Guatemala elects its new president this Sunday in atypical elections, involved in controversy and in a clear atmosphere of uncertainty about what will happen after the winner is known.
And it is not precisely due to the harshness that the two candidates competing in this second round may have shown in their campaign messages: Sandra Torres and Bernardo Arevalowho starts as a favorite according to the latest polls.
Former first lady of the country, Torres is seen as the continuist formula of the current government after having moved from social democracy to greater conservatism.
Son of former president Juan José Arévalo, the progressive Bernardo Arévalo instead presents himself as “the anti-corruption candidate” who is trying to break with the traditional political class that led the last two executives. His victory would mark a remarkable shift to the left in the country.
What the current tension in the Central American country is mainly due to is the decisions of the judiciary.
After the first round had already passed, the Prosecutor’s Office was about to leave out Movimiento Semilla —Arévalo’s party— due to alleged irregularities in its formation, which led to thousands of Guatemalans taking to the streets to protest.
After that unexpected second place achieved by Arévalo, just ahead of the candidate of the current president’s party, Alejandro Giammattei, The Prosecutor’s Office launched investigations that ordered the suspension of Semilla’s candidacy and that it was even feared that they would put the continuity of the entire electoral process at risk.
Judges have thus become a key player in these presidential elections —as much or more than the candidates themselves—, so the Guatemalan population closely follows the decisions that come out of the courts and that it is feared could continue to affect the process even after the elections on Sunday, since the investigations are still ongoing.
“This election is atypical due to the onslaught that has been given to it by the Public Ministry itself (Prosecutor’s Office), which is something completely exceptional in previous electoral processes,” says the Guatemalan political scientist. Gabriela Carrera.
“The strategy is not new, after the criminalization that we have seen in recent years of journalists and human rights defenders in the country. But this time the criminalization became political persecution, in which the judicial body has played a key role by acting against a different option than that of the last two governments, ”he tells BBC Mundo.
The controversial judicial process
After the electoral authorities prohibited the participation in these elections of several pre-candidates with a profile far removed from pro-government conservatism, the controversy continued when the Constitutional Court (CC) ordered that the results of the first round not be made official until a new comparison was made. of the minutes.
The measure, launched after the claim of nine parties among which were the UNE of Sandra Torres and the official party VAMOS, provoked strong criticism from international organizations, but the recount did not change the results.
It was then that the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity, Rafael Curruchiche —including as well as the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, on the US State Department’s Engels list of “corrupt and undemocratic actors”—announced the suspension of Movimiento Semilla for an alleged use of fraudulent signatures for its formation as a party. Arévalo described this decision as a “technical coup d’état.”
The CC, however, stopped the court order on the grounds that no political party can be canceled during an electoral process, which once again gave the green light to the candidate’s participation in the second round.
Despite this, the police and agents of the Prosecutor’s Office raided the offices of Semilla in search of documentation as part of your research.
The headquarters of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) was also raided on several occasions, on which the Prosecutor’s Office maintains at least 13 other criminal investigations to verify the role of the electoral boards in charge of the polling stations in the first round and the veracity of the results.
The body asked the CC for protection due to the fear that these actions by the authorities could violate the electoral process and democracy in the country.
“In Guatemala there is no area that is not subject to amparo, and we have always had electoral processes with very high degrees of hyperjudicialization that have been attempted to be manipulated through this figure. But now it seems that the Public Ministry has had a kind of dedication to removing uncomfortable candidates from the process,” he says. Jahir Dabroy, of the Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES) of Guatemala.
What will happen after the election?
It remains to be seen how the victory of one or the other candidate would affect the questioned current Judicial Power of the country. While Torres openly supported the work of Attorney General Porras, Arévalo advanced that I would ask for his resignation if he became president.
The Semilla candidate arrives at the electoral appointment on Sunday after a campaign in which he has promised to remove the corrupt from power and change the country.
Torres opted for a more conservative discourse than ever. Many of his followers ended up describing Arévalo as a “communist” who wanted to expropriate land from the richest —something he never said—, and they criticized his support for the LGBT population, arguing that it could put an end to the “traditional family” model, of great weight in a society like the Guatemalan one.
The polls showed their unreliability in the first round, having never seen Arévalo as one of the most voted, but according to two studies published by Cid-Gallup and the newspaper Free Press on August 16 and 17, respectively, the Semilla candidate he would be proclaimed the winner by receiving between 22% and 30% more votes than Torres.
But this hypothetical victory may not be the end of the electoral process, given that the Semilla investigations are ongoing and there is a long time until the new president of Guatemala takes office on January 14, 2024.
“It seems that this will not end on Sunday Rather, we will probably continue to see actors trying to manipulate the electoral process,” predicted political analyst Dabroy in an interview with BBC Mundo.
This same Thursday, the prosecutor Curruchiche assured that, in the framework of the Semilla investigation, more raids, arrest warrants or pre-trial requests – the withdrawal of immunity to public officials from arrests or criminal proceedings – are not ruled out after Sunday .
“I estimate that after August 20 they will have to register the suspension of the political party in the system” Semilla, he insisted again, after which the Organization of American States (OAS) expressed its concern for persisting in “judicializing the electoral process.”
Just one day later, the Supreme Court granted Semilla a permanent precautionary measure that blocks the suspension order, although the measure can be appealed before the Constitutional Court.
In all this judicial battle, another scenario to take into account according to the political scientist Carrera is that if the annulment of Semilla materializes, its deputies —the party obtained only 23 congressmen elected in the first round of a total of 160, behind the official VAMOS and the UNE—would be denied membership in a party and thus be denied chairpersons of legislative committees, which would limit their influence in Congress.
“We cannot rule out more surprises because they are being given to us from the first day of this electoral process. Regardless of who wins on Sunday, I’m sure there will be many dissatisfied people and the outlook can be complicated”, concludes the director of Public Action at the Rafael Landívar University.
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See original article on BBC