A sense of shock rippled across the social movements of Guatemala late in the evening of March 8, 2022. Commemorations of International Women’s Day were just wrapping up when news broke that Guatemalan lawmakers were about to pass one of the most regressive and hateful pieces of legislation in years.
Abortion was already illegal in Guatemala, but on March 8, legislators passed a bill to further restrict women’s rights and threaten LGBTQ+ rights. The Protection of Life and the Family Law, proposed in 2017 by far-right evangelicals and conservative Catholics in congress, would punish those who have an abortion with up to twenty-five years in prison, and target doctors who perform them. It would also prohibit same-sex marriage and outlaw inclusive sex education in schools. In addition, the legislation deems LGBTQ+ people “abnormal.”
Jeff Abbott
The passage of the Protection of Life and the Family Law on International Women’s Day in March 2022 prompted widespread protests.
“The bill promotes and incites hateful actions against the LGBTQ+ community,” Claudia Rosales, of the Sexual and Reproductive Rights Consortium, said during protests days later. “It normalizes heterosexuality as the only way to express love,” Rosales added. “That puts [the LGBTQ+ community] at risk.”
The draconian legislation was advanced by members of the previous congress but failed to pass due to a lack of quorum. The new congress that took office after elections in 2019 resurrected it.
While the bill was met with protests by Guatemala’s LGBTQ+ community and women’s rights groups, evangelical groups celebrated, including many in the United States. At an event in Guatemala City, the day after the bill was passed by the congress, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei once again declared the country the “pro-life capital of Ibero-America,” a refrain he has often repeated since taking office three years ago—one that has energized members of the religious right in both Guatemala and the United States.
Among those in attendance were representatives from the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC), an evangelical lobbying group, and other U.S.-based pro-life organizations, including Students for Life of America, National Right to Life, Global Life Campaign, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Americans United for Life.
In a podcast shortly after the bill’s passage, hosted by FRC President Tony Perkins, guest David Closson, director of the FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview, called the Guatemalan president “courageous.” He then praised the legislation, celebrating it among other legislative rollbacks of women’s rights across the hemisphere, including in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.
“They officially passed a law here in Guatemala that says they will not have same-sex marriage [and] gender ideology will not be taught in public or private schools,” Closson said. “If an abortionist is caught performing an abortion, they will go to jail. So they really are passing good, pro-life, pro-family laws here.”
Jeff Abbott
A protester dresses as a character from The Handmaid’s Tale after the passage of the Protection of Life and the Family law in March 2022.
After the bill’s passage was announced, members of the FRC participated in an anti-abortion summit in Guatemala City, called the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family. Speakers at the summit included Luis Lam, Guatemala’s ambassador to the United Nations, and Shirley Rivera, president of Guatemala’s congress. Both are described on the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family website as “strong voices for life and family.”
The FRC has its roots in the 1980s, and is closely associated with the fundamentalist evangelical organization Focus on the Family. Both groups were founded by James Dobson. Since then, the FRC has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) due to its promotion of bigoted and hateful anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies. It has continued to promote anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion policies both at home and abroad.
Perkins, who has been president of FRC for nearly two decades, “is known both in the United States and internationally as being an anti-gay lobbyist and fiercely anti-gay,” Emerson Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells The Progressive. “What is happening in Guatemala is not a singularity. It’s very much part of a bigger event that’s happening on an international scale.”
In his interview with Perkins, Closson avoided mentioning LGBTQ+ people directly, using instead the loaded phrase “gender ideology,” which is a common far-right buzzword. It is used to suggest there is a conspiracy by the left to force equality and inclusion on those who identify as religious and conservative.
In Guatemala, the links between the far-right Christian nationalist movement have existed for decades. The country once largely identified as Catholic, but today, 40 percent of Guatemalans identify as evangelical, according to a May 2022 Gallup poll—one of the largest evangelical populations in Latin America.
Evangelicals influence all aspects of Guatemalan social spaces, from preachers on buses and street corners, to collective prayer groups in municipal governments and police forces, to members of the national government. Much of the groundwork had been laid by U.S. evangelicals decades earlier, during the darkest years of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, in which 200,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared.
Evangelical missionary groups from the United States found fertile soil in Guatemala, where they distributed aid after a devastating earthquake in 1976 and spread their gospel during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. In part, the efforts sought to counter the rise of liberation theology, which arose from progressive elements of the Catholic Church that worked to promote social justice and development in poor communities and to oppose the region’s brutal dictatorships. The spread of evangelicalism was a means of social control and eventually became a part of the military’s counterinsurgency program, particularly during the bloody reign of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in the early 1980s.
“Neo-Pentecostalism has counterinsurgent ideological roots” in Guatemala, Iduvina Hernández, director of the Guatemalan organization Association for the Study and Promotion of Security in Democracy, tells The Progressive. “The dictatorship of Ríos Montt opened the door” to Pentecostal churches.
Ríos Montt, who died in 2018, was a former member of the California-based Church of the Word. He seized control of the government in 1982 and ushered in an administration marked by human rights violations and a state-led campaign of genocide targeting the country’s Indigenous population. He had a close relationship with the administration of then-President Ronald Reagan, and various Pentecostal churches in the United States, and delivered weekly sermons on state television and radio. He claimed the brutal counterinsurgency campaign was a holy war against leftists that were corrupting the country.
Faith was used as a means to create divisions between the leftist guerrillas and the civilian population, and to strip Indigenous people of their Mayan traditions and beliefs. During this period, evangelicalism and neo-Pentecostalism gained influence in the country, especially among members of the military and economic elite.
Ríos Montt was convicted in 2013 of committing genocide against the Mayan communities, but the decision was later overturned by Guatemala’s constitutional court.
The political influence of evangelicals began to grow in the years following the end of the civil war in 1996. The first evangelical political party emerged a decade after the signing of the peace accords with the Visión con Valores (Vision with Values) party, or VIVA, founded by Harold Caballeros in 2007. Caballeros was an evangelical pastor prior to his entrance into politics. Other parties and politicians have highlighted their faith in their political campaigns and policy proposals, but it wasn’t until the election of television comedian Jimmy Morales as president in 2015 that religiously influenced laws and policies began to be routinely adopted.
Morales won the 2015 presidential campaign as an outsider, promising voters he was “not corrupt, nor a thief.” The outspoken evangelical, who prior to politics was known for a racist television show where he would regularly perform in blackface, was a candidate of the National Convergence Front, a far-right party founded by former military officers.
In 2018, the FRC’s Perkins traveled to Guatemala City as part of an evangelical delegation to thank Morales for his decision to relocate the Guatemalan Embassy to Jerusalem—a move that was widely seen as an effort to appease then-President Donald Trump. Among the topics that were discussed was the need to protect life and religious freedom, which the SPLC’s Hodges points out is “just coded language for limiting the access to both gender-affirming care and reproductive rights, and limiting any protections or policies of anti-discrimination for the LGBTQ+ community.”
At about the same time, the Protection of Life and the Family Law was being promoted in Guatemala’s congress after it was proposed by Anibal Rojas of the VIVA party. Since then, far-right lawmakers have increasingly used hateful rhetoric, echoing the concerns of groups like the FRC and the Heritage Foundation regarding the spread of “gender ideology” and “globalism.”
These fears from the far right and the economic elite are propagated in many Guatemalan churches, which have become a means of spreading conspiracy theories related to the LGBTQ+ community, women’s rights, “globalism,” communism, and “gender ideology.”
“Religion is playing an important role in making people believe that a ‘gender ideology’ exists,” Renzo Rosal, an independent political analyst, tells The Progressive. “This goes for anti-women, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-human rights in general.”
From the Christian radio stations that broadcast in public markets to the promotion of a national day of prayer, to open prayer in municipal government meetings and police gatherings, the presence of evangelicalism is pervasive.
Unlike with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Guatemala has yet to find a unifying charismatic leader who appeals to evangelicals. But the stage is set for one.
“This same ultra-conservative narrative supposedly serves to strengthen the central government,” Rosal says, and “to strengthen the alliance between businessmen, politicians, and churches. [It] also serves as a way to limit and question everything that points in an apparently different direction—the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community—which is seen as an attack on the ultra-conservative narrative.”
Guatemala has come under fire for these attacks against women and the LGBTQ+ community. In June 2022, Giammattei traveled to the United States for the 2022 International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C, where he defended his actions.
“If they are going to call me a dictator for promoting religious freedom, I will gladly be a dictator,” Giammattei said at the summit. “If they are going to tell me that I am a violator of human rights for respecting life from its conception, I am a violator of human rights.”
Unlike the emergence of a well-organized evangelical political influence in Brazil that has found a hero in neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, who was defeated by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in late October, Guatemala has yet to find a unifying charismatic evangelical leader, but the stage is set for one.
“There has not been a great evangelical leader,” Roberto Antonio Wagner, a professor and independent political analyst, tells The Progressive. “We may not be very far away from a time when we have a figure that can [exploit the situation].”
Guatemala’s next presidential elections are scheduled to take place in June 2023.
Eventually, faced with mounting pressure, Giammattei threatened to veto the Protection of Life and the Family Law, prompting lawmakers to shelve it—for now. But lawmakers are moving other legislation forward to “protect children” from “gender ideology.”
“Our rulers are doing this to show the world that Guatemala is good, holy, [and] Christian, and that’s simply not true,” Rosales says. “We have all types of faiths here. But they’re saying we don’t exist in order to serve their own interests, which are political interests.”
She adds, “They are preparing for their campaigns.”