2024-02-11 03:01:00
The president of Guatemala, Bernardo Arevalo, said in his inauguration speech on January 15 that he will have “years marked by obstacles” and that he will have to make “difficult decisions.” Arevalo broke with 75 years of right-wing governments in the Central American country Almost a month after his inauguration, there are great expectations about his administration, among promises to confront corruption and reduce poverty that today is close to 60 percent.
The government maintains a strained relationship with Attorney General Consuelo Porraswho did everything possible to prevent the president’s inauguration, and a delicate situation in Congress, where the ruling Semilla Movement cannot be constituted as a legislative bloc, so the force will not be able to hold positions on the board of directors or in the commissions. Different international actors such as The government of the United States and the European Union supported Arévalo with sanctions to the actors who tried to oppose the transfer of command. The United States put Porras on its blacklist and prevented him from entering that country for “significant acts of corruption.”
Luis Fernando Mackdoctor in Political Science from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso)-Mexico, assured that “The first days of the Arévalo government have been marked more by shadows and threats than by successes or achievements”. In dialogue with Page 12 Mack maintained: “Arévalo finds a judicial system that continues to threaten his steps, since in successive rulings of the Constitutional Court the suspension of the Semilla Movement has been validated, as well as he has had to forcefully coexist with the Public Ministry that continues to act as a permanent sword of Damocles that threatens the government”.
Gabriela Carreraa political scientist at the Rafael Landívar University, said: “With the first days of Arévalo’s government, this premise of the defense of democracy as a space to live is proven. I think that the electorate continues to be very similar to what the president promotes“For Carrera it is important to consider that “there is a challenge of recovery and even reconstruction of a state tremendously weakened by corruption.”
Arévalo facing a “permanent threat”
President Arévalo and Prosecutor Porras summoned each other in the first weeks of the new government, after the head of the Public Ministry tried to prevent the change of command with a series of judicial actions against her. Edgar Ortiza lawyer from the Francisco Marroquín University, reminded this newspaper that Arévalo said at the time that he was going to ask for the resignation of Porras, whom the United States placed in 2021 on a list of “corrupt actors.”
“In Guatemala the attorney general is practically immovable. The only reason why a president can remove a prosecutor is because he has been convicted in court and that takes a long time. The current attorney general has until 2026 in office. Then he backed off with the resignation, he no longer asked for it publicly,” said Ortiz, who added: “The fact that you have agreed to work with a prosecutor’s officewith an entity that attacked them and that attacked democracy, It is still a bitter pill for the administration.“said Ortiz.
Mack agrees with Ortiz on that point: “Many Guatemalans do not conceive of the collaboration that the government can establish with an official who openly threatened the transition and? has become the true bête noire of Guatemalan democracyplaying an antagonistic role to the figure of Arévalo and being responsible for the persecution against numerous judges, journalists and human rights defenders.”
For Mack, “the photographs of a smiling Francisco Jiménez (Minister of the Interior) cordially hugging Consuelo Porras have been read as a capitulation of the government in the face of the coup threat, making many think that the first presidential promise has been broken: that of seeking the resignation or dismissal of the head of the Public Ministry. It remains to be seen what the new government’s strategy will be to overcome or neutralize this permanent threat.“.
A joint cabinet and great challenges
From the capital of Guatemala, Arévalo presented a cabinet of seven men and seven women “who stepped forward to work with you and for you, in the first joint cabinet in history.” The heavy inheritance that Arévalo receives is perceived above all in terms of health and education, in the high level of labor informality and in poverty that exceeds 60 percent, making it one of the highest rates in Latin America.
Mack explained that among the government’s priorities “Arévalo must begin to dismantle the networks of corruption that remain embedded in the state apparatusstarting with the rapacious unions that have taken advantage of their veto power to negotiate perks and privileges.” Looking at the glass half full, Carrera highlighted “a historic gesture that is the president making a dialogue agreement with some peasant organizations in order to be able to respond adequately to the social conflict installed in some territories in the country.”
In terms of security, the Minister of the Interior, Francisco Jiménez, ruled out declaring states of exception or a “war” against gangs like that of re-elected President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. “The problem is that with a strategy similar to using a fishing net when they want to catch tuna, they end up fishing for a lot of other things,” said Jiménez, for whom this logic “means starting from a concept and that is that all young people are potentially criminal.”
Seed suspension
Last Thursday the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ratified the suspension of the Seed Movementwhich leaves 23 deputies as independent of the official group. The fact that Semilla does not have his own bench, Mack explained, “prevents him from having any position of power in the legislature, so he will depend on his allies to advance the agenda for change, something that no one believes will last long.”
Ortiz explained that “If it does not manage to recover its party status, Semilla will not be able to preside over important commissions such as, for example, that of Finance, which rules on the national budget.” For the university professor, “Seed will have to take a lot of advantage from this first year of government, because at the moment they have an alliance in Congress, but that alliance can fall apart with the passing of the months.”
Criminal judge Fredy Orellana decided to sanction the party last year for alleged anomalies in the process of creating the group in 2018. The attempted cancellation of Semilla was part of the measures that the Prosecutor’s Office adopted to try to stop the inauguration of the current president. who came to power on January 14 after a surprise victory in the 2023 elections.
During the transition process, Arévalo directly accused Porras of attempting a “coup d’état” against him, along with other “corrupt actors” such as Judge Orellana. In that sense Carrera alerted Page 12 that “it is important to know, considering the teachings of previous years, that in Guatemala We cannot take for granted that there will not be a counteroffensive to the corruption pact“, as it is known in the Central American country, a spurious agreement between political, economic and judicial sectors that was reached during the governments of Jimmy Morales and Alejandro Giammattei.