Progressive social democrat César Bernardo Arévalo de León of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement Party) won the runoff election for Guatemala’s presidency on August 20, a surprising result that few could have predicted before the first round of voting on June 25. Arévalo previously served in Guatemala’s congress, and his father was the country’s first democratically-elected president in the mid-1940s. His success represents a historic victory, especially in a country that has seen a recent rollback of democratic institutions.
“[The election of Arévalo] means there is social support for the fight against corruption,” Gabriela Carrera, a political science professor at the Guatemalan Rafael Landivar University, tells The Progressive.
On August 20, 45 percent of registered voters turned out to participate in one of the most important presidential elections since the country returned to democracy in 1985 after decades of military rule. Arévalo won 58.01 percent of the vote while his opponent, Sandra Torres, a sixty-seven-year-old businesswoman and former first lady from the right-leaning National Unity of Hope Party (UNE), earned around 37 percent.
The 2023 electoral process was marred by irregularities and concerns, with many analysts and members of the international community expressing alarm around it. These concerns were amplified due to a campaign of revenge carried out by the far right against journalists, prosecutors, investigators, and judges who were involved in anti-corruption efforts that came out of investigations by the now defunct United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG), which was forced to close in September 2019.
Movimiento Semilla’s success in the first round of voting led to further political interference. In early July, a coalition of far rightwing parties that had initially polled well in the election, filed a lawsuit to block the results in the country’s Constitutional Court.
A woman holds a sign that says “in the ballot box not in the courts” during the protest on July 8 against the delay of the certification of the Guatemala electoral results.
While the court would later rule that the results could be certified by electoral authorities, the public prosecutor filed an order to suspend the Movimiento Semilla Party over accusations of falsifying signatures in its formation. These efforts were also blocked by the court, but the investigation continues.
The election put in contrast leaders who promote anti-corruption and anti-impunity efforts and those who have sought to maintain the status-quo: Arévalo and Movimiento Semilla represented the former, while Torres and the UNE Party ran on conservative family ideals and being tough on crime.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei has congratulated Arévalo, and stated that he is ready to begin the transition. However, it will be challenging for the incoming administration to follow through on Arévalo’s anti-corruption policies, given that the UNE Party and the conservative VAMOS Party won a majority of seats in the nation’s congress.
Building coalitions with other smaller parties will be key to Arévalo’s success.
Building coalitions with other smaller parties will be key to Arévalo’s success.
“For Movimiento Semilla to advance with few congressional representatives, there is not much to do other than negotiate,” Carrera says. “It will also need the support of the population to maintain its legitimacy.”
Arévalo will be inaugurated on January 14, 2024.
The 2023 electoral process was one of the first Guatemalan elections where social media became one of the primary forms of campaigning. As a result, the lead-up to the runoff election became marred by extreme levels of misinformation, conspiracies, and hate speech, largely originating from candidate Sandra Torres and her allies.
Bernardo Arévalo sits down with journalists from Al Jazeera in Jocotenango, Sacatepequez Guatemala in July 2023.
In response, Arévalo and the Movimiento Semilla Party denounced the use of hate speech and misinformation coming from their competitors ten days before the vote.
“Enough with the misinformation,” Arévalo said during the press conference. “The people of Guatemala deserve to choose [freely], with fair elections, based on proposals and constructive calls. We do not deserve to have a second round where every day we find out about lies that circulate on social networks or insults that candidate Torres spreads at her rallies.”
The denouncement stemmed from a campaign speech that Torres gave where she made extremely homophobic accusations against members of the Semilla Party, using a slur against the LGBTQ+ community. Torres has faced calls for sanctions against her from the Supreme Electoral Council and at least one legal denouncement for her use of hate speech during the campaign.
Arévalo and the Movimiento Semilla Party denounced the use of hate speech and misinformation.
She denied that she had propagated any misinformation or spread hate speech, demanding “evidence.” But throughout the lead up to the runoff, Torres and her allies actively sought to mis-inform voters about her opposition and their party, accusations that spread through social media.
Torres suggested that if Semilla won they would expropriate their land, and that Semilla had not issued a governance plan. Her campaign also shared fake Semilla pamphlets targeted at residents in wealthy neighborhoods, fake CNN and Telemundo video reports, images on social media of falsified editions of newspapers, and fake campaign signs that were set up across Guatemala City.
Many of these rumors or conspiracies were then propagated and spread further by evangelical pastors, who sought to stoke fear in their congregations of the “threat” of the progressive party “outlawing Christianity.” These powerful influence groups have backed Torres openly, but many followers broke away, voting for Semilla. In fact, in the August polling from CID Gallup and Fundación de Libertad y Desarrollo, found that only 7 percent of those polled said that their church influence their vote.
Yet this campaign of disinformation may still have an impact on future electoral processes.
“We are entering a different stage of patronage [in voting], and more specifically in the system of [voter] manipulation,” Carrera says. “Access to technology has led to a lot of support for other efforts linked precisely to processes that have to do with informing the population.”
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