Guatemala’s highest court definitively rules out favorite presidential candidate

The Constitutional Court (CC) of Guatemala resolved on Friday to definitively exclude Carlos Pineda, favorite in polls of voting intentions, from the race for the presidential elections in June, in an unprecedented event that shakes the electoral campaign to only one month of voting.

Pineda’s participation was left up in the air last week when a court provisionally suspended his candidacy. The 50-year-old businessman appealed this decision to the highest court, but days later his party, Prosperidad Ciudadana, gave up any attempt to reverse the ruling.

The Court reported in a statement that it “declared inadmissible the appeals filed” in the case, for which reason “the act claimed is temporarily suspended.”

“The CC endorses #ElectoralFraud and Guatemala loses and we are left without democracy!!” Pineda said on his Twitter account after the decision was announced. Earlier, his supporters gathered outside the highest court to await the ruling and demand that he be allowed to participate in the electoral appointment.

In a Cid Gallup poll published on Wednesday, Pineda appeared in first place in terms of voting intention, with 22%, followed by former first lady Sandra Torres, with 20%; Zury Ríos, daughter of the late dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, with 16%, and Edmond Mulet, a career diplomat, with 14%.

Apart from Pineda, two other candidates were previously excluded from the race at the polls earlier this year: Thelma Cabrera, a left-wing indigenous leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP), and Roberto Arzú, of the right-wing Podemos party.

“Clear instrumentalization of the judiciary to guarantee an ‘electoral’ result,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) acting deputy director for the Americas, Juan Pappier, said on Friday after the ruling was handed down.

HRW, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) organization expressed their concern on Wednesday because they consider that the electoral process takes place in “a context of deterioration of human, civil and electoral”.

In April, US Department of State Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols stated that “democracy depends on all citizens choosing their leaders from among all qualified candidates without arbitrary barriers, exclusion or intimidation,” in allusion to the Guatemalan elections.

On June 25, the successor to Alejandro Giammattei, whom the opposition accuses of repressing judges, prosecutors, journalists and activists, some of whom have left the country, will be elected at the polls. If none of the candidates achieves more than 50% of the vote, there will be a second round in August.

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