Despite court intervention and legal persecution, a reformist candidate is favored to win the runoff over an establishment option. Judicial efforts to derail democracy still loom.
Vaclav Masek writes in NACLA about the increased use of lawfare by the state in protecting the interests of the elites by corrupt state actors. Despite the subsequent victory of Bernardo Arévalo in the election runoff, the criminalisation of anti-corruption prosecutors continues as can be seen with the recent arrest of Claudia González Orellana, a former prosecutor with the CICIG and the lead defence lawyer for Virginia Laparra. The use of lawfare has also led to the enforced exile of dozens of journalists, prosecutors, and judges. Harassment and intimidation campaigns have become prevalent online.
Amid unprecedented legal actions against the electoral process, Guatemalans will head to the polls on August 20 in the most consequential vote in the country’s recent democratic history.
The presidential runoff pits progressive Bernardo Arévalo de León of the Movimiento Semilla party against Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope (UNE), one of Guatemala’s most enduring electoral vehicles. Immediately following Arévalo’s surprise showing in the June 25 first round, the public prosecutor’s office or Ministerio Público (MP) attempted to illegally revoke Semilla’s legal status. The multiple attacks aimed at derailing the second-round vote—or the “extreme judicialization” of the electoral process, as the Organization of American States put it—has laid bare an ongoing technical coup d’état that seeks to undermine the popular vote.
The electoral cycle in Central America’s largest economy went from the ballot box to the courts, threatening to alter the constitutional order and create a climate of political and social instability even before the next administration begins.
According to Andrea Reyes, a lawyer and former student activist who won a seat in Congress with Semilla in the June 25 election, political elites have turned to these “desperate acts of intimidation given the overwhelming rejection of the status quo at the ballot box.”
“The ruling coalition does not want to allow citizens to freely choose their rulers based on the rational, logical, and even emotional arguments they deem appropriate,” Reyes says. “Not only has an open smear campaign been unleashed. Dangerously, state bodies obliged to defend the constitution have tasked themselves with undermining the certainty of the electoral results, putting the peaceful transition of power at risk.”
In the face of allegations of voter fraud, electoral fearmongering, and other elite efforts to hamper democracy, strong pronouncements from electoral observers, the international community, and different civil sectors of Guatemalan society helped uphold the first-round results and protect Arévalo’s spot in the runoff. According to recent polling, the upstart candidate is now projected to win. “But,” Reyes says, “the threat of destabilization and the criminalization of our movement will remain even after the second-round vote.”
You can read the full piece, with links and photos, including a link to the original Spanish version, here, Lawfare Casts Shadow Over Paradigm-Shifting Guatemalan Election.
Categories: Corruption, Criminalisation, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice, Presidential Elections, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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