Source: CSIS.
Please note: this article is part one of two articles covering Guatemala’s recent political developments.
When Guatemalans went to the polls on election day on June 25, 2023, the electoral process itself had been questioned nationally and internationally because of the exclusion of three presidential candidates. This was preceded by two years of democratic backsliding in the country, and many expected apathy. Nonetheless, 61 percent of Guatemalans turned out to vote— similar to previous Guatemala’s first-round election. However, turnout was not the biggest surprise on election day. More remarkable were the choices made by Guatemalan voters, which stunned the Guatemalan political establishment as well as domestic and international observers.
The highest share went to the null vote (17.4 percent), which was the highest since the democratic opening in Guatemala in 1985. Only four percent of Guatemalans had cast null votes in the previous three elections. On June 25, the null votes jointly with blank votes (6.9 percent) meant that one out of four voters showed their rejection of the options presented by 23 political parties. The biggest surprise, however, were the votes for Bernardo Arévalo of the party SEMILLA, who became the second leading candidate with 11.8 percent of the total votes, propelling him into the runoff elections on August 20. Pre-election polls showed him with less than three percent of the votes. The leading candidate was Sandra Torres of the party UNE, who raised 15.8 percent of the votes. This was expected since she had the lead in all pre-election polls.
Arévalo’s unexpected position into the runoff elections was welcomed by many Guatemalans, but not by Guatemala’s ruling and allied parties, which began an unprecedented process of contesting the results—something that had not occurred in almost 40 years of democratic elections in the country. These legal actions placed Guatemala in a political impasse for almost three weeks and brought the country to its most critical moment in recent decades. On July 12, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) confirmed that SEMILLA and UNE will compete in the runoff election on August 20, but legal uncertainties remain. Alongside the legal challenges, extreme right groups who were unhappy with having two leftist candidates in the runoff elections cried fraud and began a relentless and ruthless campaign on social media, especially against Arévalo.
The Political Standoff
Despite the many shortcomings of democratic developments in Guatemala, the institutional design that tallies the votes is recognized as reliable, even by critics of the political system within the country. The vote counting relies on over 100,000 non-partisan volunteers who form the Voting Boards (Juntas Receptoras de Votos, or JRVs) and who spent election day sitting at electoral tables throughout the country, receiving the secret ballots cast by citizens. At the end of the day, the members of each JRV count the paper votes in the presence of appointees from all political parties who are able to corroborate that each vote goes to the party it is intended to go to. The certificate of electoral results (known as acta) is signed by the members of each JRV and appointees of the political parties, is then transmitted electronically to the headquarters of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), and the physical certificates and ballots are afterwards moved to the TSE.
On June 25, this process took place under normal circumstances and was considered successful. Nearly 25,000 election certificates were submitted to the TSE by the JRVs. This detailed explanation is necessary to understand why the allegations of fraud are baseless. The electoral legislation contemplates challenges to the results, and in this election there were indeed minor challenges, which could have been handled by the TSE as in the previous nine elections since the country turned into a democracy. However, on July 5, at the request of the ruling party and others, the Constitutional Court intervened unprecedentedly, calling for the revision of electoral certificates and giving the TSE five days to comply (a physical recount of paper ballots is not considered in Guatemala’s electoral legislation. The Constitutional Court also transferred the jurisdiction of the process to the Supreme Court.
Despite criticism from diverse international and domestic actors towards the actions of the Constitutional Court, the electoral authorities complied with the revision of the election certificates, which yielded basically the same results as those announced on June 26: Sandra Torres of the UNE party obtained 15.8 percent of the votes, followed by Bernardo Arévalo of SEMILLA with 11.8 percent. Manuel Conde of the ruling party VAMOS was third with 7.8 percent. In addition to the vote count by Guatemalan electoral authorities, other instruments such as the rapid count and other parallel mechanisms of national and international observation of the elections all confirmed the same results.
On July 10, two weeks after the elections, the Supreme Court finally cleared the way and said that despite the outstanding legal appeals against the vote count, the TSE could move forward with the process. However, as the TSE was getting ready to certify the winners, on July 12 the Attorney General Office requested the suspension of the SEMILLA party (claiming fraudulent signatures when the party was created) and a judge ordered the TSE to proceed accordingly. Analysts saw this move as an attempt to move the ruling party candidate, Manuel Conde, to the runoff elections, even though the revision confirmed that there is a difference of over 200,000 votes between Arévalo and Conde.
The TSE refused to comply. This development brought the country to a standstill, especially because on the morning of July 13 the offices of the TSE were raided by the Attorney General Office. In a matter of hours, different sectors proceeded to protect democracy and strongly rejected this latest attempt to manipulate the electoral results. In the afternoon of July 13, the Constitutional Court granted a preliminary injunction blocking the suspension of SEMILLA. This meant that the runoff election scheduled for August 20 could proceed with the two top-runners, Arevalo and Torres.
As of July 19, however, the legal problems continued as the Attorney General Office and the judge behind it attempted to criminalize electoral officials who refused to proceed with their order. Prominent civic groups and constitutional lawyers in Guatemala made it clear that these orders are null ipso jure (“by the law itself”), as political parties cannot be suspended once an electoral process has gotten underway and because the TSE has constitutional rank and independence. The legal challenges are expected to continue, but legal experts believe that the runoff between Arévalo and Torres will take place as scheduled on August 20.
The unprecedented legal actions against the electoral process in Guatemala have raised red flags across the board. Statements defending democracy in Guatemala were issued by the United States government, bipartisan members of the U.S. Congress, the European Union, several Latin American countries, and other international actors. Likewise, numerous Guatemalan organizations and civil society groups published statements in national newspapers and social media, asking the authorities to proceed with the electoral process with the two parties that obtained the majority of the votes, and criticized the legal tricks to delay the runoff election. Remarkably, these organizations and groups range from the conservative business sector and its different associations to moderate groups and even leftist movements that had called for voting null in the first round. Despite their deep ideological differences, they seem to agree that salvaging this electoral process is the last chance to save democracy in the country. This apparent consensus could be, in and of itself, one of the silver linings for democracy at this critical moment. Citizens have also protested against the attempts to block the election results.
It may be inconceivable for those who are not familiar with Guatemalan politics to comprehend that a fair election was gridlocked for almost three weeks and continues to be under threat, unless one understands that the mere institutions involved in the entrapment process (the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Attorney General Office) were largely co-opted by the so called alliance of the corrupt (pacto de corruptos). This informal alliance has been the main source of democratic backsliding in the country and is formed by the incumbent president, the current dominant parties in Congress, some extreme right individuals linked to the counterinsurgency during the armed conflict in Guatemala (1960-1996), and some individual business leaders.
Their first move was to orchestrate the expulsion of the United Nations Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Their next step was to engineer the dismantling of the existing infrastructure that made progress in fighting impunity and corruption in recent years by placing their people in charge of key institutions. Their next step was the hyper judicialization of Guatemalan politics through lawsuits (many of them spurious) against former anti-corruption judges, prosecutors, journalists, and civil society organizers critical to the alliance or to the unpopular incumbent president, Alejandro Giammattei. This prompted the exile of dozens of them, while several have been landed in prison. The obscure alliance had expected a right-wing candidate to move to the runoff elections—either Zury Rios from VALOR or Manuel Conde from the ruling party VAMOS. They would have been less satisfied, but probably not as upset, with a moderate candidate like Edmond Mulet of CABAL in the runoff but were appalled by Arévalo’s unexpected win because he openly speaks against them. This explains why their latest move was the hyper judicialization of the electoral process itself when it did not produce their expected results. Their difficulty is that unlike the past two years, now the world is closely observing their latest attack on democracy.
The 2023 Guatemalan elections have been unprecedented in the country’s recent history in multiple ways, and as a result, Guatemala faces either a watershed moment for its fragile democracy or the end of formal democracy. Formidable international pressure and the convergence of different domestic sectors to defend the electoral process may succeed in avoiding the total overturning of a democratic election, which would be the last straw for democracy. Nevertheless, the upcoming four weeks between now and August 20 will be crucial. Part II of this article will examine the prospects for the runoff election and the long-term challenges for democracy in Guatemala.
Dinorah Azpuru is a Professor of Political Science at Wichita State University. She has published extensively about democracy in Latin America. She served as Director of Vanderbilt University Latin America Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) for Guatemala for several years. She was Secretary General of the Commission for Electoral Reform derived from the Peace Accords in Guatemala.
