Guatemala’s presidential election has been thrown into confusion after the country’s top prosecutor moved to suspend the party of a centre-left anti-corruption candidate who unexpectedly made it to the second round and officials from the attorney general’s office raided the headquarters of the electoral authority.
Observers had voiced fears that the Central American country’s political establishment might try to force Bernardo Arévalo from August’s runoff after he unexpectedly came second in last month’s vote.
On Wednesday night those fears appeared to be confirmed when the prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche – who has been accused of corruption by the US – announced that Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) was having its legal status suspended as a result of an investigation into supposed irregularities in the collection of signatures allowing the party’s formation.
“There are indications that more than 5,000 citizens were illegally signed up to the Seed Movement by having their writing and signatures forged,” Curruchiche said.
Hours later, on Thursday morning, officials from the attorney general’s office raided the offices of the supreme electoral court, causing further alarm over the future of the election.
The decision and Thursday’s raid caused outrage in Guatemala and overseas. Dozens of Arévalo supporters gathered outside the electoral court in Guatemala City to protest against what they called an attempted coup d’état.
Arévalo told CNN en Español that his party, which was founded in 2018 amid growing public anger at political corruption, rejected the “spurious and illegal decision”.
“Guatemala will not allow a small group of corrupt and powerful people to silence its voice,” the 64-year-old added on Twitter. “We are in the second round [and] on 20 August we will change our future.”
Brian Nichols, the US’s assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs, tweeted: “We are deeply concerned by new … threats to Guatemala’s electoral democracy from Guatemala’s public prosecutor. Institutions must respect the will of voters.”
Later on Thursday, Arévalo’s rival, former first lady Sandra Torres, announced that she was suspending her campaign in solidarity with her opponent.
“We want to demonstrate our solidarity with the voters of the Seed party and also with those who came out to vote,” said Torres, who won the most votes in the election’s first round. “As a candidate I want to compete under equal conditions.”
Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Guatemala’s electoral law stipulated that a political party could not be excluded once an election was under way, but said the country was passing through “a scary moment”.
“It’s absolutely undemocratic. It is a clear attempt to use the judicial system to take out an increasingly powerful political rival of the establishment,” Freeman said, predicting the tactic could backfire.
“A few weeks before the elections only 27% of Guatemalans knew who Arévalo was. Now, they are all going to know who he is … So I do think this could ultimately strengthen him. But he still has to survive the next few weeks politically – and that is no small thing,” Freeman added.
Arévalo is the son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, giving the election huge symbolism in a region suffering a broader process of democratic deterioration.
Guatemala is one of several Latin American countries to have taken an authoritarian tack in recent years, alongside El Salvador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. More than two dozen Guatemalan judges and prosecutors have been forced into exile, while activists have denounced an increase in attacks on the press. Three prominent candidates were forced from the election’s first round after controversial decisions from electoral authorities.
Freeman compared the manoeuvre against Arévalo’s party to recent moves to stop Venezuela’s leading opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, taking part in next year’s presidential election.
Late last month Machado – a longstanding critic of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro – was barred from holding public office for 15 years. Another prominent opposition figure, Henrique Capriles, was slapped with a similar ban in 2017.
Parallels have also been drawn with Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, which was preceded by an unprecedented crackdown on political rivals of its authoritarian leader, Daniel Ortega. Several top opposition candidates, including Cristiana Chamorro, the daughter of the former president Violeta Chamorro, were jailed before being deported to the US in February this year. Ortega, who has held power since 2007, won the election.
Arévalo is due to face Torres in a runoff scheduled for 20 August. Torres, 67, was married to the late former president Álvaro Colom, and is fighting her third presidential election but has faced corruption allegations herself.
In a statement on Thursday morning, Torres expressed concern over the events of “the last few hours” and the “extremely confused, disconcerting and [democratically] harmful” manner in which Guatemala’s electoral process was playing out.