Guatemalan presidential candidate of the Movimiento Semilla party, Bernardo Arevalo, shows his tattooed finger after the election in Guatemala City
Surprising expectations, the candidate on the left Bernardo Arevalo of Leon This Monday, the 26th managed an unexpected second place in the presidential election Guatemala. He meets the winner, former first lady Sandra Torres Casanova, in a second round scheduled for August. The two are old acquaintances in Guatemalan politics. With 89% of the polls counted, Torres Casanova has received 15.12% of the total votes, followed by Arévalo de León with 12.19%. According to polls, Arévalo de León and his group Semilla, who left the anticorruption fight in Guatemala in 2015, would finish seventh or eighth, but support in urban areas was key to their reaching the second round. None of the polls released during the election process indicated that Arévalo de León, whose father Juan José Arévalo Bermejo ruled the country between 1945 and 1951, could stay in the running unless there was an immediate victory. The period when his father was president is considered a vernal period in the political history of the Central American nation. At this point, the difference between Arévalo de León and third place is almost 210,000 votes, which is why, according to experts, it is difficult to change the trend with the remaining votes. Exactly in third place, with 7.84% of the vote, is the government candidate, lawyer Manuel Conde, from the Vamos faction, who brought the current President Alejandro Giammattei to power. According to the Supreme Electoral Court, the abstention rate so far is around 41%.
One of the great protagonists of the elections that took place on Sunday 25th was the zero vote, since 17.41% of the population had not opted for any of the candidates, a figure higher than the ballots added up for Torres Casanova . According to experts, the high number of nulos reflects the apathy of the Guatemalan people towards the political class, despite not reaching the 50% of nulos required by Guatemalan law and necessitating a rerun of the elections. The polls were released in the last few weeks and days ahead of a row for second place between former diplomat Edmond Mulet and coup dictator Efraín Ríos Montt’s daughter, Zury Ríos Sosa. However, none of them reached 7% of the total votes. Sunday’s election aimed to establish nearly 5,000 public offices for the 20242028 period, including president and vice president, 160 members of Congress and 20 for the Central American Parliament, and 340 municipal ones.
Who are the candidates?
Guatemalan candidate for the National Union of Hope party and former First Lady (20082011), Sandra Torres │Luis ACOSTA / AFP
Sandra Torres is the exwife of the late Social Democratic President Álvaro Colom (20082012), who supported the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nationsbacked body that acted as parallel prosecutor and investigated notorious corruption cases, between 2007 and 2019. Sandra was born on October 5, 1955 in the northern municipality of Melchor de Mencos. She has a degree in communication and is a business woman in the textile industry. In 2002, she divorced her first husband, with whom she had four children, before entering politics. She joined the National Unity of Hope (UNE), a centreleft party that brought Colom to power and which she now leads. “Remember that women are good managers. We’ll stretch the money at home and I’ll stretch it in government,” said the 67yearold former First Lady. In 2003 she married Colom. She divorced him in 2011 so that she could run for president and not violate the constitutional norm barring close family members of incumbent presidents from running for office. The court rejected his candidacy. She was arrested in 2019 for alleged irregular funding by UNE, but the case was filed in 2022. Torres lost to Jimmy Morales in 2015 and to current President Alejandro Giammattei in 2019. This year, however, she proved that she could do it would be right to be able to defeat any rival in this second round. “Whoever it is with (the second round), we’re going to win,” the former first lady declared Sunday night. A major challenge for them is rejection, which affects 41.4% of voters, according to a poll by the newspaper Prensa Libre.
Bernardo Arevalo, 64 years old, The sociologist and member of the Bundestag, who is running for the presidency for the first time, surprised in the first round. He is the son of President Juan José Arévalo (19451951), who shaped the country. On his shoulders rests the legacy of his father, who became the first Democratic president after decades of dictatorship, ending the 13year rule of Caudillo Jorge Ubico, an admirer of Hitler who forced the indigenous Maya to do forced labor. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1958 because his father was in exile in South America and France after Jacobo Árbenz was deposed in a 1954 invasion orchestrated by the United States. Árbenz was the heir to the progressive government of Arévalo, a decade that saw the creation of the Guatemalan Institute for Social Security, the public university of San Carlos and municipalities were given autonomy, and women and illiterates were allowed to vote. Also during this period, a port was built in the Caribbean and another in the Pacific; a highway designed to connect the capital to the Atlantic and to compete with the railroad of the powerful United Fruit Company. The left candidate lived mainly in France and Mexico and came to Guatemala at the age of 15. During the government of the late President Ramiro de León Carpio, he was Vice Chancellor from 1994 to 1995 and Ambassador to Spain from 1995 to 1996. During the election campaign he was active as a candidate for the Semilla movement. pledged to follow in his father’s footsteps to improve education, reduce violence and poverty, which affects 59% of Guatemala’s 17.6 million people. However, he has already stated that he will not legalize abortion current legislation only allows the practice when the woman’s life is in danger nor equal marriage. At the same time, it states that it does not allow discrimination or stigma based on gender or religion. As he wasn’t among the favourites, the polls didn’t measure Arévalo’s rejection.
*With information from international agencies