Guatemala fights for its democracy

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Feliciana Herrera, Indigenous leader of the Ixil people in Guatemala, will always remember spending weeks – both day and night, through sunshine and pouring rain – protesting outside the headquarters of the Guatemalan Public Ministry. This was the end of 2023, and she was there with thousands of others to demand the peaceful transfer of power to the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, and the resignation of the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, who was seeking to block it. Porras’s efforts sparked three months of peaceful demonstrations. Day after day, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, blocking key roads across the country and causing fuel and food shortages in some areas. Thousands of workers, including teachers and market vendors, went on strike, sending the country into a partial shutdown. But this was a pivotal moment for Guatemala’s democracy. “He [Arévalo] was the [only] hope that we had left after so much impunity and inequality,” Herrera explained.

A 65-year-old sociologist, diplomat and former congressman, Bernardo is the son of Juan José Arévalo, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, who led the country after it emerged from dictatorship in 1944. Bernardo’s social democratic Semilla party – which translates as “Seed” – won the election in August 2023 on an outsider’s campaign focused on communicating directly with voters through social media and promising to fight corruption.

It’s an ambitious goal. The last three presidents of Guatemala have all been linked to corruption – from nepotism to bribery and diversion of public funds. Last year, former president Otto Pérez Molina was sentenced to eight years in prison for running a smuggling scheme through customs. His successor, Jimmy Morales, led the dismantling of the office that investigated corruption. Arévalo’s predecessor, Alejandro Giammattei, along with Attorney General Porras, was sanctioned by the US, which added them to its list of “Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors” in Central America. Despite this, in 2022 Porras was re-elected to serve as attorney general until 2026.

It was a shock when Arévalo won the elections. But the political establishment isn’t taking this challenge lying down. In Guatemala, the transition between governments lasts five months. During this time Arévalo was fiercely attacked by Porras, who requested the arrests of members of Semilla, raided the offices of the electoral tribunal and tried to get the elections declared null. Powerful evangelical churches allied with the former government also campaigned against Arévalo’s candidacy, spreading false rumours that he intended to liberalise abortion and introduce same-sex marriage.

Arévalo has pulled through, surviving his first six months. But without a majority in Congress and with vast challenges against him, it has not been easy. While the world’s eyes were on him after the vote, the attention has now moved away, and his popularity is declining among the people. Is he making the progress he promised, or has he already made too many compromises? And will he ever be able to dismiss Porras – the woman behind so much oppression, and so many backhand deals – who remains attorney general even under a presidency she tried to block? The stakes are high for Guatemala. If Arévalo fails, the country’s democracy may not survive.

A victory against the odds Guatemala is Central America’s most populous country, with 18 million inhabitants, rich in history and environment. It’s the region’s largest economy, built on agricultural exports like coffee and sugar. Yet it continues to struggle with poverty and violence, which have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the US.

The first thing Arévalo has to deal with is the challenge of the corrupt political class. From their perspective, he was never supposed to win office in the first place. During the election campaign, Guatemala’s electoral tribunal eliminated three candidates who were popular with the public to make room for politicians who they knew weren’t going to rock the boat. However, this had the consequence of boosting Arévalo from seventh place in the polls into prime position as the alternative to democratic regression.

The attacks began immediately after the election. First off, Porras asked the Supreme Court to remove immunity from Arévalo and his vice president Karin Herrera so they could be charged with sedition over historic social media posts expressing support for a protest at Guatemala’s public university. The request was denied, this time, but Porras will keep trying if she remains in her position.

At present, Arévalo needs 107 votes out of 160 in Congress to dismiss her. There was a vote in May, but he only obtained 50. “The government’s big medium-term problem will be to survive these anti-democratic attacks,” said Edgar Ortíz, a professor at the University of the Isthmus of Guatemala. “The survival of democracy and Arévalo are the same.” Yet dismissing Porras will take a lot of work. “The state apparatus is captured,” he said. “There is no political capacity to negotiate with the current actors.”

The politicians who operated alongside the former president were so heavily linked to dark interests that the population baptised them the “Pact of the Corrupt”. Giammattei was quick to persecute anyone fighting to clean up the state. Judges and human rights defenders, opposition politicians and journalists were regularly imprisoned, while others were forced into exile. The Pact of the Corrupt was also linked to key evangelical Christian figures, such as Sergio Enríquez, leader of the Ebenezer Ministries – one of the country’s most popular churches. Guatemala is deeply religious, split roughly equally between the evangelical and Catholic Churches, but it is the former that holds much political sway, having forged ties with consecutive conservative governments. During the campaign, Enriquez asked his followers to pray against Arévalo’s success. He called him a communist and a horseman of the Apocalypse.

Some of the country’s key evangelical leaders also accused Semilla of seeking to promote abortion and same-sex marriage – even though these policies were not part of their manifesto – in what many saw as a bid to scare their followers into voting against Arévalo. These issues became a key part of the campaign for his main opponent, Sandra Torres, the wife of a former president. “I want to run this country with the fear of God,” said Torres, who picked an evangelical pastor as her running mate. Guatemala’s constitution bars religious ministers from running for the office of president or vice president, but the country’s top court permitted it. Luis Mack, a political scientist at Guatemala’s San Carlos University, told AP that Torres’s campaign could be seen as part of a regional trend of capitalising on religion for political campaigns. “It is an open manipulation of politics and faith,” he said.

What can Arévalo achieve? But these tactics did not prove to be enough. Arévalo has also found powerful allies in the Indigenous leaders who led the national strike for democracy and expressed their desire to support him. The majority of the population in Guatemala is Indigenous, primarily of Mayan descent. Many such communities live in poverty, lacking access to basic health and education services. According to the UN, the poverty rate among Indigenous populations in Guatemala is 79 per cent – almost 30 per cent higher than the national average. While the majority are farmers, their right to live and work on the land is often precarious. They hope that Arévalo will stand up for poor and Indigenous people against the political elite and the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

But with Arévalo hamstrung by Guatemala’s politics, the anti-corruption crackdown that people were hoping for hasn’t yet arrived. Some feel that Arévalo has already failed the electorate in his first six months by not fulfilling his promises – including his failure to dismiss Porras. However, as of May, 54 per cent of the population still approved of his presidential management, perhaps because he has demonstrated the will to clean up politics. One of his administration’s first actions was to create a National Commission against Corruption, which developed a code of ethics for public officials and encouraged ministers to file complaints about anomalies in the management of public funds by previous governments. However, none of these complaints have been advanced at the time of writing – because they have all been blocked by Porras. Arévalo will need time to build allies in parliament and deploy an effective strategy, Ortíz said: “If you have undemocratic actors in power, what you have to do is negotiate with those who are democratic to marginalise the others.”

Rodrigo Véliz, an anthropologist from Guatemala and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, points out that Arévalo is working under different circumstances to his father. “In 1944 they overthrew a dictatorship completely. There was nothing left: It was an armed revolution, the constitution was completely changed, new institutions were created and there were no people from the old structures,” he said. In comparison, Bernardo faces institutions that are co-opted by people favourable to the last two governments, not only in the Prosecutor’s Office run by Porras but also in the Courts of Justice. “If the government lasts four years without a coup d’état and without massive corruption, the people will be grateful for that,” he said.

But the president is hoping to do more. One of his biggest opportunities is happening right now. In August, as this magazine goes to press, the process is ongoing to renew the entire Supreme Court of Justice and Courts of Appeal. “This will be the most important battle for the executive,” said Ortíz. These courts, along with the Constitutional Court, are the highest judicial authorities in Guatemala. Every criminal, civil, labour or family case is resolved by these judges. They also have the power to remove the president’s immunity. If Arévalo’s allies can replace some of the old guard with sympathetic people, they could block Porras’s ability to prosecute him in the future. “The country’s repressive and antidemocratic apparatus has three legs: the Public Ministry [run by Porras], the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Justice. If they lose one, they will limp,” Ortíz said.

US influence One unpredictable factor is the forthcomng US presidential election. Joe Biden has been a key ally of Arévalo. In March, US vice president Kamala Harris met Arévalo in Washington, promising support for his administration and more investment in Guatemala. However, Donald Trump is likely to back the political status quo in Guatemala, if he wins again this year, as their political goals are more closely aligned – including on abortion, religion and Israel-Palestine (former president Morales was the only Latin American leader who agreed to move their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after Trump officially recognised the city as the capital of Israel). So the future of the country also relies in part on which way Americans choose to vote in November.

Arévalo will also have to retain the goodwill of the people, including the Indigenous communities who form the backbone of his support. Now that the first six months of his government have passed, Indigenous leaders like Herrera say they feel listened to by the president, but that they are still waiting to see a response to their most urgent needs. “We are not asking for radical changes,” Herrera said. “We believe that the needs will not be resolved in one or two years. Structural changes are required and that will occur when the justice system is no longer taken over [by corrupt people].”

However, the lack of action around rights to the land has caused anger among the Indigenous community. In May, 48 Indigenous families were evicted from the land where they lived and farmed in the north-east of the country. The police and the army arrived without warning, burning down their wooden houses and their crops. The eviction provoked resentment against Arévalo and his interior minister, who is in charge of the police, since it represents a continuation of the repressive policies used against Indigenous peoples. The Arévalo government said it had to respect the eviction order because the people were living on land owned by the state. But given that many Indigenous people went out on the streets to defend his presidency at the end of 2023, there is a feeling of betrayal. “There has been a rapprochement between Indigenous authorities and President Arévalo. Yes [the government is] listening to them, but it is complex because people are upset by the evictions,” Aj Ral Ch’och’, an Indigenous journalist, said.

The government has proposed some economic reforms that if implemented would benefit the Indigenous community. In the very same week as the evictions, Arévalo announced a one-off bonus of $128 for poor families in rural areas and a monthly $32 bonus for those in urban areas. The aid is projected to reach 300,000 families, although it is not known exactly how they will be selected. “Arévalo should take advantage of the fact that the communities still have hope of changing the repression, evictions and [forced] migration … The communities say that if they are called [upon], they are there to support the president,” Ch’och’ said.

The fate of Guatemala could have a positive ripple effect on other countries in Latin America. It’s not the only country in the region teetering between democracy and authoritarianism. In Nicaragua, international organisations have denounced systematic violations of human rights committed by the government of Daniel Ortega, accused of leading a dictatorship. In El Salvador, in June, President Nayib Bukele began a second term in office, despite the constitution prohibiting it. In March, Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking charges in the US, with prosecutors saying he ran the country like a “narco-state”.

Latin America, said Ortíz, is divided into three types of countries: those that live under dictatorships such as Nicaragua; those considered solid democracies such as Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica; and countries that are in a state of democratic decline, such as Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador. Guatemala was in the latter group until it took its unexpected leap last year. “The country democratically turned the helm and managed to overcome an attempt at authoritarian consolidation without the need for repression or violence,” said Ortíz.

But staying in that lane will not be easy for Arévalo. And with the evangelical church rapidly growing in Guatemala, reforms might become even harder if popular ministries start to direct more of their influence to support anti-democratic forces. According to Herrera, two things will be a significant help: first, if the government manages to elect independent judges by the time the process ends in September; and second, if they are able to stay close to the Indigenous communities, who could be powerful allies. This will mean taking steps to support poor rural families, who can’t wait for politics to be cleaned up in order to get the resources that many so desperately need. “We still have tons of needs around health, education, food and electricity,” she said. “This is justice too.”

This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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Guatemala fights for its democracy

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