Guatemala’s turbulent elections ended in a sweeping victory for a progressive former diplomat Bernardo Arevalo, whose anti-corruption platform harnessed anger at a political establishment that barred better-known candidates from the ballot.
“He was kind of a right guy at the right time,” Dr. Ryan Berg, who directs the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “In a sense, he was the only anti-establishment choice remaining after a number of other leading candidates were taken out by judicial decisions and electoral authority decisions.
His victory could pose a threat to the nexus of political and mafia elites that have presided over Guatemala’s ordeal as one of the most violent countries in the world, as he has pledged to stoke economic development and target the cartels that profit from the northward flow of people and drugs. Yet Arevalo’s victory is no silver bullet, analysts caution, for either Guatemala or U.S. relations with the Central American state.
Arevalo will have to forge through opposition just to make it to the inauguration in January, as his opponent’s political party signaled that they might reject the election results in a statement that demanded “total transparency” about the tabulations.
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