When Bernardo Arévalo, an anticorruption advocate, achieved a resounding victory in the presidential election in Guatemala, voters flocked to the capital of the most populous country in Central America to celebrate. But the mood in the streets has changed as Arévalo’s enemies intensify their efforts to prevent the president-elect from taking office in a few weeks.
In a region already tense due to the rise of authoritarian tactics that restrict democratic freedoms, not only in Guatemala but also in neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador, analysts say the scorched-earth attack against a democratically elected leader in an attempt to prevent the orderly transfer of power is a symptom of a country on the brink of a political crisis.
In an interview, Arévalo (a sociologist trained in Israel and the most progressive candidate to come this far since Guatemala restored democracy in 1985 after decades of military rule) insisted that he still sees a path to assume the presidency. But he acknowledged facing enormous obstacles.
“In the 20th century, there were coups with tanks, bayonets, with the military, and they lasted two or three days,” Arévalo commented. “The coups of the 21st century are carried out with lawmakers, lawyers, in the courts, that’s how they are done,” he said. “It’s more sophisticated, it takes much longer, and it’s done with the pretense of continuing with the institutions.”
“But the truth is that they are empty shells where legality has been thrown away,” he added.
As soon as Arévalo narrowly made it to the second round in the summer, alarm bells started ringing for Guatemala’s fragile democracy. Arévalo is the son of Juan José Arévalo, a former president still praised for the creation of the social security system and protection of freedom of expression.
A prosecutor quickly took action to suspend Arévalo’s emerging party, Movimiento Semilla, and when he overwhelmingly won the August election, judicial authorities and members of Congress expanded their campaign against the president-elect and his allies.
These efforts have reached a climax in recent days, as prosecutors and Congress moved to strip Arévalo of his judicial immunity and effectively nullify the election results. Along with other attempts to lift Arévalo’s immunity and imprison some of his allies, these measures could pave the way for judicial officials to seek his arrest and hinder the planned transfer of power in mid-January.
Leonor Morales, a prosecutor who led the most recent efforts against Arévalo, accused Semilla of using fraudulent signatures to register as a political party. “Semilla never came into existence through legal means, as its formation was through corrupt and illegal actions,” Morales told the press last week.
In their attempt to disqualify Arévalo’s party and, possibly by extension, the election result, an alliance of conservative prosecutors and lawmakers, working without objections from outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, are moving forward with a years-long effort to consolidate and protect their power, some jurists said.
Alejandro Balsells, an authority in constitutional law, said that officials intensifying the legal attacks against the president-elect are in a “scorched-earth” dynamic and compared their tactics to those of Hernán Cortés, who burned his ships to prevent his men from retreating in what would be the conquest of the Aztec Empire.
In this case, Balsells said, prosecutors and legislators were participating in a scheme to reverse the election results and using almost every tool at their disposal to get the courts and Congress to act against Arévalo.
For some of Arévalo’s supporters, this stance is equivalent to stealing the elections. “If he assumes the presidency, it would be a miracle,” said Claudia González, a prominent human rights lawyer who was imprisoned for 82 days this year.
González had worked on a UN-backed anticorruption mission that was shut down, turning Guatemala from a place where corruption was being eradicated into a country where dozens of judges and prosecutors have been forced into exile.
The shift has been frustrating for the Biden administration, which has repeatedly expressed support for Arévalo and has tried to bolster anticorruption efforts in Guatemala. This month, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Miguel Martínez, a close ally of Giammattei, due to widespread bribery schemes.
However, the push by Guatemalan officials to prevent Arévalo from taking power highlights the limits of US influence in Guatemala, where the US used to have considerable weight.
In response, Arévalo’s supporters are engaged in tense confrontations with authorities in some parts of the Guatemalan capital. After taking to the streets in October in antigovernment protests across the country, indigenous protesters camped outside the headquarters of the attorney general’s office to show their support for the president-elect.
“Our fight today is not for the Semilla party or for Bernardo, it is for the little democracy we have,” said Rigoberto Juárez, a 66-year-old indigenous leader from Huehuetenango in the western highlands of Guatemala. He said they had placed their trust in Arévalo, “and not recognizing that vote is an attack” against indigenous peoples, he commented.
There is fear that Arévalo’s adversaries are willing to go to great lengths to prevent him from assuming office.
The latest magistrates to leave the country were members of the authority overseeing the elections who had certified the voting results and blocked the suspension of Arévalo’s party. On the same day that Congress removed their immunity, they boarded flights to leave Guatemala.
If he manages to assume the presidency, Congress has also moved to incapacitate Arévalo this month by approving a budget that severely limits his ability to allocate resources to two of his main priorities: education and healthcare.
Arévalo claimed that members of the ruling alliance told him that bribes were paid to secure the votes of lawmakers in favor of a “package” that included the budget and the elimination of judicial immunity.
“They have told us about sums that have progressively increased,” Arévalo said. “They started offering 150,000 quetzals for budget approval. Then they told us they raised the sum to 200,000, then to 250,000 quetzals” (250,000 quetzals is around $32,000); these claims could not be independently verified.
At the same time, a powerful prosecutor, Rafael Curruchiche, has built one of the cases trying to strip Arévalo of his immunity. Curruchiche, who has also been listed by the United States as a corrupt Central American official, claims that Arévalo’s party obtained fraudulent signatures and financing.
Prosecutors are also attempting to remove Arévalo’s legal immunity in connection with protests at the University of San Carlos de Guatemala. While the details of the case are unclear, prosecutors argue that Arévalo’s social media posts supporting student protests constitute participation in what the attorney general’s office claims is an illegal occupation.
It remains to be seen how the efforts to strip Arévalo of his immunity will proceed. The country’s Supreme Court could still intervene, although the institution is controlled by the president-elect’s adversaries. If Arévalo’s immunity is removed and he is arrested, Congress could appoint an interim president until new elections are called.
As for the president-elect, who says prosecutors “fabricated” the case against him, he insists that time is running out for such maneuvers. Invoking Guatemalan law, Arévalo said that immunity can only be removed during regular sessions of Congress, which concluded in November. “It is no longer possible,” he said.
But some are not sure that Arévalo’s adversaries will relent in their attacks. Will Freeman, a researcher on Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Guatemalan authorities had repeatedly used the law as a weapon to crush anticorruption initiatives.
“If it was just to tie Arévalo’s hands, they have already achieved it,” Freeman said. “We are seeing a push to prevent…”