral process is going to be very competitive, very confrontational, and very tense, because the dividing line between the different options is small,” Rosal says. “It is a very strong competition, where right now I do not see any candidate who separates themselves from the rest.”
As Guatemala enters the election cycle, the country has continued to face a worsening political and social crisis, which has led to a sharp increase in violent crime. The rightwing is expected to campaign on perceived threats of “gender ideology” and “globalism,” which conservatives argue should prompt a return to traditional values—all talking points which were coined by Republicans during the 2022 U.S. midterms, according to Chang.
Rosal points out that the participation of candidates accused of corruption means they will likely not campaign on combating it. But as the country faces a worsening situation, crime and violence has emerged as the right wing political talking point.
These preliminary candidates have already started to make election promises, in spite of a moratorium on campaigning outside of the predetermined period. Far-right candidates like Ríos are also raising calls for the return of the death penalty in the Central American country.
The rightwing is expected to campaign on perceived threats of “gender ideology” and “globalism,” as well as a return to “traditional values”—all talking points which were coined by Republicans during the 2022 U.S. midterms.
On January 5, the candidate tweeted her call for the return of the death penalty in response to the death of Génesis Ixcajop, a seven-year-old girl whose remains were found on January 1. Arzú too has expressed his support for the death penalty, suggesting that his administration would “send criminals to god.”
According to the polling done by Gallup in Guatemala, 45 percent of voters ranked establishing the death penalty among their political priorities. But among the main concerns of voters, it fell behind removing the military presence from the streets, construction of highways, access to grants for higher education, the cost of medicine, and the cost of living.
Concerns over worsening crime and violence miss the fact that the 2016-2020 administration of Jimmy Morales and his Minister of the Interior Enrique Degenhart, who is running for congress with Ríos’s Valor Party, had undermined efforts to root out corruption within the police, as Chang highlights.
“[Degenhart] basically dedicated himself to removing people,” he says, “who had been in the civil service for years, trying to combat organized crime structures or establish processes to improve follow-up on complaints.”
Since that time, crime has increased in Guatemala, especially in this period ahead of the upcoming elections.
As the situation has worsened, so too has the migration from the country. According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 230,000 Guatemalans were encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border during fiscal year 2022, a number that is down from over 284,000 in 2021.
Meanwhile, Guatemalans continue to lack the ability to vote from abroad, and the proposals from most political parties do little to address the root causes of migration. Rather, the parties largely continue to pursue the promotion of impunity and the corruption that has pushed so many to seek to flee the country.
“There is a resignation,” Chang says. “I think the issue here is that people do not see any party or candidate that can channel the capacity for transformation.”