Several people toil with wheelbarrows to transport bags of cement that Guatemala’s ruling party, VAMOS, has just given them as a gift, in exchange for attending a political march in favor of the presidential candidate, Manuel Conde. Until the very day that the election campaign concluded this Sunday, the political formations tried to buy the vote of the people with gifts such as bags of food and sheets for the roofs of the humble houses that rise in the multiple settlements spread over the ravines of the capital of the country. With a total lack of proposals that improve people’s lives, most of the candidates try to convince the poorest population that they are the best option for the next four years through handouts and gift raffles. Once the campaign ends, the winner forgets about the 59% of Guatemalans who suffer from poverty and extreme poverty in the Central American country and are left to fend for themselves without solving their problems.
Every four years, the same story is repeated in Guatemala and this has not been the exception. There is not even the slightest possibility that something will change in the Central American country, given that the old ultra-conservative politics dominates the intention to vote in the latest poll published by Prensa Libre. In the lead for the first electoral round is Sandra Torres, 67, for the National Unity of Hope (UNE) party, with 21.3%. She is the former first lady of Guatemala between 2008 and 2012 with the Government of Álvaro Colom, who died on January 23 and from whom she was divorced.
Torres could become the first woman to preside over this Central American country after trying for the third time to hold the power that her husband once had. In both the 2015 and 2019 elections, she made it to the second round, although she was defeated by Jimmy Morales (FCN-Nación) and Alejandro Giammattei (Vamos), respectively.
This is due to what has been called in Guatemala the ‘anti-vote’, given that many people prefer to give their trust to the other candidate rather than to Torres, who always stays at the gates of the Presidency. After losing against the current president, Alejandro Giammattei, in the 2019 elections, Torres was arrested by court order in the framework of an investigation by the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity in Guatemala that accused her of the crimes of illicit association and electoral financing not reported. Specifically, the Public Ministry accused her of not having documented 27.7 million quetzales (3.4 million euros) during the 2015 electoral campaign.
After spending several months in preventive detention, in January 2020 he was released after paying a bail of 800,000 quetzales (100,000 euros). Subsequently, on November 29, 2022, a judge cleared her of all charges, considering that there were insufficient elements for her to face trial. Like a Phoenix bird, Torres was able to run again in the elections, appearing for the moment in first place in voting intentions, thanks to his populist promises such as granting 700 quetzales a month to each mother “on the condition that they send their children to the school and the health center. She has also pledged to implement her ‘minimum ceiling’ policy, under which she will provide sheets and building materials for people to put labor into their homes.
Another of the candidates’ workhorses to win the vote of the population is to put an end to insecurity, which causes around 4,000 violent deaths each year (12 per day). Under the motto ‘order and transformation’, Torres has already promised to apply measures similar to those of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, such as taking the army to the streets, militarizing prisons and installing 20,000 high-resolution cameras in the capital that allow the facial recognition of criminals, in order to be able to arrest them in “two or three hours”.
Despite being Catholic, Torres is accompanied as a candidate for the Guatemalan Vice Presidency by Romeo Guerra, who until now was an evangelical pastor, who defines himself as “pro-life, pro-family and pro-free market economy.” This supposes a turn to the right of his party, which in the last elections defined itself as a social democrat. Thus, the candidate with the best chance of winning the first round defends that the only possible family is the “unity between a man and a woman procreating children” thus opposing marriage between people of the same sex. Torres, who defines herself as “God-fearing,” is also strongly opposed to abortion, since she defends “life from its conception, as stipulated in the fourth commandment, which she clearly says you shall not kill.”
The UNE candidate considers that the entire Guatemalan government system is “corrupted” and, therefore, asks the population to give her the opportunity to lead the country this time, since “in the last two elections voted poorly and ended up favoring presidents who have failed”.
To do this, they must defeat their rival in the second round to be held on August 20, if they do not achieve more than 50% of the votes this Sunday. According to the aforementioned survey carried out by ProDatos for Prensa Libre, the candidate of the CABAL party, Edmond Mulet, appears in second place in voting intentions, with 13.4%.
Mulet, 72, also defends conservative ideas by defining himself as a “God-fearing man” who believes in the “value of the family as a pillar of society.” Likewise, he defends life “from conception” by closing the door to any possibility for women to terminate their pregnancy, even girls who have been victims of rape. This is the second time that he aspires to the Presidency through his right-wing party, after he achieved third place in the vote in 2019.
He is a veteran of Guatemalan politics, given that between 1992 and 1993 he held the Presidency of Congress, where he was a deputy since 1986, while between 1993 and 1996 he was the Ambassador of Guatemala to the US, as well as representative of the Central American country to the European Union. between 2000 and 2006. He is also the person with the longest diplomatic career in the entire country, after joining the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti in 2006, where he remained until 2007 and was again appointed to the same position between 2010 and 2011. Likewise, in 2007 he held the position of UN Assistant Secretary General in charge of peacekeeping operations, managing to supervise up to 22 missions around the world.
The then UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, appointed him Chief of Staff of the United Nations General Secretariat between 2015 and 2016, while the following year he directed the Mechanism to investigate the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which had created by the Security Council.
Mulet developed this entire political and diplomatic career, despite the fact that in the 1980s he was involved in alleged child trafficking when he worked as a lawyer and notary. He was arrested one day in 1981 accused of favoring the illegal departure of children from Guatemala to be adopted by families in Canada, although the judicial process ultimately came to nothing.
“I want to be remembered as the one who came to my country to rebuild my homeland,” stresses the CABAL candidate, who opposes euthanasia and assures that it must be rejected “outright the pro-abortion and pro-LGBT globalist agenda that is floating around the world.” Mulet censures that, in Guatemala, “there is no legal certainty and corruption is destroying and corroding the country,” which is why he pledges to “fight it at all levels,” taking into account that “we have regressed in all the indexes of human rights, poverty has increased and children are dying of hunger.
The third candidate who could compete to reach the second round is Zury Ríos, daughter of the dictator who died in 2018 Efraín Ríos Montt, who intends to “write a new history” in Guatemala hand in hand with the far-right political coalition Valor-Unionista. With 9.1% of voting intentions, Ríos, 55, based her campaign on promising “firmness and character” to put an end to insecurity by reinstating the death penalty in the country that was applied for the last time in the year 2000.
Like the other two candidates, he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. This is the third time that Ríos has tried to reach the Presidency, after his unsuccessful attempt to run in 2019, after he was prevented from doing so by the Constitutional Court based on an article of the Constitution that prohibits people involved in coups from running. State or their relatives.
He never condemned the crimes committed during his father’s regime in the 1980s, despite the fact that in 2013 Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity for the murder of 1,771 Ixil Mayans. However, the process was annulled ten days later by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala after an appeal by his lawyer, so the dictator died at his home in 2018 accompanied by the current candidate without being sentenced again for this cause or for the military massacre of another 201 indigenous and peasant farmers, including 67 children under the age of 12 who were thrown into a well.
Zury is also a veteran politician, having entered the Guatemalan Congress as a deputy in 1996 for the far-right Guatemalan Republican Front (FGR) party founded by Efraín Ríos Montt. She remained in the Legislative Chamber for four consecutive years until 2012.
In principle, Ríos had a constitutional prohibition to run for the Presidency, since article 186 of the Magna Carta of Guatemala prohibits people involved in coups or their relatives from being president of the country. The CABAL party itself tried to expel her from the electoral contest by presenting an appeal that was declared inadmissible by the Constitutional Court.
This is the third time that he has tried to reach the Presidency that his father held. In 2011, she was a pre-candidate for FGR, although she resigned from the campaign due to lack of financial resources, so in 2015 she tried again through the Visión con Valores party, with which she reached fifth position. Far from giving up and after her father died, she ran for the 2019 elections with the VALOR formation, although the Constitutional Court prevented her from running based on the aforementioned article 186.
Subsequently, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recognized that his rights had been violated, which opened the door for him to be able to stand in this year’s elections defending his “Christian values” and with the “fear of God” at the center. of their life.
In these elections, 9.3 million people are called to choose their new president and vice president among 22 candidacies, as well as 160 representatives of Congress, 20 representatives of the Central American Parliament and 340 municipalities. However, citizens have been left without the possibility of being able to vote for an alternative to the current ‘status quo’ based on ultra-conservative populist governments that are opposed to any social progress and that have plundered the state coffers with numerous cases of corruption.
First, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal rejected the candidacy of the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP) made up of the indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera and the former Human Rights attorney, Jordán Rodas. In the 2019 elections, Cabrera came in fourth place with his defense of the territory against extractivist companies and the fight for the rights of indigenous peoples, who represent almost 50% of the population. Cabrera represented the only hope of the left in Guatemala to reverse the discrimination suffered by the indigenous population.
It was not the only one to be rejected by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, but also excluded were the right-wing Roberto Arzú, son of the deceased former president of Guatemala between 1996 and 2000 and former mayor of the capital, Álvaro Arzú, as well as the landowner businessman Carlos Pineda. , who, according to the polls, led the intention to vote through his popular campaign on social networks.
Both Arzú and Pineda appealed for a null vote, which according to the latest survey could reach 13.5%, after condemning the prevailing corruption in the current government of Alejandro Giammattei in which some thirty prosecutors, judges and lawyers to avoid going to jail for the persecution of the Prosecutor’s Office led by Consuelo Porras, who in 2021 was included in the US Engel List of corrupt and non-democratic actors for “participating in significant acts of corruption with the purpose of protecting their political allies”.
It should be remembered that the Prosecutor’s Office requested 40 years in prison against the president and founder of El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora, who on June 14 was sentenced to six years in prison for laundering money and other assets, while acquitting him of the crimes of influence peddling and blackmail. Zamora had denounced through his media outlet numerous cases of corruption that affected the current and previous government, although after being arrested in July 2022, he was forced to close it on May 15.
Among the judicial actors who have been “exiled”, especially to the US, are the former attorney general of the Public Ministry Thelma Aldana, the former head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, Juan Francisco Sandoval, the former Human Rights Attorney , Jordán Rodas, and the former High Risk judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez, who in September 2015 ordered the imprisonment of former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina (2012-2015), who is still in prison accused of several corruption cases.
All of them had defended the work of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a UN body that, since 2007, supported the Prosecutor’s Office in the investigation of corruption cases, although former President Jimmy Morales decided in 2019 not to extend their stay in the country from September 3 of that year considering that it was a risk to national security.
The president of the Washington Office on Latin American Affairs (WOLA), Carolina Jiménez, has already warned of the “democratic decline and authoritarian drift in Guatemala: we are very concerned because the situation at this moment leads us to think that the next possible president will not be committed to the fight against corruption, to human rights, or to the restoration of democratic values”.
The despair experienced among the Guatemalan population is summed up very well by Sandra Galicia, 22, who in 2015 presided over the Children’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal: “We have to choose the best of the worst because we know that any president who comes to power will never going to invest in education and health, since they want cheap labor and ignorant people who continue to vote for the same candidates and parties.”
In this sense, Galicia, who studies International Relations, regrets that young people are experiencing moments of “anguish, frustration and anger”, because “despite the fact that we are looking for a better future for Guatemala, they are holding us back, so I have zero hope in these elections and unfortunately, the only option we have left is to emigrate, since nothing good is seen for the next four years”.
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