Guatemalans flocked to public squares all over the country as results came in on August 20, waving the country’s sky-blue flags and setting off fireworks late into the night. Chanting “Sí se pudo” or “Yes, we could” and singing the national anthem, they celebrated the victory of a new president that few expected would rise to the top before the first round of voting on June 25. “We are going towards a new spring,” president-elect Bernardo Arévalo of the Movimiento Semilla party said in a statement the day after the election. “No one can prevent the will of the people of Guatemala.”

Ronalth Ochaeta Aguilar, who has been part of Semilla since 2017 and was elected on June 25 to represent the department of Guatemala in Congress, described a grueling campaign. Although “it was very low cost (financially),” he said, “it was done with lots of heart, effort, and determination” on the part of the entire Semilla team. Arévalo’s unexpected showing in the first round, Ochaeta recalled, brought an explosion of “total joy.” He repeated what has become a slogan on social media: “Nadie nos vió venir”—nobody saw us coming.

In June, I wrote about the “shadows of the past” hanging over Guatemala’s elections. On August 20, those clouds parted, giving way to what many are calling a second Guatemalan spring. Arévalo and his vice-presidential running mate Karin Herrera won 58 percent of the vote—an astounding margin against the allegedly corrupt establishment candidate, Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope (UNE). Arévalo and Herrera hope to usher in a new period of prosperity and democracy for the country, which has been battered by democratic backsliding and intensifying migration movement in recent years.

A First-Round Upset

Arévalo stunned Guatemala when he and Herrera won 12 percent of the vote in the June general election and advanced to the runoff, which he went on to handily win. After polling around 2 percent ahead of the first-round vote, Arévalo shot up to finish in second place, reflecting widespread discontent with the entrenched corruption that has become the status quo in Guatemala. Arévalo, however, is more than a surprise candidate who is trying to reign in corruption. He is also the son of Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president (1945-1951). Arévalo seeks to fulfill his late father’s democratic legacy. His party, Semilla, and their logo—a green sprout—gestures to the return of the Guatemalan Spring (1944-1954), a period of democratic governance that came to a dramatic end with a U.S.-backed coup that threw the country into decades of brutal civil war.

While Semilla dominated in most of the country in the August 20 election, winning 17 of 22 departments, UNE’s Torres performed well in rural areas, showing the party’s continued strength in historically marginalized areas. She is remembered from her time as first lady (2008-2012), when she oversaw a popular anti-poverty program that distributed basic supplies to rural communities. But while Torres first emerged as a social democrat, she has veered to the right in recent years, focusing her 2023 campaign on an anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion platform.

Semilla, on the other hand, leaned heavily on the youth vote in urban areas. Their campaign also leveraged social media, embracing the green sprout emoji. Supporters even took to calling their candidate Tío Bernie, referencing both the outsider status and the shared name with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In the second round, Semilla triumphed in many departments, winning 68.8 percent of the vote in the department of Quetzaltenango, 74.9 percent of the vote in the department of Guatemala, and 82.3 percent of the vote in Sacatepéquez. Despite the party’s urban, mestizo base, Arévalo’s resounding victory suggests the emergence of a democratic popular front.

Ana López, a Mam lawyer, traveled more than 18 hours from Guatemala City to her hometown in Santa María Tzejá, Ixcán to cast her ballot. “Semilla’s results during the first round of voting are due to the efforts of the mestizo youth of the capital, who rebelled against the traditional corrupt government,” she told me. “However, many different social sectors united for the runoff, including Indigenous peoples, campesinos, Indigenous women, and rural groups. This unity coalition was what carried [Arévalo and Herrera] to the presidency.”

Indigenous Participation in the New Administration

López insists that regardless of Arévalo’s and Semilla’s best intentions, the path to a new Guatemala must meaningfully integrate the four peoples or pueblos cohabitantes of Guatemala—Maya, Garifuna, Xinca, and Ladino—into the planning and execution of state and development projects. Otherwise, the transformative promise of the new government will not be able to mature into a truly inclusive democracy.

In an interview with Americas Quarterly, journalist and anthropologist Irma A. Velásquez Nimatuj echoed this sentiment: “One of Arévalo’s critical challenges will be whether he can put Indigenous peoples at the center of his reforms to create a true alternative to the inequality that structural racism has subjected them to.”

Roberto—a young K’iche’ man from Nahualá, Sololá—voted for Semilla in both the first round and the runoff. He echoed the opportunity and challenges presented by the election. The runoff results “are one more piece of evidence of a marginalized people who have been stripped of their rights and are tired of so much corruption,” he said. “[They] are expressing their opposition to corruption in a peaceful manner at the ballot box, [which] has created an incredible opportunity.” Although Roberto is cognizant of the many barriers Arévalo faces to taking office and to governing, he calls the election a “big win for democracy” and hopes that Semilla can create a “more inclusive state.”

Ongoing Uncertainty amid Threats to the Democratic Process

In the lead-up to the runoff, Guatemala’s elites tried to disqualify Arévalo and his party from the election. These efforts have continued in the wake of the second round. These developments come on the heels of a turbulent campaign season in which three leading presidential candidates were excluded from the race. In the days after the first round, and before legal challenges began, some noted that Arévalo would not have been allowed to run if the establishment thought he could actually win. The race continues to be marred by what many have called “extreme judicialization” or political lawfare, in which the courts played an active role in shaping the election.

Torres, a three-time presidential candidate and former first lady, has yet to concede defeat. She has since locked her verified X account, which had been actively posting until the runoff. President Alejandro Giammattei acknowledged the election in a message on X the night of the runoff. Yet he stopped short of fully embracing the results. “I have spoken with Arévalo to congratulate him and invite him to the Presidential House the day after the results are verified,” he wrote (emphasis added), “to plan the most orderly and thorough presidential transition this country has yet experienced. He thanked me and accepted.” Days after the election, the results have yet to be certified.

According to Semilla’s Ochaeta, the attacks on Arévalo and the party from the Public Prosecutor’s office “do not have any legal basis.” “Semilla colleagues were forced into exile,” he said. “The political persecution and dirty tactics did not stop throughout the runoff campaign, but they did not work because citizens flooded the streets in support of the electoral process as well as the results.” Still, a long road remains until the January 14 transition.

The Public Prosecutor’s office, which is controlled by allies of the current administration, made another attempt to suspend Semilla’s status as a political party days after the second round while also escalating attacks on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE).

While these legal maneuvers since the runoff haven’t been as vicious as feared, risks of violence have escalated. On the afternoon of August 24, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) denounced two separate assassination plots against Arévalo and Herrera and implored the Guatemalan state to take appropriate measures to “guarantee the rights” and lives of the president and vice president-elect. According to the IACHR resolution, one assassination plan was code-named “Colosio” after the Mexican presidential candidate of the same name who was assassinated in March 1994. Reports indicate that state agents were behind the plan. These threats reflect a grave risk of political violence and are particularly shocking in light of the recent assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

For people all over Guatemala, including López and Roberto, Semilla represents renewed hope that all Guatemalans can live a dignified life. As López told me: “Semilla’s victory is in fact that of the Guatemalan people.” As for Ochaeta, he recognizes the opportunity and responsibility he and Semilla as a whole now hold. “We have a duty to the people who dream of a new country and a government that can begin to respond to its problems,” he said. “Being elected…is the highest honor of my life, but also comes with a great responsibility to fulfill the task at hand and represent Guatemala in a dignified way.”

Ongoing threats from Guatemala’s ruling elite, both through political lawfare and through physical violence, demonstrate the tenacity of existing power structures and the immense promise of Semilla’s growing coalition.

(Emily Taylor is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is currently based in Guatemala City, Guatemala on a Fulbright Hays DDRA Fellowship. Courtesy: NACLA.)

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Guatemalans Voted to End 69 Years of Corrupt Rule. Will US, Canada Accept It?

To understand Guatemala’s challenges going forward, we must ask questions about the role of the international community.

Grahame Russell

On August 20, 2023, the Semilla Party’s Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera were elected president and vice president of Guatemala.

This election will bring a formal end to 69 years of anti-democratic, military-backed, corrupt, “open-for-global-business” governments when the transition of power takes place on January 14, 2024. “The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has recognized the results and what the people have shouted is, ‘No more corruption,’” President-elect Arévalo said in an August 20 press conference.

But Arévalo’s election won’t bring an end to the interests of an alliance of corrupt judges, prosecutors, politicians, and economic and military elites known as the “Covenant of the Corrupt,” who have run the country for decades.

These elites, who now have to vacate the executive branch of government for at least four years, retain considerable control over most branches of the state and most institutions of the government. They dominate all sectors of Guatemala’s exploitative economy.

As millions of long dispossessed, impoverished Guatemalans, a majority being Indigenous Mayan peoples, celebrate the Semilla Party’s victory, seemingly impossible-to-overcome challenges still remain within its borders — challenges the incoming government will have to address and work to remedy.

But before it can get to work remedying the country’s systemic inequalities, the party will have to overcome ongoing “lawfare” attacks against its members, who face potential arrest on trumped-up charges. By legally attacking the Semilla Party, the Covenant of the Corrupt, which controls the attorney general’s office, hopes to render the Semilla Party itself illegal, leaving Arévalo and Herrera as an independent president and vice president. Such attacks are also targeting the role of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in officializing the final vote count.

Guatemala faces just as many challenges from outside its borders, namely the policies and actions of the United States-led “international community,” including Canada, the European Union, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and countless transnational companies operating in partnership with Covenant of Corrupt elites in the sectors of for-export food production, mining, tourism, hydroelectric dams and maquiladora sweatshop garment production.

To understand these challenges, we must ask important questions about the role and responsibility of the U.S. and international community over the past 69 years of maintaining beneficial political and economic relations with successive military-backed, Covenant of Corrupt governments.

“Bitter Fruit”: U.S. Military Coup

What would Guatemala be like today as a government and people if the U.S. had not planned and orchestrated a military coup in 1954?

The June 27, 1954, “bitter fruit” coup violently ended Guatemala’s only period of actual democracy, from 1944-1954, crushing 10 years of social, economic, land and human rights reforms that the governments of President Juan Jose Arévalo (father of President-elect Bernardo Arévalo) and President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman were working to implement.

The coup restored to power the traditional military-backed economic and political elites who had been in power from 1931-1944, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Gen. Jorge Ubico — precursors to Guatemala’s Covenant of Corrupt governments of today.

After refusing to establish diplomatic relations with the democratically elected governments in power from 1944-1954, Canada effectively legitimized the 1954 coup by establishing diplomatic relations with the military-backed government in 1961.

Soon after, the Canadian government openly supported the arrival of the world’s biggest nickel mining company at the time, the International Nickel Company, known as INCO, to take control of a vast swath of Mayan Q’eqchi’ territories and begin long history of violent, harmful and corrupt mining that continue today.

“Scorched Earth” Genocide

What would Guatemala be like today if the U.S. had not — in the name of “fighting communism” — backed the Guatemalan military and death squads during the state repression and terrorism of the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s?

Hundreds of thousands of mainly Indigenous Mayan people — young and old, men and women — were savagely massacred, tortured and “disappeared” in “scorched earth” military campaigns in the highlands.

In four regions of the country, genocides were carried out against the local Mayan populations. Millions of people were violently displaced from their homes and lands during the military campaigns, becoming desperately poor and internally displaced, or refugees seeking safe haven Mexico, the U.S. and beyond. Even today they are still being hunted and killed by the regime.

Ignoring the Peace Accords

In 1996, comprehensive peace accords were signed that set out serious reforms and changes to remedy most of Guatemala’s historic inequalities, injustices and systemic racism, formally ending decades of “internal conflict.”

The reforms included, for example, comprehensive land reform, the establishment of the United Nations Truth Commission to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity from 1960-1996, recognition of the rights of refugees to return home to their lands, long-overdue recognition of the rights of Indigenous (mainly Mayan) peoples. The U.S., Canada, and much of the international community stated publicly they supported the full implementation of the accords, but in practice the countries ignored the reforms by not conditioning future political and economic relations on proper implementation of the accords.

What would Guatemala be like today if these accords had not been ignored by ensuing Covenant of Corrupt governments and the U.S.-led international community?

What if the U.S., Canada and international community had actually demanded full implementation of and compliance with the accords, instead of getting right back to “business as usual” — maintaining and expanding economic interests with 25 more years of repressive governments controlled by the Covenant of Corrupt elites right through until today?

The past can’t be changed, but asking these questions is more than rhetorical. Answering these questions will show what the policies and actions of the U.S., Canada and international community have actually been since 1954.

Hopefully, August 20, 2023, will mark a transformational before-and-after date in Guatemala’s history. The incoming Semilla Party government and Guatemalan people are already working — hopefully, cautiously, nervously — to begin to address the almost impossible-to-overcome challenges confronting the needs and well-being of the majority population.

Will U.S. and Canadian governments, politicians and media ask the hard questions and demand serious reforms and changes as to how they exercise and impose our power and interests on small countries around the world, or will they quickly get back to insisting on business as usual in support of their political and economic interests?

(Emily Taylor is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is currently based in Guatemala City, Guatemala on a Fulbright Hays DDRA Fellowship. Courtesy: The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military intervention in the Western hemisphere.)