PMore than twenty-five years have passed in Guatemala since the signing of the peace accords which put an end, on December 29, 1996, to a civil war that began in the 1960s and which reached its peak between 1978 and 1984. However, since 2018, the country is experiencing a continued decline in fundamental freedoms and a challenge to the rule of law.
For a whole section of economic power, associated with ex-soldiers denouncing as “communist” everything that concerns democracy and the rule of law, it seems that the Cold War has never ended. And their stubborn refusal of democracy is becoming even more pronounced.
Elected president on August 20 to everyone’s surprise, under regular conditions, Bernardo Arevalo faces fierce opposition from oligarchic groups and the political class, who want to prevent his access to power.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal having banned several candidacies deemed undesirable for the elites, they thought they had locked the election through the usual financing of parties intended to guarantee the defense of their interests. A failure, because, rejecting the representatives of a corrupt system, the Guatemalans elected as president Bernardo Arevalo, candidate of Semilla, a party founded in 2015 during the great protest movement against corruption.
Power grabs and plots
Faced with this defeat, the outgoing government, the economic elites and a core of soldiers nostalgic for dictatorships are no longer content with anachronistic anti-communist propaganda and “fake news”, but are multiplying coups and plots. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights revealed in August the existence of a plan to assassinate Bernardo Arevalo and Vice President Karin Herrera.
Bernardo Arevalo, sociologist, former diplomat, is a consistent reformist, like his father Juan José Arevalo, elected President of the Republic in 1944 and incarnation of the Guatemalan “democratic spring” (1944-1954). Bernardo Arevalo intends, first and foremost, to restore the rule of law and hunt down corrupt officials and politicians.
The alarmist speeches comparing him to Hugo Chavez are just nonsense above all revealing the terror inspired by the possibility of an independent justice system fighting against former war criminals and against the corruption of numerous elected officials and magistrates involved in cases illegal and in drug trafficking.
The systemic nature of corruption
This fear of independent justice is due to the role played, from 2006 to 2018, by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig), which, mandated by the UN, assisted the public prosecutor and the police in numerous investigations and highlighted the systemic nature of corruption.
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