Carlos Pineda greets his supporters from a truck during a campaign rally in Guatemala City May 14. Moises Castillo (AP)
In early May, the newspaper Prensa Libre published a poll on voting preferences with surprising results in Guatemala. The poll found that Carlos Pineda, a farmer who is not part of traditional Guatemalan partisan politics, is a leader in voting intentions and has built a profile as a successful businessman through videos on Tik Tok and other social networks. The poll gave him 23% of the preferences, opening up a new election scenario with Pineda going into the second round and with ample chances of becoming president. However, his candidacy was threatened by an injunction imposed by political rivals in the Electoral Court who allege irregularities in the announcement of Pineda’s candidacy. This Friday, the judiciary suspended his candidacy, at least temporarily, and the candidate announced that he would appeal to the Guatemalan Constitutional Court. “The system is fighting against me and that is because I am not a suitable candidate for any political sector. Fighting the system is not easy. “All politicians share the cake, that’s their business and that’s why they attack me,” Pineda said in a video posted to his social networks.
He described his rapid rise in the polls as an “electoral revolution”. The truth is that it has positioned itself over traditional candidates such as Sandra Torres, who lost the last election to current President Alejando Giammattei, and Zury Ríos, daughter of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was at the helm at the beginning of the year Voting intent, which has now fallen to fourth place among presidential candidates. “It has become a thorn in the side of many other competitors. It kind of breaks with the form they planned because the idea was that the argument would be between Zury Ríos and Sandra Torres and now suddenly they are outperformed in the Pineda corner, which has already moved the board”, explains Renzo Rosal, political scientist and university professor. “It’s a particular phenomenon, he’s a right-wing, populist candidate, but he also has an anti-oligarchic discourse, resources that end up posing a threat to the established order of these elections, and because of that, the odds are that he does will, very high.” is quite high,” adds Rosal.
Pineda has managed to get to the top of voting intent thanks to his ability to use social networks, especially Tik Tok, where he has almost a million followers. In this network, he appears dressed in jeans, boots and a hat, visiting the cities of Guatemala with a folk message. Recently expressing his admiration for the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, he traveled to El Salvador to show his supporters the differences between Bukele’s heavy-handed country and present-day Guatemala. “I came to El Salvador to learn about the prosperity of a country when not enough money is stolen,” he wrote on Twitter along with a video showing his landing on Salvadoran territory. “You’re famous on Facebook,” an airport worker tells him. “I came to see the progress and development that has taken place in El Salvador recently,” Pineda replies. In the following videos, the candidate shows what he believes Bukele has brought about as a positive change: he travels to the beaches, visits pharmacies to compare drug prices, and talks about the fight against corruption, which he says is his main concern may be . “My respect goes to President Nayib Bukele who managed to break the system and that’s why El Salvador was able to develop,” Pineda said.
Calling himself a “passionate businessman” and “pro-life” on Twitter, he always quotes God in his speeches and asks his supporters to pray for his election victory. Pineda had flirted with running for office in previous elections, but his ambitions did not materialize. Then he began to mold the image of a successful man on social networks, where he also showed solidarity with the most vulnerable in a country plagued by poverty. “During Hurricanes Eta and Iota, some businessmen donated their planes and helicopters to bring food and supplies to affected communities, and that’s how we began to learn about Carlos Pineda and his use of social media. He has to be seen as a representative of an emerging sector, groups interested in state deals but also illicit deals that have existed in partisan politics over the last two decades, albeit on the fringes. Pineda is the representative of this sector,” explains scientist Rosal.
The analyst points to the high levels of corruption and impunity Guatemala suffers, which has worsened since the dissolution of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a sort of special prosecutor established in 2006 with the support of the United Nations. Under the presidency of former President Jimmy Morales, the mandate of the CICIG, which had also implicated Morales in corruption, was removed. Deciding to break with the agreement Guatemala had maintained with the United Nations body for 12 years, Morales ordered foreign officials to resign from the organization, which is headed by Colombian judge Iván Velásquez, and as a crackdown on corruption in Guatemala is applicable. In addition to this body’s resignation from the UN, a war has been unleashed from the judiciary against independent judges and prosecutors fighting corruption, which has already claimed around thirty victims, officials who have gone into exile because of threats against them.
Although all the candidates in the running reiterate that they will fight corruption, analysts see these promises as difficult to deliver. “Pineda would continue to control and co-opt the institutions. The purpose is the same, but the actors who will make the compromise are different,” explains Rosal. “Pineda appears out of nowhere to change electoral dynamics, bringing with it many of its own resources, with an impressive positioning on social networks that did not emerge yesterday but a long time ago.” That is why the traditional sectors, the political ones, look Parties, the classic economic sectors, the oligarchy and the same electoral competitors see their presence as a big stumbling block,” the analyst affirms.
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This rupture that Pineda caused in Guatemalan politics has prompted his rivals to exclude him from the election campaign. Members of the Cambio party filed a lawsuit in the electoral court alleging that Pineda failed to meet the requirements set out in the electoral law to launch his candidacy for his party, Citizen Prosperity. According to the complaint, this political organization “failed to comply with the requirements governing the holding of the National Assembly, such as failing to provide economic reports and signature lists of the delegates present at the National Assembly and failing to represent minorities”. Pineda has fended off the attacks and is confident of staying in the running if he wins the appeals case. “Despite the efforts of the corrupt, we continue to fight,” he warned.
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