Editor's note - Election update (June 26, 2023): Guatemala's elections on Sunday produced surprises for observers and citizens, with the progressive Movimiento Semilla party's candidate Bernardo Arévalo coming in second, and thereby moving on to the second round. He will face conservative Sandra Torres in the run-off scheduled for August 20. Arévalo's success was unforeseen, as polling had suggested prior to election day that he was trailing. Previous front runners Edmond Mulet and Zury Rios placed in fifth and sixth places, respectively.
Guatemalans go to the polls on Sunday, June 25 to vote to elect a new president, 160 congressional representatives, hundreds of mayors, and twenty members of the Central American Parliament.
There are twenty-two presidential candidates running for the office. If none of the candidates receives a majority of votes, the top two vote-getters will go into a run-off election on August 20.
In the latest polling, one of the leading candidates for president is conservative Sandra Torres, the former first lady who has proven links to corruption Next is centrist Edmond Mulet, who ran for the presidency in 2019, had served as a diplomat at the United Nations, and is connected to an illegal adoptions scheme that took place between from the 1980s to the early 2000s.. And third is the far-right Zury Rios, who was blocked from running in 2019 because her father, General Efráin Ríos Montt, had taken the presidency in a coup d’état in 1982. Article 186c of the Guatemalan constitution prohibits family members of those who took power in a coup from holding higher office. Ríos Montt was convicted in 2013 of committing genocide against the Indigenous Maya population during his regime, but the conviction was overturned by his allies in the country’s Constitutional Court.
Jeff Abbott
Edmond Mulet's campaign signs line the street along Guatemala City's Reforma Avenue.
The front runners have all campaigned on conservative values, promising to protect the nuclear family. Each candidate has promised to carry out similar policies that have led to the incarceration of more than 1 percent of the population in El Salvador and resulted in numerous accusations of human rights abuses.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which oversees Guatemala’s elections, arbitrarily blocked several presidential candidates from running for office, including leftist Thelma Cabrera of the Movement for the Liberation of the People party and conservative populists Roberto Árzu of the Podemos party and Carlos Pineda of the Citizen Prosperity Party, ahead of the elections. Other candidates for congress were also blocked, then permitted to run, before being blocked again.
Jeff Abbott
Zury Rios campaign signs line the streets across Guatemala City.
The confusion over who could participate, while candidates like Rios were allowed to, has contributed to a lack of confidence in the elections.
“Most citizens do not have much hope of what can be obtained in the elections,” Luis Mack, a Guatemalan political analyst and professor, tells The Progressive. “There is a really pessimistic perception of the electoral processes and so what they are trying to vote for is the least bad.”
But the elections are occurring at a time of one of the most pronounced attacks on democracy in the country in the nearly thirty years since the attempted self-coup d’état by the administration of Jorge Serrano in 1993 and perhaps since Guatemala’s return to democracy in 1985.
The democratic rollbacks have generated concern in the international community, especially as the shift accelerated due to the end of the internationally supported International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, commonly known as CICIG, in 2019. Ahead of the upcoming election, U.S. Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, issued a statement calling for free and fair elections and an end to corruption and impunity, and condemning the actions of the administration of President Alejandro Giammattei.
“Giammattei’s administration has aggressively sought to eliminate any political opposition, silence its critics in the press and civil society, and retain strict control over the country’s judiciary,” — U.S. Senator Peter Welch
“Giammattei’s administration has . . . aggressively sought to eliminate any political opposition, silence its critics in the press and civil society, and retain strict control over the country’s judiciary,” the Senator said in the statement. “In this month’s elections, the Guatemalan people will have an opportunity to reject the country’s long history of political corruption and express their desire for just and accountable governance.”
But the elections are unlikely to bring a meaningful shift to the political status quo in Guatemala. This is made apparent by the participation of so many candidates who have been accused of corruption and other criminal activities, including candidates with deep ties to organized crime.
“We are going to go through an electoral process that sadly will not change anything,” Abelardo Medina, an economist with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies, tells The Progressive. “The credibility of election systems and public systems in general are doing a lot of damage to the country, to the extent that people do not trust them.”
In the lead up to the elections, Guatemala saw an intense campaign of revenge carried out by the far right against anti-corruption activists, judges, prosecutors, and journalists who report on corruption.
José Rubén Zamora
Just eleven days before the elections, Guatemalan journalist José Rúben Zamora was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of money laundering, but was absolved of charges of blackmail and influence peddling. Zamora, a renowned journalist and founder of the now closed newspaper, El Periódico, was widely seen as a government critic and one of the key journalists supporting investigative stories into accusations of corruption.
While El Periódico has long faced lawsuits and attacks for their work, the spurious sentencing was widely seen as sending a “chilling message” to journalists to not investigate corruption.
The press has come under further attack in the lead up to the elections, with candidates blocking access to journalists and making antagonistic statements against journalists. Just days ahead of the elections, multiple journalists were attacked by candidates and party members while covering their political rallies.
The hostility has led to concerns of what is to come in the next administration.
“We consider it a critical crisis with institutional erosion, with the limitation of freedom of expression, arbitrariness, and authoritarianism against the press,” Marielos Chang, an independent political analyst, tells The Progressive. “[These things] are critical and worrying.”
Among the key strategies that are unlikely to change following the vote, no matter who wins, is the foreign policy of Guatemala.
It appears that whoever wins the presidency, Guatemala will continue their steadfast support for Taiwan. Ahead of the elections, nearly every presidential candidate stated in interviews that they would maintain diplomatic relationships with the island nation.
It appears that whoever wins the presidency, Guatemala will continue their steadfast support for Taiwan.
In recent years, the administrations governing Guatemala have sought to utilize their diplomacy to curry favor with the government of the United States. President Jimmy Morales moved the Guatemalan embassy to Jersuelem in order to find favor with the Trump Administration as he sought to end the CICIG; and the administration of President Alejandro Giammattei has sought to utilize diplomatic relations with Taiwan and Ukraine in order to avoid criticisms for democratic rollbacks, attacks on the press, and anti-corruption efforts.
In exchange for the support, Taiwan has paid for lobbying efforts on behalf of the Guatemalan government. In 2022, Taiwan paid $900,000 on behalf of the Guatemalan government to a lobbying group based in Washington, D.C.
The use of foreign policy as a means to defend corruption is worrying for foreign observers.
“The Guatemalan government has instrumentalized their foreign policy in terms of Taiwan, Ukraine, and the topic of migration with the objective that the international community decrease their criticism of what occurs in Guatemala,” Juan Pappier, the Acting Deputy Director for the Americas with Human Rights Watch, tells The Progressive.
“No one can genuinely believe that Guatemala is interested in Ukraine, in Taiwan, or addressing migration,” he explains. “Here the only interest is to consolidate impunity for corrupt actors who have operated in this country and guarantee impunity for human rights violations.”