Guatemalans vote amid poverty and corruption

First modification: 06/25/2023 – 11:50

The social democrat Sandra Torres leads the intention to vote (21.3%), followed by the centrist Edmond Mulet (13.4%), the right-wing Zury Ríos (9.1%) and the right-wing official Manuel Conde (5.8%). %), according to the latest ProDatos survey. “Now Guatemala is going to have a mother government,” says Torres, ex-wife of the late president Álvaro Colom (2008-2012), while Mulet, a former UN official, promises to take the army to the streets “temporarily” to fight crime.

There are 22 presidential candidates in the running, something usual in Guatemala. If none obtains an absolute majority, there will be a runoff on August 20. Voting is voluntary and re-election is prohibited. Some 9.4 million Guatemalans are eligible to elect a successor to right-wing President Alejandro Giammattei, who is coming to the end of his four-year term with 76% disapproval, according to ProDatos.

In addition, 160 deputies, 340 mayors and 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament will be elected. “I have to go vote. I think voting is very important because the bit that one can give is a great advance for the people. We want improvements, we don’t want to get worse,” Darlyn Jiménez, a cell phone seller, told AFP. 22 years old in the capital.

None of the main candidates promotes legalizing equal marriages or abortion, which is only allowed if there is a risk to the mother, after a campaign with all kinds of promises and frequent invocations to God.

– Persecution of prosecutors and journalists –

The democratic system is navigating troubled waters in Guatemala, with control over the judiciary, prosecutions of journalists, exclusion of candidates, and persecution of prosecutors who have fought corruption. Two weeks ago, the owner of a newspaper critical of the government, José Rubén Zamora, was sentenced to six years in prison for money laundering, in a trial denounced by the Inter-American Press Association (SIP). His newspaper, founded in 1996, ceased publication on May 15.

The Association of Journalists of Guatemala documented 117 cases of violations of press freedom in 2022, among which judicial harassment, limitations on coverage and cases of exile stand out. The United States, the European Union, UN agencies and human rights organizations have denounced the persecution of journalists and prosecutors. In addition, the electoral and judicial authorities excluded from the presidential race two candidates with options: the right-wing businessman Carlos Pineda and the left-wing indigenous Thelma Cabrera.

This has caused mistrust and lack of interest in the elections, which would explain the record of 13.5% of citizens who intend to vote void. In the first round of 2019 the zero number was 4.1%. For analysts and NGOs, Guatemala is experiencing a setback to authoritarianism as a reaction of powerful political and business sectors to the work of the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an entity endorsed by the UN that helped uncover notorious cases of corruption, among 2007 and 2019.

Right-wing then-president Jimmy Morales ended CICIG in 2019, and Giammattei made no attempt to resuscitate it. The groups that had lost power with the CICIG “returned with greater force,” Edie Cux, head of the local chapter of the NGO Transparency International, told AFP. Despite the questions, Giammattei affirmed on Friday that Guatemala has “a solid democracy.”

– “Need forces us to emigrate” –

The almost 3,500 voting centers will open at 07:00 local (13:00 GMT) and close at 18:00 (00:00 GMT). From noon on Saturday, dry law applies for 42 hours. The first official scrutinies will be known about three hours after the end of the voting. There will also be voting centers in 15 cities in the United States, where 2.8 million Guatemalans live, although only 90,000 are registered to vote.

Poverty and violence drive thousands of Guatemalans to immigrate to the United States each year. “Need forces you” to emigrate, Manuel Rojche, a 46-year-old bricklayer, told AFP, whose son was one of 19 Guatemalans among the 40 migrants who perished in March in a fire at a detention center. immigration detention in Mexico.

With 71.1% labor informality, Guatemala is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, according to the World Bank. Some 10.3 million of its 17.6 million inhabitants live in poverty and half of the children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, according to the UN. Another overwhelming problem is insecurity, since Guatemala’s homicide rate triples the world average, according to the UN.