Is Guatemala About to See an Upset Win for Democracy?

The Presidential election in Guatemala, which will be decided on Sunday, in a second and final round of voting, initially appeared to be over before it began. Within two months of the start of the race, at least three prominent candidates had already been disqualified by the country’s electoral tribunal. Two were conservatives and the third, Thelma Cabrera, a leftist, was the only Indigenous candidate effectively in the running—in a country where more than forty per cent of the population is Maya. What each of the candidates had in common was that none sat well with the political establishment. The tribunal’s reasoning was technical and dubious—in short, it was typical of the government of Alejandro Giammattei, a conservative surgeon with a sagging approval rating, whose time in office has been marred by allegations of corruption and the entrenchment of special interests. (By law, he cannot run for a second term.)

Among the remaining candidates, the establishment favorites going into the first round, in June, were Zury Ríos, the daughter of a former dictator, and Sandra Torres, an ideologically malleable figure who’s run for President twice before. Ríos previously faced a ban on running, because her father, General Efraín Ríos Montt, had taken the Presidency by force. (He came to power in a coup, in 1982; was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, in 2013, for his role in the massacre of Indigenous villagers during the early nineteen-eighties; and died, in 2018, at the age of ninety-one.) The constitution barred the immediate relatives of coup leaders from executive office, but Ríos secured an exception. Torres is the ex-wife of former President Álvaro Colom, who died earlier this year, while under house arrest facing corruption charges. He and Torres divorced in 2011, because of a legal prohibition on spouses following their partners into the Presidency. In 2019, she was arrested for violating campaign-finance laws, but the case was later dismissed. Guatemalans of diverse political persuasions use a single phrase to explain how such people become front-runners: el pacto de corruptos, the pact of the corrupt.

The past several years have made clear how the system functions: influential individuals, working in league with key players in the legal system, pressure the government to do their bidding. (The special-interests network consists of politicians, businessmen, and members of organized crime who benefit collectively from a state of sustained impunity.) The turning point came in 2019, with the blessing of the Trump State Department, when President Jimmy Morales, a former comedian who had campaigned on the slogan “Neither corrupt, nor a thief,” nevertheless dismantled Guatemala’s anti-corruption office. The office—the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG)—began in 2007, with the backing of the United Nations and funding from the United States, to create an independent body capable of investigating complex corruption cases. Its work led to the arrest of the President and the Vice-President, in 2015, for running a lucrative smuggling operation through the country’s customs offices. Morales supported the CICIG’s work, until it began investigating him and his family. Since 2018, more than thirty judges, anti-corruption prosecutors, and other officials have been forced into exile. Many who remained have been jailed. Last summer, José Rubén Zamora, the founder of the prominent newspaper elPeriódico and an implacable government critic, was arrested and later arraigned on money-laundering charges that he denied; a judge has sentenced him with up to six years in prison. At the center of these arrests is the Public Ministry—Guatemala’s version of the Department of Justice—headed by María Consuelo Porras. She and her main deputy appear on a list of state and private actors who are sanctioned by the U.S. government for corruption and undermining democracy. But, last year, Consuelo Porras was appointed to a second term, putting her in prime position to shape the outcome of the Presidential race.

No one predicted that the government’s heavy-handedness would backfire. On June 25th, a sixty-four-year-old progressive legislator named Bernardo Arévalo finished in second place, with nearly twelve per cent of the vote. He was running on the ticket of a small upstart party called Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement), which grew out of street protests against corruption that swept the country in 2015. In a Congress made up of a hundred and sixty seats, Semilla currently occupies six. “Our calculus was that we would be able to finish fourth,” Arévalo told me. “We’d fish for seven or eight per cent of the vote.”

His strong showing came as a shock that immediately galvanized the public. The platform he was running on was a modest, center-left agenda built on a non-ideological premise. As he put it to me, “the necessary starting condition” for any government policy “is eliminating corruption.” One of his campaign promises is to hire as his advisers the jurists and lawyers who’d been forced into exile. A historical echo that may have reverberated with voters was that his father, Juan José Arévalo, was the first democratically elected President in Guatemala’s history.

In disqualifying some candidates, the government did two inadvertent things: it helped clear the field and it alienated the public across the political spectrum. Around forty per cent of the country didn’t vote in the first round, and almost a quarter of the ballots cast were blank or voided. Many voters reacted against traditional candidates, while those supporting the “officialist” line split their support among several options. Zury Ríos ended up in sixth place; a center-right former diplomat with promising early poll numbers finished fifth. Sandra Torres came in first—with about sixteen per cent of the vote—and she now is making a play for the votes of marooned conservatives.

Arévalo attributes his momentum to the youth vote and its spirit of productive indignation. “The youth is what turned our message around, and it was the youth that became our main champions,” he told me. “A number of families came to us and said that they weren’t going to vote, or didn’t know what to do, but their kids went and said to them, ‘Look, this is the program; look, this is the option.’ And they wound up convincing their family to move ahead.”

Perhaps Semilla’s biggest asset going into the first round was that its success seemed so unlikely that the Party never aroused the suspicions of the Public Ministry. “The authorities took it upon themselves to eliminate contenders who were uncomfortable to the system,” Juan Francisco Sandoval, the country’s top anti-corruption prosecutor, until he was forced into exile in the summer of 2021, told me. (He has been living in Washington, D.C., since then.) “With Semilla, it was a risk that the criminal alliances hadn’t predicted. Semilla was polling in eighth place, and so it didn’t pose any problems to these alliances in the first round.”

Once the results were in, Semilla became the primary target of the government. The Constitutional Court, which is widely seen as a political ally of the current administration and its backers, ordered a highly unusual review of the ballots. (The Court maintains that the review was meant to protect the integrity of the electoral process, and said, in a statement, that it acted with “objectivity, impartiality, and total independence.”) By mid-July, however, the electoral tribunal had demonstrated a measure of independence and confirmed the first-round results. Then Consuelo Porras’s deputy, who is in charge of the office that Sandoval ran, announced that he was investigating Semilla. He claimed that some five thousand signatures submitted by Semilla in 2018, in order to register as a national political party, were fraudulent, an allegation the party has forcefully denied. This led to a suspension of Semilla’s registration by a district-court judge who is also on the U.S. government’s list of corrupt actors. When the electoral tribunal announced that Arévalo would remain on the ballot, the Public Ministry sent agents to search the tribunal’s offices for incriminating materials.

“The Public Ministry is acting well outside any pretension of following the law,” Arévalo told me. We spoke by phone just days after the ministry had raided the offices of Semilla, confiscating files. On July 27th, it ordered the electoral tribunal to turn over the names of all state and local election workers. “They’re trying to find people, which is what they’ve done before at the ministry, to get anyone to confess to anything so that they can put us in jail,” he said. Local members of Semilla were receiving intimidating phone calls from officials at the ministry ordering them to appear for questioning. (The Public Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.)