Nine months before the presidential election, the right wing that rules the country is fracturing into rivaling projects as progressive groups discuss the elusive idea of a united candidacy. Electoral authorities are indulging pre-campaigning by the ruling party and top conservative Zury Ríos, but sanctioned left-wing Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera for retweeting the words “plurinational state.”
Roman Gressier wrote in El Faro on the manoeuvrings currently in play on the candidate selection for next year’s Presidential election where, and no surprise here, some candidates are allowed to start electioneering while others are not, depending on their world view.
Since the 1996 Peace Accords, no Guatemalan party has won consecutive presidencies. It’s just what President Alejandro Giammattei, secretary general of Vamos, hopes to accomplish in the elections set for June — even though he won’t be on the ballot.
Despite having an approval rating of under 20 percent, rivaled in the hemisphere only by Peru’s Pedro Castillo, the president has made a special effort to repeatedly appear at public events with congressman Manuel Conde, widely viewed as the anointed candidate.
Conde, 65, who came in eleventh place in the 2007 presidential elections with the PAN party, aligned with Vamos in 2020 and has supported legislation appealing to the military and to conservative Christians, like the bill proposed in September 2021 “against gender identity disorders”.
To bolster Conde’s candidacy, in recent months Giammattei, the man behind prison-or-exile lawfare against independent prosecutors who investigated his 2019 campaign on allegations of illicit finance, has unveiled a string of public works projects like a public hospital in Izabal and has increased 2023 funding to mayors’ offices.
You can read the full article, with links, here, Who Will Inherit Giammattei’s Power in Guatemala?
Categories: Corruption, Criminalisation, Culture, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice, Presidential Elections, Rios Montt, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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