Moises Castillo / AP
In the early morning hours of Monday, January 15, Bernardo Arévalo was finally sworn in as president of Guatemala after a nine-hour delay. All the while, the country and the foreign leaders who had come to the inauguration ceremony waited patiently for the squabbling majority of the opposition congress to form a governing council, elect a new speaker and representatives to take the oath of the new head of state.
And in Constitution Plaza, Guatemalans from all over the country were dancing, setting off fireworks and waving blue-and-white national flags in anticipation of the inauguration. But even their patience came to an end, the atmosphere of joy and celebration was briefly replaced by anger, and then, dispersing the police, shouting, «Get out, you coup plotters!» — they threatened to storm the Congress and take the oath of the new president themselves.
As a result, Arevalo was sworn in as president, succeeding Alejandro Giammattei, who was mired in corruption scandals. «Our democracy has the strength to resist, and through unity and trust we will be able to transform the political landscape in Guatemala», Arevalo said, addressing a large crowd of supporters, minutes after taking office.
But time will tell who will have more power in this most populous and corrupt Central American country. Especially since the victorious Seed Movement has only 23 deputies in the 160-seat legislature.
Bernardo Arévalo is the son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo (1945 to 1951), who is still admired in Guatemala for establishing a social security system and pulling the country out of the humiliating condition of a «banana republic». His father survived 25 attempts to forcibly remove him from power, not without the involvement of the United States. The CIA managed to stage a coup d’état and overthrow the next democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954 through intervention and barbaric bombing of Guatemalan civilians.
This coup not only destroyed Guatemala’s economy, but also triggered a nearly 40-year civil war (from 1960 to 1996) that claimed 200,000 Guatemalan lives.
The 65-year-old Arevalo, a career diplomat and sociologist, founder of the low-profile center-left Semilla («Seed») movement and an outsider in last August’s presidential election, shocked Guatemala’s political establishment by unexpectedly entering the second round of the presidential election. He promised to raise living standards for millions of poor indigenous Guatemalans (42% of the nearly 18 million population is Indian), end corruption and banditry, enact sweeping democratic reforms, and deal with the rising cost of living and violence — key factors in the population’s suffering and mass flight to the United States.
Since 1985, when civilians replaced the military in power, Guatemala has been ruled by the «Covenant of the Corrupt» — an alliance of corrupt politicians, drug traffickers, ex-military and businessmen — which achieved by 2023 an unprecedented consolidation of power in the executive, legislative and judicial branches and created a shield against prosecution of corrupt officials.
The stakes are high. For now former President Jammattei and his allies, according to the InSight Crime think tank, power has secured control over billions in the national budget, key ministries and businesses. The kickbacks «lubricated» the entire system of state and government administration.
«The State Department has credible information indicating that Giammattei received bribes in exchange for performing his public functions while serving as president of Guatemala — actions that undermined the rule of law and government transparency», U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller’s eyes were opened on the thief president after four years in office.
According to a poll conducted in 2022 by CID Gallup, the Guatemalan president’s approval rating was 19%, the lowest in the Americas.
The constitution prohibits the incumbent president from running for a second term, but entrenched elites have every time organized the election race in such a way as to guarantee «their sons of a bitches» the presidency. The authorities systematically «removed from the race» all opposition candidates who could compete with their protégé. The 2023 elections were no exception.
President Alejandro Giammattei, with the help of the Attorney General’s Office, jailed and exiled dozens of denouncers of corruption and possible contenders for the highest office — politicians, prosecutors, judges and journalists. Not a single serious candidate went unnoticed. The rivals were suppressed, relegated to the background, and the ground for the establishment’s victory was 100 percent prepared.
The «Covenant of the Corrupt» did not pay attention to the leader of the anti-corruption party Semilla Bernardo Arevalo, who in all the polls barely received 2%, and therefore had virtually no chance, and the Pact saw no need to exclude him from the electoral race. And it miscalculated — Arevalo unexpectedly passed the first round of elections, and at the second round he was elected president with a large margin.
The very next day after winning the election, Arevalo faced stiff opposition. For the first time not only in Guatemala, but perhaps in all of Latin America, the right-wing attempted to overthrow a president who had been elected but had not taken office. All the efforts of the outgoing administration of Alejandro Giammattei were aimed at preventing Arevalo from assuming the presidency.
Just a week after Arevalo was declared president-elect by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the government officially suspended his Seed party. Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras, an ally of Giammattei, sent her agents to raid the offices of the electoral commission, where they opened ballot boxes and conducted searches despite the protests of commission members, and attempted to strip Arevalo and his vice president of their legal immunity and annul the election results. There were at least four serious attempts to cancel the election, the most egregious of which was the confiscation of «thousands of protocols» that confirmed the results.
If the Indigenous Movement’s Governing Council of Municipal Mayors, known as the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán and comprising more than 140,000 people, had not mobilized the Maya, Quiché, Garifuna and Xinca Indians to defend democracy, President-elect Bernardo Arévalo and his vice president, Karin Herrera, would not have avoided prison. On October 2, 2023, they declared a national strike against the «Covenant of the Corrupt». The country’s main highways were blocked for 100 days, and a sit-in was organized in front of the Public Ministry in the capital Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción. Creoles and Mestizos soon joined them. The international community strongly condemned the authorities’ attempts to prevent the inauguration of the president-elect and to disqualify his party.
In the early morning hours of January 15, Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in. For Guatemalans, the inauguration was less the culmination of Arevalo’s electoral victory than a successful defense of the country’s democracy.
«Today begins four years that will be marked by unforeseen obstacles. The political crisis from which we are emerging gives us the opportunity to make a difference. The responsibility we take on today will determine the future for generations to come. There will never again be human rights violations, <…> no more discrimination, no more racism», said the new president in his first address to the nation.
Blessed is he who believes. In the medium term, Guatemala will face deep structural problems. Extreme poverty and lack of employment opportunities continue to force large numbers of Guatemalans to emigrate to the United States. The poorest are most vulnerable in the context of the global crisis and in the intensifying cycles of drought and flooding, exacerbated by climate change.
In any case, the government team realizes that with Arevalo in power, one obstacle course ends and a new, equally difficult and dangerous one begins. Guatemala’s political elite maintains a dominant position in the country’s legislature and has spent decades taking over state institutions. How will the resistance of the «Covenant of the Corrupt» be overcome, and how will the new president be received by conservatives who are suspicious of the leftist political forces with which they have been at war for decades? To what extent will it be possible to ensure control over state institutions that are firmly in the power of conservative opponents? How will a declared «government of change» be formed and guaranteed to work and implement the promised reforms and anti-corruption program?