The attempt to exclude the candidacy headed by Bernardo Arévalo, of the Seed Movement, from the second electoral round in Guatemala has set off all the alarms among the democratic forces of the Central American country. Opposition representatives, lawyers, international organizations and the Joe Biden Administration reject the decision of a court that on Wednesday disqualified the progressive formation that obtained 12% of the votes in the elections on June 25. The party filed a constitutional appeal to challenge the ruling and the Electoral Tribunal has requested this Thursday to annul the judge’s order and thus maintain the call for the second round, set for August 20. The risk is, in any case, that of an imminent rupture of the constitutional order. The Seed Movement, which emerged in the heat of the 2015 protests against the country’s institutional drift, is facing a criminal case promoted by Rafael Curruchiche, a prosecutor sanctioned by the United States for corruption.
Guatemala is one step away from a technical coup, in the opinion of former Foreign Minister Gabriel Orellana, now a lawyer. “Crude, but in the end hit,” he says. He comes to this conclusion after examining the order of the judge seeking to blow up the formation of Arévalo, who filed an appeal for amparo before the Constitutional Court to try to prevent the electoral authorities from complying with an “illegal and unconstitutional” provision. Complying with the order of a judge who meddles in the functions of the Electoral Tribunal poses a breach of the fundamental law, according to the jurists consulted, and is also illegal, because no party can be suspended during an electoral process. In this context, according to the most widespread analysis, the attempt to exclude Arévalo from the electoral contest pursues the imposition of a second round between the former first lady Sandra Torres (conservative) and a pro-government candidate close to the current president, Alejandro Giammattei .
Before an expectant population for the officialization of the electoral results of the first round, confirmed by a repetition of the scrutiny, the Public Ministry released a video on Wednesday in which the prosecutor Curruchiche announced that a court ordered the disqualification of the Seed Movement with the argument of the alleged falsification of signatures of party affiliates.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has presented this Thursday an amparo before an appeals chamber to annul the order. “The judge should not have even heard about the cancellation of a political organization,” the registrar, Ramiro Muñoz, said at a press conference, because that is a power that is only the responsibility of the electoral authority. Neither can the cancellation occur with a process underway and when the decree that formalizes the results of the candidates who go to the second round has already been issued, he explained. The electoral authority will also present an action before the Constitutional Court, in defense of the Magna Carta, as it would with any other party, to defend the supremacy of the decisions that are only the responsibility of the Registry of Citizens, according to Muñoz. The registrar looked nervous and when asked if he was afraid. He said no, and recalled that his charge enjoys immunity from a possible threat of criminal prosecution for not complying with the order, valued as illegal by several jurists and by the same court.
Concern over this drift reached Washington. The United States Department of State not only expressed its concern about this situation, but also stated that these actions “put at risk the legitimacy of the electoral process at the center of Guatemalan democracy, which must be promoted and defended in accordance with the Constitution of Guatemala and the Inter-American Democratic Charter”. “The will of the Guatemalan people, expressed through the results of the June 25 elections, must be respected,” a statement warned.
“In no way are we going to abide by a spurious and illegal decision,” said Bernardo Arévalo. The 64-year-old sociologist is running as a candidate for the presidency for the party that represents a progressive proposal for change in the face of the system of corruption and authoritarianism that deepened during the Giammattei government. More than a hundred justice operators, human rights defenders and journalists are in exile, while other former anti-corruption officials have been imprisoned, such as former prosecutor Virginia Laparra, whom Amnesty International has declared a “prisoner of conscience”.
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If it goes up, they lower it
In this context of authoritarian drift, more than 5.5 million Guatemalans went to the polls on June 25 and decided that the candidate of the National Unity of Hope, Sandra Torres (15% of the votes), and Arévalo (12 %) will dispute the presidency in the second round, set for August 20. During the pre-campaign, three candidates with the possibility of reaching the ballot were excluded through judicial decisions widely criticized as arbitrary and opportunistic. This is the case, for example, of the rancher Carlos Pineda: when he led the polls, former congressman Manuel Baldizón, who served a sentence in the United States for money laundering, filed a legal action to remove him from the race.
Arévalo surprised by capturing 12% of the votes, and became the candidate that neither the polls nor the analysts managed to see in the second round. This position put the Seed Movement in the crosshairs of the call Pact of Corrupt or the corporation in power, to which a convergence is attributed to maintain control of the institutions. These are people appointed by President Giammattei or by the alliance of deputies that has a majority in Congress, which responds to the interests of the president or the official party. He Pact of Corrupt “It is an informal alliance of politicians, a bureaucratic elite and businessmen plus some representatives of criminal networks,” says former foreign minister and political analyst Edgar Gutiérrez.
One of those actors, according to Gutiérrez, is Baldizón himself. In addition to his criminal history in the United States, this former deputy has two open proceedings in Guatemala, one of them for the alleged receipt of bribes in the Odebrecht case. Baldizón also directed legal actions for the Constitutional Court to suspend the officialization of the electoral results until the vote counts were repeated throughout the country, which delayed the entire process for at least a week.
Thus, without a single combat tank or violence, a “sophisticated” and “crude” coup began in Guatemala at the same time, former Foreign Minister Gabriel Orellana insists in statements to EL PAÍS. Like Orellana, dozens of jurists turned to social networks to present their legal arguments, which reached a unanimous conclusion: the cancellation of a match with a second round underway is illegal, unconstitutional, and puts Guatemala in the face of a kind of of a technical coup.
The conversation left the field of lawyers as Wednesday night progressed. The business chambers, social organizations, national and foreign electoral observers, students and the public in general used social networks to denounce what they consider an outrage that was created by the Prosecutor’s Office and that found in Judge Fredy Orellana the endorsement to put Guatemala’s fragile democracy at risk.
The imposition of candidates
“The Public Ministry and particularly the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity are in charge of carrying out this dirty strategy, of wanting to undermine the electoral process and bring down Semilla,” says analyst Renzo Rosal. This action opens the possibility of any scenario and “cancels the doubts about the despicable performance of the Public Ministry and especially the Curruchiche prosecutor,” says Rosal. In his opinion, they seek to distort the results of the first round and that, “before the disappearance of Semilla, they seek to impose Manuel Conde in the ballot,” the candidate of Giammattei’s party, who came in third place, with a 7.83% of the votes.
The scenario drawn by the constituent Aquiles Faillace goes further and sets January 14 as the critical date, when Giammattei has to pass the baton and leave power. “Even if Bernardo Arévalo wins the election, he will not be president,” he predicts. His hypothesis is that the Prosecutor’s Office builds a spurious case against Arévalo, that Congress strips him of immunity and appoints another president. The Vamos party, led by Giammattei, achieved the majority of deputies in Parliament and second place went to the National Unity of Hope party, led by Sandra Torres.
Torres herself reacted to the judge’s decision with a statement from the National Executive Committee that calls on the Electoral Tribunal “to conduct the election process in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution and the Electoral Law.”
Between accusations of illegality and of an attempted coup that the cancellation of the anti-system political proposal supposes, the citizens try to trust a court whose image has been eroded by the application of unequal and arbitrary criteria, according to local observers, as well as by corruption accusations. days before the vote The New York Times revealed that an electoral magistrate would have gone to the United States Embassy to denounce the delivery of bribes by President Giammattei.
With a dose of mistrust and another of hope, the population is trying to find in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal the ally that will defend the votes they cast at the polls. “Elections are won and defended at the polls, that is democracy,” said the president of the court, Irma Palencia, at a press conference in which she showed her commitment to guarantee the process and respect for the legality.
“We urge the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to firmly exercise its role as the highest authority,” highlighted the Chamber of Construction in one of the communiqués that circulated on Wednesday night, and which, like others, reflects citizen sentiment. The attention and the protests are directed this Thursday towards the electoral court, which must give an answer to an order described by the experts as clearly illegal; the Public Ministry and the courts of justice, the actors that will define the constitutional breakdown or the rupture of the electoral system in a country that is experiencing the lowest hours of its democratic history.
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