Jeff Abbott
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei votes in an August 2019 presidential runoff election that he won. In June, Giammattei boycotted the Summit of the Americas in California, over efforts by the Biden Administration to denounce corruption in Guatemala.
Latin America’s far right is rooting for a comeback. As progressives gain ground with recent election victories in countries like Colombia, Chile, and Honduras, rightwing politicians in the region are hoping that former U.S. President Donald Trump and others aligned with his values will dominate in upcoming midterm elections in the United States, and the presidential election in 2024. The situation in Guatemala is a good example of how the far right hopes to maintain its grip on power across the hemisphere.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei was among a handful of leaders—most notably Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who boycotted the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California, in early June. But unlike the other presidents, who were upset that Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were excluded from the summit, Giammattei’s snub was a protest of criticism by the Biden Administration of the re-election of Guatemalan Attorney General María Consuelo Porras, who was sanctioned in May by the U.S. government for facilitating corruption.
“I excused myself from attending [the summit] because I do not agree with the way we have been mistreated,” Giammattei said on the far-right Global Liberty Alliance Podcast. “[We have been] mistreated by people from the State Department, who, in a clear interference in the internal affairs of the country, pressured us [and] told us they were going to make decisions against Guatemala.”
Giammattei accused U.S. officials of attempting to overthrow his administration, adding that the two countries “supposedly share the same values.”
But Giammattei’s values seem to more closely align with a powerful minority in the United States. He is a far-right politician who has attempted to curry favor with members of the global pro-life movement, and says his hard-line stance against abortion rights is because Guatemala is fundamentally conservative. Describing the country as a “light to the world,” in March, he declared Guatemala to be the “Ibero-American pro-life capital.” In the podcast, he accused the Biden Administration of “promoting abortions” in Guatemala.
At home, Giammattei faces accusations of corruption. In response, he has sought to bolster his support among far-right Republican politicians in the United States. Since taking office in January 2020, Giammattei and his representatives have maintained direct contact with ideologically similar politicians in the United States, including Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, while facing sanctions from the Biden Administration for dismantling anti-corruption and anti-impunity initiatives.
“[Giammattei] and his people are very confident they will have Trump back [in 2024],” Edgar Gutiérrez, a political analyst and former foreign minister of Guatemala during the administration of Alfonso Portillo (2000–2004), tells The Progressive. “This is an ultraconservative regime, and the only friends they have in the United States are ultraconservatives, who are now a minority.”
Trump’s election in 2016 emboldened members of the far right in Central America, and gave a tacit green light for officials in the region to roll back anti-corruption efforts in their countries. “Trump permitted the possibility of uniting everyone [here] and expelling the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala,” Carmen Rosa de León, a sociologist and human rights advocate, tells The Progressive. The United Nations–backed commission, commonly known by its acronym CICIG, was a key actor in uncovering massive corruption in Guatemala, but was shuttered in September 2019 by then-President Jimmy Morales.
But Trump’s loss to Biden in 2020 derailed many of those goals and ushered in new efforts to implement oversight and curb impunity and corruption. In response, the Guatemalan administration has continued to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby U.S. officials, primarily Republicans.
In one such arrangement, the government of Taiwan paid $900,000 to the lobbying firm Ballard Partners, whose president, Brian Ballard, is a longtime Trump supporter and has close ties to the Republican Party. In return, Ballard agreed to provide “strategic consulting and advocacy services” in the United States, on behalf of the Guatemalan government, according to CNBC.
Other Guatemalan business groups and politicians have hired lobbyists to influence U.S. officials in recent years as well, including Zury Ríos, the daughter of the late Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. Zury Ríos—who was barred by Guatemala’s constitutional court from running for president in 2019 because she is related to a coup leader—hired Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Sonoran Policy Group that year to persuade U.S. officials to help her “fight the socialists.”
Across the hemisphere, the ideological division seems to be widening. This comes as the political pendulum is swinging to the left in several countries, including Honduras, Colombia, Chile, and likely Brazil. At the same time, there is increasing authoritarianism in countries led by far-right populists.
El Salvador, for example, has undergone a rapid consolidation of power by its young president, Nayib Bukele, which prompted the United States to pressure his administration to guarantee the protection of human rights. Bukele responded by telling Salvadorans in California to avoid voting for Democratic Congresswoman Norma Torres, an outspoken defender of anti-corruption efforts in Latin America, during her primary election in early June.
Salvadoran human rights defender Morena Herrera tells The Progressive that Torres has “criticized the government’s social policy and the lack of alternatives for Salvadoran citizens,” which drew Bukele’s ire. Bukele, she adds, saw this as an opportunity to “gain favor with the Republican Party” and cozy up to Trump, whom he met in September 2019.
Herrera says that these efforts were meant as a message for Salvadorans that Bukele can “influence the conditions of the Salvadoran community in the United States.” Nevertheless, Torres won her California primary election and will advance to the general election in November.
“If Trump were to run again and win, a national holiday would be declared.”
Bukele was elected three years ago after promising to be tough on crime and to root out corruption. Later, he praised Trump for helping his administration fight gangs. Yet according to U.S. officials last year, in an effort to reduce the violence, Bukele’s administration secretly negotiated a truce with the gang leaders. Bukele denied the allegations.
The peace was short-lived, however, as sixty-two people died in gang-related killings on a single day last March, making it the most violent twenty-four-hour period in El Salvador since the end of that country’s civil war in 1992, the BBC reported. In response, lawmakers declared a state of emergency that led to the detention of tens of thousands of people. While local human rights groups say the state of emergency has resulted in hundreds of human rights violations, lawmakers extended it for a third straight month in June.
“With the Trump Administration, [Bukele and his people] have found an accomplice,” Ricardo Castaneda, a Salvadoran economist with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies, tells The Progressive. “If Trump were to run again and win, a national holiday would be declared [in El Salvador].”
The same conspiracy theories that fueled Trump’s election are being echoed by far-right leaders in Latin America. But this isn’t a new phenomenon in the region. In the 1950s, for example, far-right political groups in Guatemala attacked the administration of President Jacobo Árbenz with claims that it was riddled with communists. Árbenz was later overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’état, in 1954.
Today, thanks to social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, conspiracy theories circle the globe at hyper speed, and some Latin American leaders are quick to promote them. Bukele tweeted last year that George Soros was meddling in El Salvador’s affairs; in Guatemala, antisemitic dogwhistles about a “globalist agenda” prompted conservative lawmakers to host a on the issue, which they then linked to “gender ideology.”
Like their U.S. counterparts, rightwing Twitter users in Guatemala criticized the sale of inclusive children’s books at one of the country’s most prestigious bookstores, after Álvaro Arzú Escobar, a conservative lawmaker and son of former President Álvaro Arzú, posted a video online denouncing the books. Conservative groups responded by calling for a boycott of the bookstore and launching a campaign on the website of a far-right group to stop the “indoctrination of children with children’s books.”
The manufactured controversy over critical race theory in the United States has even made its way to Guatemala, where it is discussed in private text exchanges and online chats.
As in the United States, one of the main vehicles for these conspiracy theories in Latin America is the church. Conspiracy theories “practically link these ultraconservative groups and fanatics of the neo-Pentecostal churches with the United States,” Iduvina Hernández, director of the Guatemalan nonprofit Security in Democracy, tells The Progressive. She says that from the churches, the conspiracy theories quickly enter into the political realm.
While Giammattei has claimed that Guatemala maintains a good relationship with the United States, and is committed to combating drug trafficking and undocumented migration, there are limits to his support for U.S. policies, which are linked to whether the United States will interfere with what members of the Guatemalan far right want. And right now, what they want is a return of Trump to the White House and of his supporters to Congress. “They have their eyes on the November elections,” Hernández says.
In late June, Giammattei traveled to Washington, D.C., to complain to members of the Organization of American States about a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that criticized Guatemala for human rights abuses. While there, with the International Summit for Religious Freedom as a backdrop, Giammattei sat for an interview with Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, for the rightwing TV network Newsmax. He was also interviewed by Breitbart, the far-right website previously run by Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Back home, efforts by Giammattei’s administration to roll back human rights protections and block access to justice continue. Former anti-corruption prosecutors, lawyers, and investigators face ongoing criminal investigations, as do human rights activists and members of the opposition parties. The short-term goal of these far-right politicians and their economic allies is to tighten their grip on power ahead of a presidential election next year.
“There is no institutional counterweight that is strong and independent enough to be able to put a stop to this agenda,” political analyst Marielos Chang tells The Progressive. “They already have taken control of all of the institutions.”