234 - Hope Emerges for Anticorruption in the Americas

            The fact that Bernardo Arévalo managed after a nine-hour delay to be inaugurated as president in Guatemala very early Monday morning, together with his vice-president, suggests that there is at least some hope that the corrupt elites that have deprived the citizens of Guatemala of so much opportunity, prosperity, and freedom for so many years can finally be out-maneuvered, and Guatemala placed tentatively on a positive path to improved development.

            "Never again will there be human rights violations," the new president enunciated immediately after he took the presidential oath in Guatemala City's Plaza de la Constitucion.  "We will not allow our institutions to be bent by corruption and impunity," he also declared. "Political-criminal elites, at least for a time, will continue to be entrenched in some branches of the state," but the new president vowed to end their capture of the state.

            Arévalo was elected decisively in August, but his opponent still refuses to recognize his victory.  Nor has the Guatemalan political establishment, starting with term-limited outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei and his close associates, especially Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras. An ally of Giammattei, she made several attempts to hinder Arévalo's transition to the presidency, including trying to strip Arévalo and his vice president of legal immunity, attempting to suspend his Semilla Party, and annul the election.  None succeeded, thanks to warnings from Mexico and the United States. But she and her collaborators will continue to attempt to undermine Arévalo's mandate. And she remains in office.

            The reasons for Porras and Giammattei's reluctance are obvious. Arévalo campaigned almost exclusively on a platform of ending corruption. Petty and grand corruption has for long decades, perhaps more than a century, sustained the rule of greedy interests over the people of Guatemala, especially its large, massively deprived and too often abused, subsistence farmers, many Indigenous. About 40 percent of Guatemala's 17 million people are Indigenous.

            Ruling over the peasant farmers during the 1954 to1996 era were military juntas, one after the other. After a brutal war throughout this period, elected politicians finally took over, but they maintained the pattern of massive corruption that was common almost everywhere in Central America outside Costa Rica.

            A unique UN-introduced International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) for a time moderated Guatemala's corruption.  CICIG, financed by the UN and the US, and directed by non-Guatemalans (finally in 2013-2019 by Iván Velásquez, a Colombian prosecutor who is now minister of national defence in Bogota) from its creation in 2006 sought to help Guatemala's official prosecutorial and judicial establishments to pursue crime and strengthen existing law-enforcing institutions. Its mandate included combatting corruption and helping to bring a number of corrupt Guatemalan leaders to book.  This admirable experiment achieved a remarkable degree of justice and reform in the period after 2010, but its success became too threatening to the regime of President and comedian Jimmy Morales in 2018-2019. He sent its chief organizer back to Colombia and ended the arrangements with the UN despite the CICIG's successes and its popularity both with the non-elite common people of Guatemala and with U.S administrations. 

            Without CICIG keeping watch, both Morales and Giammattei, his successor, could profit mightily from influence peddling, contract padding, and letting the Guatemalan state be captured by kleptocrats, narco-entrepreneurs, and people smugglers. And so they did -- until sociology professor Arévalo, the son of  revered former Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo (1945 to 1951) -- the first ever elected democratically -- decided to seek the presidency himself. He was regarded as a very long shot, given the power of the Guatemalan political establishment. But his appeal to voters was dramatic; they wanted improved prospects for themselves and their country and made those views known when they went to the polls.

            Arévalo has the advantage that Giammatttei managed to give the executive more power than under his predecessors. Hence, Arévalo will be able to bring about some needed changes via executive order. He also managed this weekend to see a leading member of his Semilla Party gain election as head of Congress. But Giammattei's allies have many more seats in parliament than Arévalo's Semilla Party, which holds only 23 of 160 seats. That will make governing difficult and enacting serious and needed changes almost impossible.  Arvalo will struggle to bring about the kinds of anticorruption reforms that are urgently needed.  He might want to resurrect something akin to CICIG, but the establishment will fight him over anything that threatens to diminish its wealth-seeking.

            Washington engineered the overthrow of a supposed Marxist Guatemalan president and successor to the first Arévalo) in 1954, ushering in four decades of decay, instability, vicious civil war, and corrupt military rule.

            Before his CIA-arranged ouster, President Jacobo Arbenz, a dedicated Swiss-born agrarian reformer, had sought to expropriate the unused lands of the United Fruit Company (the banana export monopolist). Now, if not completely distracted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Washington has an opportunity to back Arévalo strongly, especially to provide the financial support that his own legislature will not give him. The U.S. has long wanted Guatemala to be a more progressive entity, with its people palpably gaining prosperity -- if only to keep them from voting with their feet and heading into neighboring Mexico and trekking to the borders of Arizona, California, and Texas. Now is the time to work in a productive fashion with someone cut from a promising governing cloth.

            It will not be easy for Arévalo to prevail in the viper-pit of his nation's politics. But, should he manage to produce major uplifts for his people, and to begin to reduce the kinds of corruption and gang violence that have traditionally convulsed Guatemala, then his people may want to flee north in more limited numbers.  A less-corrupted Guatemala could also influence neighboring Honduras, offer a less authoritarian model than nearby El Salvador, and lean Guatemala in the direction of Costa Rica, the least corrupt country in Central America.     

            Widespread North American backing for Guatemala's new, promising, president is essential. The battle against kleptocracy is never easily won, but helping the new Guatemala succeed against long odds will make other anticorruption efforts possible.