In the fall of 2022, I held extensive meetings in Washington with members of Capitol Hill and White House and State Department officials responsible for Central American policy. I found them embarrassed. About halfway through their term, they were far from being able to deal with the small, troubled poor neighborhood to the south.
In the post-pandemic, irregular migration was overflowing due to the drop in employment and household income, while the political regime was going through the worst regression in more than three decades. Daniel Ortega had become a dictator. Nayib Bukele captured all public powers in the midst of a mass uprising that has been going on for five years. And in Guatemala, a not at all covert corporate dictatorship launched its fierce persecution against dissidents. The fiscal effort to face the serious health emergency translated, in all the countries of the isthmus without exception, into the shameless feast of corruption by the rulers. Juan Orlando Hernández, then president of Honduras and later extradited to the United States, not only committed electoral fraud to get re-elected, he also defrauded his people with the provision of hospitals that were as expensive as they were useless.
In January 2021, President Joe Biden's team had launched an ambitious immigration reform plan, identifying the “root cause” of the problem, in clear disagreement with the hostile policy of Donald Trump, obsessed with completely walling the border. with Mexico, while encouraging the indiscriminate hunt for desperate migrants. But the good intentions of the Democrats were quickly drowned out by the irresistible force of rising tides of Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians and Africans escaping misery and violence and authoritarian regimes.
In this bleak picture, Guatemala, the most populated country in the area, was the first unsecured border and its corrupt elites were no longer docile to the pressures of the empire. President Alejandro Giammattei not only publicly challenged Biden's emissaries but also picked up the phone to directly accuse them of being coup plotters. Between the lines he was telling them: to control migration, you need me and I can help you, on the condition that you do not ask me about the probity of my Government or respect for the rule of law. The timid individual sanctions that Washington applied to deter the Corrupt Pact were presumed to be “medals of merit.”
“Between tolerating such insolence and dropping a megaton bomb, we have a range of policy options,” a Biden official told me that fall. But the roadmap was not clear. Still in mid-2023, on the eve of the general elections, Washington seemed resigned to tolerating the scam that the elites had been orchestrating, as it continued to sign immigration agreements that for Giammattei were actually commitments on empty paper. But in the early hours of June 26, the scenario changed unexpectedly. The Guatemalans decided to take revenge on the regime's grievances at the polls and ratified it on August 20, granting a comfortable victory to Bernardo Arévalo. To the extent that the Pact of Corrupts intended – through the most unlikely tricks – to snatch that victory from the people, the ancestral indigenous authorities took firm steps in defense of democracy, sustaining street mobilizations for more than a hundred days and establishing camps that besieged the main headquarters of the Public Ministry of Consuelo Porras, the embodiment of all opprobrium.
Thus, the United States found the table set to enforce the Inter-American Democratic Charter through the OAS, and the EU was not far behind. The European Parliament was emphatic in warning that its borders were closed to corrupt Guatemalans, while at the same time stating a menu of individual and commercial sanctions. Suddenly the capitals where they sheltered their ill-gotten money and enjoyed ostentatious vacation periods have become inhospitable for these politicians and oligarchs.
Why did Guatemala have a deal shock opportune on the part of the liberal democracies of the West, and not Venezuela or Nicaragua? Migration logic continues to govern policy towards Central America. A wayward dictatorship in Guatemala easily triples the Nicaraguan diaspora, while opening the risk of consolidating the Chinese and Russian presence in the context of elites that unleash their inflamed nationalist rhetoric, when it comes to protecting their privileges and impunity.
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