The New Yorker:

Months after the election, President-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s path to taking office remains uncertain.

By Graciela Mochkofsky

Guatemala’s President-elect Bernardo Arévalo, who won a landslide victory in August, is scheduled to take office on January 14th, but nobody is certain that he will. Not Arévalo, who has repeatedly denounced an “ongoing coup d’état” attempt orchestrated by the country’s entrenched political system, which has been mired in corruption for decades, including under the current President, Alejandro Giammattei. Not the Biden Administration, the European Union, the Organization of American States, or the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, all of whom are backing Arévalo’s claim to office. And not the huge crowds of peaceful protesters who have taken to the streets during the past two months to demand that the election results be respected. As autocrats are being voted into office across the region and the world, Guatemala, a country with a long history of dictatorships and corrupt governments, is fighting to insure a victory for democracy. In an unprecedented step, the protests are being led by Indigenous communities, who lost more than a hundred thousand people in a three-decade-long genocidal war, from 1960 to 1996, and who remain, still today, deeply marginalized.

Arévalo is a sixty-five-year-old center-left sociologist and former diplomat who, before the elections, was best known in Guatemala as the son of Juan José Arévalo, the country’s first democratically elected President. Bernardo Arévalo’s Semilla (Seed) party ran on an anti-corruption campaign, and has been fighting against the efforts of a special-interest network that includes politicians, businessmen, and people involved in organized crime widely known as el pacto de corruptos, the pact of the corrupt. The pact has attempted to use the judicial system, especially the electoral tribunal, the highest authority in electoral matters, to invalidate the election results, and the Congress to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the twenty-three Semilla legislators who won the election and, if seated, would constitute the third-largest congressional bloc. At midnight on November 30th, the pact lifted the immunity of the four of the five judges on the electoral tribunal who refused to overturn the election; three of them immediately fled the country. A week later, the special prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, who last year was named on the U.S. State Department’s list of corrupt and undemocratic actors, requested in a press conference that the results of the runoff be annulled.

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