When former U.S. President Donald Trump lost his 2020 bid for reelection and set out with his supporters to find a path to staying in power, he had exactly 11 weeks left in office before then-President-elect Joe Biden was to be sworn in. Imagine what would have happened if the period between the presidential election and Biden’s inauguration had been twice as long.
That’s the case in Guatemala, where a shock election result in August handed the presidency to Bernardo Arevalo, an anti-corruption campaigner, and the political establishment—widely believed to be tainted by corruption—has been using the months since then to carry out a soft coup before Arevalo’s inauguration in January.
Efforts by the outgoing administration of President Alejandro Giammattei to prevent Arevalo from taking office are continuing despite evidence that Guatemalans are determined to defend the electoral results. Most recently, the government appears equally determined to cook up a criminal case against Arevalo to keep him out of office.
It all started months ago, with a most unlikely electoral drama in two acts, each one equally stunning.
Giammattei was constitutionally banned from seeking a second term, but the entrenched elites that many Guatemalans call “the pact of the corrupt” sought to ensure that one of their own would replace him. Systematically, authorities banned every opposition candidate that seemed to pose a significant threat. They didn’t pay much attention to Arevalo, the 64-year-old son of an exiled former president and co-founder of a new anti-corruption party named Semilla, or Seed—mainly because he didn’t seem to stand a chance.
Arevalo had participated in the 2015 protests that helped turn Guatemala—for a time—into the epicenter of the fight against entrenched corruption in Latin America, forcing then-President Otto Perez Molina out of office.
But corruption subsequently came back with a vengeance. Activists fled the country, and hope for change was in short supply. That’s why in the first-round presidential voting in June, more people spoiled their ballots than supported any of the candidates. But to almost everyone’s surprise, Arevalo finished second, just behind Sandra Torres, the conservative former first lady.
The push to overturn Guatemala’s election results has so far not succeeded. Instead, it seems to have strengthened the resolve of pro-democracy forces.
In the August runoff, Arevalo swept to victory in a landslide, winning 58 percent to Torres’ 36. The push to keep him out of office began almost immediately. A week after the voting, on the day the Supreme Electoral Tribunal declared him the winner, the government formally suspended his Semilla party. The attorney general’s office was already on the offensive, looking for a way to stop Arevalo and Semilla from tackling corruption head on, as he had vowed to do during the campaign.
Arevalo was under no illusions about what was happening. “No one can stop me from taking office on Jan. 14,” he declared.
Since the election, Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras has tried a number of other maneuvers to block Arevalo’s path. Already sanctioned by Washington on accusations of abuse of power and corruption, Porras had her agents raid the electoral commission offices, where they opened and searched the ballot boxes over the commissioners’ protests.
But that only steeled Arevalo’s supporters, who responded with street protests and blocked roads, vowing to defend the election results.
On Nov. 16, prosecutors announced they would strip the immunity enjoyed by Arevalo and his party’s members of Congress. The plan isn’t hard to discern. Without immunity, Arevalo would be subject to prosecution and, of course, conviction and imprisonment.
As the attorney general’s office made the official petition to lift the immunity of Arevalo’s key allies, security forces were already in place, surrounding their homes. Some of them were arrested and taken to a military prison.
The case against Arevalo is flimsy to the extreme. Prosecutors reviewed his posts on X, the former Twitter, and concluded that he encouraged a student occupation of San Carlos University during an April 2022 protest against what the students maintained was corruption in the election of a new rector.
Earlier last month, the attorney general launched yet another effort, ordering electoral authorities to turn over a slew of documents related to Arevalos’ registration as a candidate, along with that of Semilla’s chief, Samuel Perez.
Meanwhile, Congress, where the outgoing government holds a comfortable majority, is also looking into the elections and refusing to seat Semilla’s elected deputies. In addition, legislators created a committee tasked with reviewing the immunity of electoral authorities, which could ultimately lead to prosecutions against its members and the reversal of the election results.
Arevalo’s allies say the reason Giammattei and his allies are fighting so feverishly to keep him from taking office is that they fear an anti-corruption administration could result in criminal prosecutions against many of them.
The anti-democratic machinations have raised alarm across the hemisphere and beyond. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on key figures in the soft coup plot.
The U.S. State Department lambasted the “brazen efforts to undermine Guatemala’s peaceful transition of power.” The European Union, whose observers concluded that there was no fraud in the election, described what is happening as an effort “to overturn the legitimate outcome of the election,” warning that continuing attempts to undermine democracy would harm Guatemala’s relations with the EU.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, condemned the Guatemalan attorney general’s office for its “abuse of authority for electoral and political purposes.” The IACHR listed a litany of prosecutions targeting Arevalo supporters, calling the moves an attack on democracy.
And yet, the push to overturn the results has so far not succeeded. Instead, it seems to have strengthened the resolve of Guatemala’s pro-democracy forces. With little over a month left before the inauguration, protesters are standing firm, holding up signs declaring, “The people’s will must be respected.”
Four months after becoming president-elect, four months after the outgoing government launched its campaign to keep him out of office, Arevalo still seems on track to become Guatemala’s president. The strong show of force by the country’s defenders of democracy amounts to a stern warning to the Giammattei government. If Arevalo is arrested or the election results overturned, chaos could ensue. The corrupt establishment in Guatemala has had far more time to try to steal an election than Trump had in the United States. But they may not end up any more successful.
Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist and a regular contributor to CNN and The Washington Post. Her WPR column appears every Thursday. You can follow her on Twitter at @fridaghitis.