On November 6, 2024, Guatemala’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, extended his congratulations to US president-elect Donald Trump on his victory and said, “We will continue to work with the US to strengthen our ties in the causes and under the common principles that have historically united us as nations.” For Arévalo, these “causes” include democracy and the rule of law. An anticorruption advocate and champion of reform, Arévalo won a landslide victory in Guatemala’s 2023 general elections, despite vigorous attempts by the nation’s powerful elites—commonly referred to as el pacto de corruptos (the pact of the corrupt)—to block his ascent.
Guatemala is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranking 154th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index. For years government officials have exploited their positions to amass personal wealth and power, while using the criminal justice system to stifle those advocating for the rule of law. The 17.6 million people of Guatemala—particularly its indigenous communities, which constitute nearly half the population—bear the brunt of this pervasive corruption. Around 55 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty; in predominantly indigenous regions, poverty rates are as high as 80 percent, and access to public services is half that available in nonindigenous areas. Nearly 50 percent of Guatemala’s children under the age of five suffer from chronic malnutrition, one of the highest rates in the world. Despite the strength of community ties, the lack of relief for the impoverished means that there are few incentives for them to remain in Guatemala.
That an anticorruption activist like Arévalo won the presidency is nothing short of a miracle. In the first round of the elections, held on June 25, 2023, Arévalo surprised everyone by finishing second in the presidential race, trailing only the establishment’s choice, former first lady Sandra Torres. This qualified him for the runoff election. Although international observers from the European Union and the Organization of American States (OAS) found no basis for questioning the outcome, several political parties challenged it before Guatemala’s Constitutional Court on grounds of fraud. The Constitutional Court, which is beholden to el pacto de corruptos, took the unprecedented step of ordering a review of the vote and issued a provisional injunction halting the official announcement of the outcome. It was only after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal—the country’s highest electoral authority—conducted the review and found no change in the results that they were officially announced.
But the public prosecutor’s office—led by Attorney General María Consuelo Porras, a crucial member of el pacto de corruptos—continued to oppose Arévalo’s candidacy. On July 12, 2023, the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (Fiscalía Especial Contra la Impunidad, or FECI), which reports to Porras, secured a court order barring Arévalo’s party, Movimiento Semilla, from participating in the runoff on grounds of alleged irregularities in the signatures collected for its registration as a political party. On July 21 the FECI raided Semilla’s headquarters as well as that of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, allegedly to obtain supporting evidence. Ultimately the Constitutional Court allowed Semilla to participate in the runoff.
Arévalo won the runoff on August 20, 2023, with about 60 percent of the vote, far exceeding Torres’s 39 percent. That put his life in danger. A few days after his victory, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous OAS organ mandated to protect human rights in the region, asked Guatemala to provide more protections for him and Vice President–elect Karin Herrera, citing “serious and urgent” risks.
Meanwhile el pacto de corruptos continued to pursue its obstructive tactics. On August 28 the national citizens’ registry provisionally suspended Semilla’s legal status as a political party, and two days later Guatemala’s Congress required Semilla’s elected deputies to serve as “independents” without party affiliation. Two and a half weeks after that, the FECI once again raided the Supreme Electoral Tribunal facilities, breaking into and photographing the contents of several ballot boxes without the tribunal’s permission. In December 2023 the FECI declared that the elections should be annulled. It later alleged that tribunal judges had engaged in fraud and breach of duty by using “overpriced” software to transmit preliminary election results, and it sought to strip them of their immunity from prosecution—clearly an attempt to pressure the judges to block Arévalo’s victory.
The OAS electoral observers in Guatemala said that the FECI raid was “without due cause, violating the functions, independence and autonomy of the electoral body,” and they condemned the “artificial fabrication of crimes and accusations” by the public prosecutor’s office as “intimidating practices” that sought to “sow doubts about the electoral process and the results of the popular will expressed unequivocally at the ballot box in both electoral rounds.” Nonetheless, on December 1, 2023, Congress stripped four electoral judges of immunity from prosecution, prompting them to flee the country. A week later, building on previous allegations of irregularities in Semilla’s registration, the public prosecutor’s office asked a court to strip Arévalo of his immunity and once again called for the elections to be annulled. The OAS called this move an “attempted coup d’état by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Guatemala.” The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, similarly condemned it as a measure “aimed at nullifying the outcome of the general elections.”
Guatemala’s indigenous communities played a crucial part in defending democracy as el pacto’s legal maneuvering to undo the elections unfolded. They were at the forefront of nationwide protests, chanting, holding banners, blocking roads, camping outside the public prosecutor’s office, and calling for the vote to be respected and for Porras to resign. Sanctions announced by the United States, the European Union, and Canada against several of el pacto’s members added to the pressure. On December 14 the Constitutional Court issued a decision requiring that Arévalo, Herrera, and other officials be allowed to take office on January 14, 2024. At the same time, however, in a nod to el pacto’s influence, the court did not stop the public prosecutor’s office from continuing its investigations into the president-elect.
Arévalo’s inauguration was set for 3:00 PM on January 14, 2024. Though it was delayed by nine hours as his opponents made a last-ditch effort to prevent it, the inauguration symbolized the revival of democracy in Guatemala. The last time the country had witnessed something similar was at the outset of the “Ten Years of Spring” (1944–1954), after Guatemalans overthrew Jorge Ubico, a military dictator who had shown fascist leanings during World War II. Semilla (“seed”) was named partly in reference to that democratic spring, during which Arévalo’s father, Juan José Arévalo, became Guatemala’s first democratically elected president in 1945.
Juan José Arévalo was not a Marxist but described himself as a “spiritual socialist.” His government and that of his successor, Jacobo Árbenz, promoted new social welfare programs that led to higher wages for industrial and agricultural workers. Árbenz’s government also legalized a communist political party that then elected four members to Congress. They were among the supporters of Decree 900, a controversial land reform measure known as the Agrarian Reform Law. Adopted in 1952, the law provided for the expropriation of unused land from large property owners and its redistribution to peasant families. By far the largest landowner in Guatemala was an American corporation, the United Fruit Company. It grew bananas on a small portion of its holdings and left the rest fallow. Approximately three quarters of its land was expropriated, and as the company had placed a very low value on the unused land to keep its tax bills low, the compensation it received was minimal.
United Fruit, aided by forces in the US intent on resisting the threat of communism wherever it appeared, fomented a coup against the Árbenz government. Two former partners in the New York law firm that represented the company, John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles, were by then, respectively, secretary of state and director of the CIA. In 1953 Allen Dulles had spearheaded the CIA’s covert operation that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1954 the CIA repeated that feat in Guatemala. These two coups might be considered the most extreme examples of CIA intervention in the affairs of other countries.
In the three decades after the coup, Guatemala had a series of governments mainly headed by military men and became known for violent abuses of human rights. Disappearances as a mode of repression seem to have originated in Guatemala and spread from there to other countries in Latin America. Left-wing insurgencies began to develop in the Guatemalan highlands during this period.
Repressive violence in the urban areas of Guatemala peaked during the presidency of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García, which began in 1978. Under his rule there were thousands of disappearances and thousands of killings by right-wing death squads. Guatemala’s armed forces also became focused on counterinsurgency during this time. Reports of rural massacres started to appear, and large numbers of Guatemalan peasants began to flee their villages, some to parts of the country not yet suffering from conflict, others across the border and into the Mexican state of Chiapas.
Efraín Ríos Montt came to power in March 1982 through a coup that installed him as head of a military junta. During his seventeen-month tenure, the armed forces engaged in numerous massacres, most of which occurred in the parts of the Guatemalan highlands where guerrilla groups were active. Many of the victims were villagers thought to be providing the guerrillas with recruits or food or care for their wounded. But all the residents of a village could be killed, not just those suspected of collaboration. The region where the largest number of killings is thought to have taken place is known as the Ixil Triangle, because it includes three small towns, Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal, and because much of the Mayan population there speaks the Ixil language. The guerrillas also committed significant abuses against villagers who may have resisted their activities, though they are not known to have carried out large-scale massacres like the armed forces did.
Ignoring the slaughter taking place in the countryside, the Ronald Reagan administration claimed that there had been great improvements in the country’s human rights situation because there was a decline in disappearances and death squad killings in the capital, Guatemala City. Reagan traveled to Central America in December 1982 and met with Ríos Montt in Honduras, where he asserted that “President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment…. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Most famously, Reagan declared that the reports of human rights abuses were “a bum rap.”
Ríos Montt was toppled by another military coup in August 1983. Under his successor, Óscar Mejía Víctores, rural massacres declined, and urban disappearances and death squad killings increased. Civilian government was restored with the December 1985 elections, in which a Christian Democrat, Vinicio Cerezo, became president. Though his election inspired hope for an end to violence, and though rights abuses were less frequent than they had been under military governments, killings and disappearances continued, and the Cerezo government did not attempt to prosecute those responsible.
In the latter part of Cerezo’s presidency, a peace process between the government and the guerrilla groups in the highlands got underway, slowly and fitfully. It did not make much progress until the inauguration of Alvaro Arzú as president in early 1996. A businessman who had served as mayor of Guatemala City, Arzú made the achievement of a peace agreement his priority and succeeded by the end of the year.
One of the most significant elements of the agreement was the formation of the Commission for Historical Clarification. To some it seemed a weak body because it could not name those who had committed abuses and it lacked the power to compel testimony. In response the Catholic Church launched its own project to document human rights abuses, under the direction of Bishop Juan Gerardi, the church figure who had been most active in attempts to protect human rights.
Gerardi produced a 1,400-page report in 1998 entitled Guatemala: Never Again! It documented the cases of 52,427 victims of violence—torture, rape, disappearance, and murder. It estimated that in the previous thirty-six years there had been about 150,000 conflict-related deaths and about 50,000 disappearances, and that government forces had been responsible for about 80 percent of the deaths. About 80 percent of the crimes the report documented took place between 1980 and 1983, during the presidencies of Lucas García, Ríos Montt, and Mejía Víctores. More than half took place in the department of El Quiché, which includes the Ixil Triangle. Two days after the publication of Gerardi’s report, he was found beaten to death in the garage of his parish house. Three members of the military were convicted of the murder in 2001.1
The truth commission, chaired by a German legal scholar, Christian Tomuschat, who had been chosen by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, issued its report in 1999. It found that there had been more than 200,000 deaths in the armed conflict and attributed 93 percent of them to the armed forces. It stressed the large number of crimes committed against Mayan women and girls, who were tortured, raped, and murdered. Most strikingly, it found that the killings constituted “acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people” and that these were carried out “with the knowledge or by the order of the highest authorities of the State.” Though the commission had been barred from naming names, it was abundantly clear that the blame lay with such men as Ríos Montt.
Though Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had published many reports on atrocities in Guatemala, neither group had used the word “genocide.” If these atrocities were a genocide, it is the only case in the western hemisphere since World War II that could be credibly labeled as such.
The report likely contributed to the decision in 2012 of Claudia Paz y Paz, the attorney general appointed by President Álvaro Colom, a moderate reformer, to indict Ríos Montt for crimes against humanity and genocide. The charges against him focused on the killing of 1,771 Ixils and the forced displacement of another 29,000. Though many former heads of state had been prosecuted for human rights abuses and corruption in the courts of their own countries, this was the first time that such a prosecution had alleged genocide.2
Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013, but the verdict was set aside by the Constitutional Court on obscure grounds. Still, the court did not invalidate most of the testimony that had been presented at his trial. A few months after his prosecution resumed in early 2015, an investigator found that he was no longer fit to stand trial, and he died in 2018 at age ninety-one.
Paz y Paz, the fearless attorney general who prosecuted many other powerful figures in addition to Ríos Montt, was forced to step down in 2014 after the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a dubious challenge to her tenure by a wealthy businessman, Ricardo Sagastume. Her office had been assisted by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an independent anticorruption organization created in 2007 based on an agreement between the government of Guatemala and the United Nations. CICIG successfully supported corruption probes that uncovered criminal networks and resulted in the indictment of several powerful government officials, including former president Otto Pérez Molina and his vice-president, Roxana Baldetti.
The contrast between Paz y Paz and Guatemala’s current attorney general, María Consuelo Porras Argueta de Porres, could not be starker. Paz y Paz was a force for justice and the rule of law. Porras, who took office in 2018, is widely regarded as a protector of the corrupt.3 Under her leadership the public prosecutor’s office attempted a coup against a democratically elected president and has continued to obstruct countless corruption investigations while using criminal law to persecute judges, prosecutors, journalists, and activists.
A recent report by the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School and the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, “Above the Law: The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Guatemala” (which Amrit coauthored), documents numerous official findings—including those of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the OAS, the United Nations, and the European Union, as well as the governments of nineteen countries—that confirm Porras’s serious misconduct and abuse of power. The report documents sanctions imposed on Porras by forty-two countries for corruption and attempts to subvert democracy.
Yet Porras continues her assault on the rule of law. Her office has initiated at least seventeen investigations into high-ranking Arévalo administration officials and has petitioned the Supreme Court on at least six occasions to strip Arévalo of his immunity from criminal prosecution, while neglecting other corruption investigations, including those concerning the possible receipt of bribes by his predecessor, Alejandro Giammattei. Human Rights Watch found that Porras “repeatedly accused” Arévalo administration officials of “committing offenses such as ‘abuse of power’ on the basis of alleged conduct that does not appear to be criminal.” Prosecutors often held high-profile press conferences to announce sensational allegations, only to later declare the cases “classified.”
For example, in August 2024 FECI’s chief, Rafael Curruchiche (whom the US and the EU have sanctioned for corrupt and undemocratic acts), once again requested that the Supreme Court strip Arévalo of his immunity after he dismissed his infrastructure minister for authorizing payments to construction companies outside of standard procedure. During a press conference, Curruchiche accused the president of being “the main sponsor of corruption and impunity in Guatemala” but failed to explain how the decision to fire the minister constituted a criminal act. After the press conference, the case was declared “classified.”
In November 2024, as part of a case brought by Porras’s office, Judge Fredy Orellana (whom the US and the EU have also sanctioned for corrupt and undemocratic acts) ordered the cancellation of Semilla’s registration as a political party. That same month, Porras dismissed Erick de León, a prosecutor who had investigated several human rights cases. Porras’s office also brought dubious criminal charges against José Rubén Zamora, a prominent journalist who led El Periódico, a newspaper that conducted exhaustive investigations into alleged government corruption by former president Giammattei and cover-ups by Porras. Zamora spent over eight hundred days in prison and continues to fight those charges.
In December 2024 the public prosecutor’s office obtained an arrest warrant on charges of “collusion” and “passive bribery” for the exiled investigative journalist Juan Luis Font, known for his reporting on corruption in Guatemala. It also announced an investigation into allegations of “extortion” and “influence peddling” against Marco Livio Díaz Reyes, the superintendent of the tax administration. Just months earlier Díaz Reyes had filed a criminal complaint against 410 companies, accusing them of evading taxes amounting to more than 300 million quetzales (approximately $39 million) during Giammattei’s tenure. In stark contrast, the government’s National Commission Against Corruption reports that of the 198 criminal complaints filed by the Arévalo administration since the president took office, prosecutors have closed thirty-seven, and only six have advanced beyond the preliminary stages of investigation.
Guatemalan law does not provide any effective means for holding Porras accountable; it allows her removal only on the basis of a final criminal conviction for an intentional crime committed while in office. Any criminal investigation against her would have to be initiated by the public prosecutor’s office, which she heads, either by one of her subordinates or by an external “special prosecutor” whom she had appointed and could remove.
The entrenched power of Porras and other members of el pacto de corruptos has left the Arévalo administration severely constrained. With only twenty-three out of 160 deputies, Semilla has little control over the legislature. The courts remain largely beholden to el pacto. Prosecutors, judges, journalists, and activists have either been imprisoned or forced into exile under threat of baseless criminal charges. Porras and her allies continue to try to unseat the president however they can.
It remains uncertain what will break this impasse. After taking office in January 2024, Arévalo requested that Porras resign, but she refused. Without reform of the laws governing the public prosecutor’s office, he may have little choice but to wait for her term to end in May 2026, and her efforts to remove him are expected to intensify as that date nears.
Meanwhile the international community will have to stay vigilant, as it did during the election. In December 2024 the European Union renewed sanctions against Porras, Curruchiche, Orellana, and two other officials in the public prosecutor’s office, and the Biden administration imposed sanctions on two Guatemalan officials for engaging in significant corruption.
The intentions of the incoming US administration remain to be seen. President-elect Trump has made it clear that his top priority is to reduce immigration to the US. Guatemala’s history indicates that the most effective way to do this in the long term is to help Arévalo strengthen the rule of law within the country, which would improve the government’s ability to offer basic services and encourage private investment and development. Working with Arévalo would also support Trump’s objectives in the short term: in his first year in office, Arévalo increased cooperation with the US on migration, and the aggregate number of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala to the US dropped.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, has expressed strong support for democracy and the rule of law in Guatemala. In December 2023 he joined a bipartisan statement condemning Guatemalan prosecutors’ attempt to strip Arévalo of his legal immunity and to cast doubt on his January 2024 inauguration, calling it “a threat to Guatemala’s democracy.” The statement further emphasized that “a commitment to uphold Guatemala’s place among the community of democratic nations will be crucial for the future of US-Guatemala relations.” In February 2024, Rubio also joined a letter to Arévalo praising his leadership in maintaining diplomatic ties with Taiwan despite increasing pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. The letter stated that by reaffirming this relationship, Guatemala “reinforced its allegiance to democratic values and the bonds of solidarity among nations committed to democracy, freedom, human rights, and respect for the rule of law.”
After nearly seventy years of repression and entrenched corruption, the people of Guatemala, against all odds, elected President Arévalo, trusting him to usher in a long-awaited democratic spring. Yet powerful forces of corruption continue to undermine this fragile transition. The United States must stand firmly with Guatemala in its fight for democracy or risk watching this moment of hope slip away.
—January 16, 2025