Bernardo Arévalo is finally sworn in as president of Guatemala

First modification: 01/15/2024 – 08:07

3 min

After a transition marked by a judicial attack and numerous attempts to stop his assumption of power, Bernardo Arévalo de León was sworn in as president this Monday, January 15, at dawn, when the majority of foreign guests had left.

The investiture was delayed for about ten hours amid tension in the Guatemalan Congress due to a dispute over credentials that was hindering the inauguration of new legislators for the 2024-2028 period.

Protesters, several of them indigenous people who arrived in the capital, struggled with dozens of police officers who maintained two fences in the back of the Legislative Palace, in the historic center of Guatemala City.

Arévalo de León was inaugurated president of Guatemala for the period 2024-2028, in a solemn session that took place at the National Theater in the Guatemalan capital ten hours late than planned and after an eventful transition, and in which Karin Herrera assumed office as vice president of the Republic.

Arévalo assumes the Presidency after his victory in the 2023 elections, in which his main banner was a speech against corruption.

Since he went to the second round in June 2023, unexpectedly, he had to overcome numerous attempts by the Prosecutor's Office to have his immunity withdrawn and the electoral result annulled.

Arévalo, 65 years old and who has denounced the actions of the Prosecutor's Office as an attempted “coup d'état”, was sworn in at the National Theater, in a session of a Congress that is expected to be adverse to him after the suspension, now revoked, from his party, the progressive Semilla movement.

The new president, who was a deputy, came to the Presidency driven by a solid vote, with the promise of fighting corruption in the Central American country and the intention of emulating the presidency of his father, Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, who governed the country between 1945-1951.

Precisely the Semilla Movement, by Bernardo Arévalo, was born from the anti-corruption demonstrations registered in Guatemala in 2015 and that gave way that year to the arrest of former president Otto Pérez Molina (2012-2015) for million-dollar bribery scandals.

Arévalo was born in Montevideo and lived as a child in Venezuela, Mexico and Chile, in his father's exile after the coup d'état orchestrated by Washington against the progressive Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954).

Your party, back

Before the investiture, the new Congress of Guatemala revoked this Sunday the suspension of the Semilla Movement party, of President Arévalo, with 93 votes of the 160 deputies that make up the Legislative Body.

The decision came after, in the morning, a commission from the previous Congress ordered that the 23 deputies of the Semilla Movement take office as independent deputies without ties to their party.

On the same day of his inauguration, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala, the country's highest court, ruled that the Semilla Movement, the president's party, was suspended.

The decision left the Semilla Movement without the possibility of being part of the board of directors of Congress for the period 2024-2025, but established that the 23 deputies of the Arévalo political group will be independent for the period 2024-2028.

The suspension arose from a criminal order dated July 12 for an alleged case of false signatures in the founding of the Semilla Movement in 2018.

Since Arévalo de León won second place in the June 2023 presidential elections, the Public Ministry (Prosecutor's Office) of Guatemala began a judicial persecution to prevent the academic from taking office, as did the deputies of the Semilla Movement.