[Politics] "My candidacy and our party channeled the fatigue with an intolerable situation of corruption": interview with Bernardo Arévalo, president-elect of Guatemala

[TheKnight.]

 

Bernardo Arévalo's rise to the top of power in Guatemala has become an obstacle course that even his broad electoral triumph did not completely eliminate.

 

After being elected Guatemalan president in a runoff election on August 20 with 60.9% of support and with an anti-corruption speech, Arevalo has denounced an attempted "coup d'état" to prevent him from taking office on January 14.

 

This 65-year-old sociologist and diplomat denounces that attempts to circumvent the electoral results by corrupt public officials include the suspension of the legal personality of the Semilla Movement, the progressive party co-founded by him.

 

The Public Prosecutor's Office claims that there are irregularities in the constitution of the president-elect's party.

 

Arévalo specifically points to Attorney General Consuelo Porras, whom he asks to resign after she ordered the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to be raided alleging alleged anomalies in the elections won by Arévalo.

 

Porras has been included by the United States in a list of corrupt and undemocratic actors for her controversial management, but she has the backing of the current president, Alejandro Giammattei.

 

The conflict generated protests in recent weeks in Guatemala in favor of Arevalo, who was surprised in the elections and will become the most progressive president since the return to democracy almost 40 years ago

 

“They are fabricating causes to try to criminalize different actors. I have no doubt that they can do it against me and others,” Arevalo says in an interview with BBC Mundo.

 

The following is a summary of the telephone dialogue with this expert in conflict resolution, who was elected deputy in 2019 shortly after entering politics and is the son of Juan José Arévalo, considered the first democratically elected president in Guatemala.

 

You have said that there seems to be a “slow-motion coup d'etat” in Guatemala to prevent your inauguration on January 14th. Can you identify who specifically is seeking to prevent you from taking office as president?

 

It has been very clear that the political persecution against the electoral process, which has been extended even to the judges of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, is being carried out by the Public Prosecutor's Office: the Attorney general of the Republic with prosecutors in her charge. Among them, the special prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche.

 

It is a political persecution that is carried out in an absolutely illegal way, violating constitutionally established competences.

 

And it is through this means that they are trying to violate the po[CENSORED]r will freely expressed in the elections.

 

You have denounced that these officials you mention do not act on their own behalf but defend the interests of others…

 

In Guatemala we have suffered in the last two decades a process of co-optation of state institutions by a criminal political elite that, organizing into political parties, went on to assault the city halls, the Congress of the Republic and other spaces of the State.

 

https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cjmp32w4p4ko