Three of the candidates for the presidency of Guatemala: Zury Ríos, Edmond Mulet and Sandra Torres.RR SS
In three months, the electoral authorities in Guatemala must have the ballot papers ready for more than nine million citizens to elect the next president. At the end of the registration, the candidatures for president and vice president of 23 political parties have been accredited, but litigation surrounding the election vote is still ongoing, increasing uncertainty and concern among voters at a process that will see the installation of such analysts according to them, “electoral autocracy” or “front-line democracy” is at stake.
The election campaign began this Monday, March 27, while several candidates are still in court demanding the use of contradictory, discriminatory and unequal criteria that keep them out of the running. Concerns about uncertainty and tensions in registering candidatures echoed in the Organization of American States (OAS), pointing to the expulsion of hundreds of people, some of whom are very high-profile aspiring to the highest elected positions.
Uncertainty and disinterest are also spreading among the population. For example, of the 4.5 million young people between the ages of 18 and 30 in the census, only 2.6 million are eligible to vote, according to the Diálogos Association. Unlike the 2015 and 2019 elections, when hope for change mobilized interest in voting, Guatemalans are now deeply disappointed at how the process is turning into an apparent fraud, says Kaqchikel Maya activist Nanci Sinto.
In 2015, Guatemala experienced a period of civic demonstrations based on outrage over serious corruption allegations against Otto Pérez and Roxana Baldetti. Wanting a non-corrupt ruler, the populace elected comedian Jimmy Morales the same year as president, removing the CICIG from Guatemala in 2019. The panel brought 120 corruption cases to court. Four years ago voters brought Alejandro Giammattei into the presidency, in whose mandate the loss of institutional balance was accused.
With the entire system in favor of a group serving the same interests, the pursuit of impunity and the avoidance of prosecution for corruption, only people who make no noise about the co-opted state project that wants to consolidate ballots could remain in the presidency, stresses Lourdes Balconi , Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Rafael Landívar University.
The assumption that the ballot paper is designed to meet the interests of the public is considered fraud from the public’s point of view, but cannot be described as such from a scientific perspective. One cannot speak of fraud because it is not a matter of falsifying the result in the event of a power failure or the destruction of the ballot paper, but of manipulating who participates and who does not, explains Balconi. “They will force us to select only among the candidates that a group allows to participate,” explains the scientist.
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“Under these conditions, what sense does it make to go to the polls to legitimize or ratify it?” asks Sinto. From the university lecture halls, Balconi continues, there is great concern because what is at stake in these elections is the loss of the bare minimum of electoral democracy: free, transparent and regular elections. “We can lose the possibility of free choice, because since the courts decide who is eligible and who is not, we still don’t know who will be on the ballot paper,” the scientist points out.
The Maya Leader’s Blockade
The TSE has registered the candidacies of the formulas of the Podemos parties, composed of Roberto Arzú García-Granados and David Pineda, as well as Thelma Cabrera and Jordán Rodas, of the Movement for the Liberation of Peoples (MLP). . The Civil Registry rejected Rodas’ candidacy because his administrative record was invalidated following a complaint filed during the processing of his registration as the MLP’s vice presidential nominee. The Anti-Terrorism Foundation, which has denounced former judges, prosecutors and journalists, has asked that Rodas not be registered.
The complaint was filed by Alejandro Córdova, the human rights lawyer elected by the ruling party-led Alliance in Congress who was accused in 2021 of involvement in the alleged rigging of the election of judicial officials. The investigation was not advanced by the decision of the Constitutional Court. In the 2019 elections, the MLP presidential candidate Thelma Cabrera came fourth with her proposal for the re-establishment, multinationalization and nationalization of electrical energy.
Another recent action seen as a maneuver to exclude candidates is the Public Department’s complaint against Cabal Party presidential candidate Edmond Mulet. The prosecutor responsible for Rafael Curruchiche, sanctioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of the corrupt and undemocratic actors, is trying to investigate Mulet because they believe that he has promoted his political image by speaking out for journalists, against which is determined as the President of elPeriodico Jose Ruben Zamora . And that, according to Curruchiche, is an expected campaign.
Mulet is one of the 20 presidential candidates accredited by the Citizens Registry and qualified to campaign in the June 25 elections, like Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) and Zury Ríos Sosa of the Valor-Unionista -Coalition. The three clearly dominate in the internal polls of the political parties ahead of Manuel Conde, the presidential candidate of Vamos, Giammattei’s party.
The country’s legal and institutional system refuses to allow various competitors, such as the anti-system MLP, “which will undoubtedly help deepen electoral autocracy,” says sociologist Luis Fernando Mack in an opinion column published in early March. . .
Autocracy is a system of government that centralizes power in one person, whose decisions, according to political science dictionaries, cannot be challenged or controlled. When asked for a more colloquial definition, Professor Balconi defines authoritarianism as “front-line democracy”.
In the 2019 procedure, there were also court exclusions of candidates. A month before the vote, the Constitutional Court removed ex-Attorney General Thelma Aldana, who was running for the presidency for the Semilla party, from the running. The court also disqualified Zury Ríos Sosa, daughter of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, arguing that Article 186 of the Constitution barred her from taking part because she was the daughter of a putschist.
The critical aspect of the current electoral process, says anthropologist and political scientist Ricardo Sáenz de Tejada, is the co-optation of all public bodies, even the Constitutional Court. Unlike the 2019 elections, the population now lacks independent judges, prosecutors, magistrates and a human rights ombudsman, many of whom have had to go into exile.
Former Secretary of State Edgar Gutiérrez agrees that the 2023 electoral process will be shaped not only by juridification, but by two phenomena unprecedented in the last four decades: all counterbalance institutions are directly controlled by the central government, and the lack of independence and technical weakness of the TSE.
Gutierrez points to the fact that the courts, the attorney general and the judge of conscience were elected directly by President Giammattei or the official party-led coalition in Congress. The same group of MPs has encouraged the expansion of the functions of Supreme Court Justices (CSJ) by not electing successors.
Minutes before the deadline for registering candidatures, electoral judges Blanca Alfaro and Gabriel Aguilera acknowledged that the court is not “supreme” because the law allows the Constitutional Court to make final decisions on electoral matters. In 2021, reform was proposed to make TSE decisions non-challengeable in court, but Congress failed to endorse the initiative.
Relying on court decisions to confirm or disqualify candidates also entails electoral costs, such as the $645,000 paid to have ballots reprinted. Aguilera recalls that there were also candidates who were only able to run for a few weeks.
Towards the authoritarian drift
While elections in the past served to process or resolve contradictions and produce new balances of power, “today they tend to reinforce the authoritarian drift that President Giammattei gives the entire system without the central actors of governance reacting: neither the autonomous nor the directly affected Parties, civil society or business people,” Gutiérrez notes.
Democracy, which has cost so much effort and life, is being led to the slaughterhouse like a little lamb before the startled eyes of the Guatemalans, adds the former foreign minister.
Do you mean authoritarianism?
– If Giammattei were to extend the mandate himself by a year or two, it would definitely be pure and harsh autocracy, aggravating the conditions of persecution and stifling more and more civil and political liberties, says Gutiérrez.
Such is the case of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who appointed a constitutional chamber that lifted the ban on immediate re-election. In Guatemala, Sáenz de Tejada explains, it is not about the survival of a single figure, but about a coalition of networks that want to continue using the state as an instrument of accumulation.
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