Guatemala is heading towards authoritarianism. The Central American country will hold presidential elections on Sunday and none of the three candidates with a chance of going to the second round is proposing a radical turn to the situation left by the outgoing president, the right-winger, accused of corruption and under whose government a even greater institutional deterioration than achieved by his predecessor, the comedian Jimmy Morales.
The latest poll, published on Thursday by the newspaper Prensa Libre, gives first place to the former first lady, Sandra Torres (21%), who proclaims herself a social democrat, but who embarks on a program as populist and conservative as that of her two main contenders These are the diplomat Edmond Mulet (13%) and Zury Ríos (9%), daughter of the dictator.
To varying degrees, the three best-placed candidates have shown sympathy for the iron fist against criminal gangs adopted by the authoritarian president of neighboring El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, which has led to the arrest and mass imprisonment of thousands of criminals with methods that in many cases violate human rights. Bukele has 91% public approval, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Guatemalan politicians in a country where crime, along with corruption and poverty, are the main concerns.
The next president will have the ground ripe for moving towards bukelismo, after the Giammattei government has co-opted the electoral authorities and the judiciary to ingratiate itself with an establishment that is always alert to any threat of change. In May, the Administrative Disputes Tribunal annulled the candidacy of the populist entrepreneur and tiktoker Carlos Pineda, an outsider who was leading the electoral polls. And in February, the Supreme Electoral Court had denied the registration of the presidential candidacy of the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples, the only movement from the left that could question Guatemala’s authoritarian drift.
In addition, Giammattei has harshly repressed any protest against his government and has seen how justice removed from the middle critical journalists such as the founder of elPeriódico, José Rubén Zamora, sentenced last week to six years in prison for money laundering, a crime for which other managers of this newspaper were also condemned, which was characterized by publishing investigations of corruption since its predecessors. Financially suffocated, elPeriódico closed in May.
“Guatemala is governed by a corporate tyranny that changes its general administrator every four years.” This is how journalist Juan, who was director of the newspaper for 17 years and who has been in exile in Mexico since April 1st, from where he answered the phone for La Vanguardia this week, sums up the situation. “This corporation wants wealth for the elites, the country is in the hands of a small group of people”, adds Font, who recalls that in Guatemala “a third of the children are malnourished”.
