Guatemala’s turbulent elections ended in a sweeping victory for a progressive former diplomat Bernardo Arevalo, whose anti-corruption platform harnessed anger at a political establishment that barred better-known candidates from the ballot.
“He was kind of a right guy at the right time,” Dr. Ryan Berg, who directs the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “In a sense, he was the only anti-establishment choice remaining after a number of other leading candidates were taken out by judicial decisions and electoral authority decisions.”
UP FOR DEBATE: TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND 2024 GOP HOPEFULS' STANCE ON AI
Arevalo, a former ambassador to Spain who has worked for a nonprofit organization based in Geneva since 1999, enjoyed outsider status even as the son of his country’s first democratically elected president. And as incumbent powerbrokers made a series of apparent efforts to clear a path for former first lady Sandra Torres, Arevalo emerged as the standard-bearer against a “judicial war of oppression,” as he called it, that catapulted him from a frail second-place finish in the primary contest to a resounding victory Sunday, with 58% of the vote.
“Today we accept with great humility the victory that the people of Guatemala have given us. The ballots have spoken ... and what the people are shouting is ‘enough already of the corruption,’” Arevalo said Monday. “Regardless of the option they chose, participating is an act of defending democracy, and in this historic moment, it was an act of courage for every person who cast their vote.”
His victory could pose a threat to the nexus of political and mafia elites that have presided over Guatemala’s ordeal as one of the most violent countries in the world, as he has pledged to stoke economic development and target the cartels that profit from the northward flow of people and drugs.
“We are clear that development will not come on unless you take away corruption from the equation of governance,” he said during an Atlantic Council event last month. “We are partners in the fight against international organized crime of every form — narco-traffic, traffic of persons, and so on. So we do see in the United States a critical partner for us and for our national goals of development.”
Yet Arevalo’s victory is no silver bullet, analysts caution, for either Guatemala or U.S. relations with the Central American state.
“In some ways, he is kind of the Biden administration’s dream leader [of Guatemala],” the U.S. Army War College’s Evan Ellis, a member of the State Department’s policy planning team under then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Examiner. “Part of the risk is that also because he has gone against the establishment elites, his logical power base ... is basically from the center to the left to the far left — including what I would call the malevolent left, including forces who would like to impose Chavista leftist populism in the country.”
Arevalo will have to forge through opposition just to make it to the inauguration in January, as his opponent’s political party signaled that they might reject the election results in a statement that demanded “total transparency” about the tabulations.
“There's very clearly a lot of interests in Guatemala that are working for to prevent anti-corruption from becoming a major theme of the next administration,” Berg said. “They were pulling strings behind the scenes when some of the other anti-establishment candidates were taken out of the race. There's no reason to believe that they're going to just go lightly.”
And while Arevalo’s outsider status helped propel him to victory, it comes with the drawback that he lacks a deep network of allies within the political system to help enact his agenda, as Berg and Ellis agreed.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Arevalo election will certainly stir up the pot in terms of the fight against corruption,” Ellis said. "It’s hard for me to believe that it will lead to a significant diminution of corruption in Guatemala, and to that extent, it's hard for me to believe that will be to solving some of Guatemala's underlying problems.”
That would be a disappointing outcome for the country, as Arevalo well knows. "This was an election that actually somehow catalyzed the Guatemalan people to translate this dormant protest against corruption into an active protest against corruption," he said in July. "And the people are actually believing that we can advance and begin to get rid of this corrupt political system that we have been suffering for decades by now."