Carlos Figueroa Ibarra
When I write these lines, there are just over six weeks left until January 14, 2024, the date on which Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera of the Movimiento Semilla party take office as president and vice president of Guatemala. The Semilla Movement duo came unquestionably in second place in the first electoral round on June 25 and decisively won the August 20 runoff. In a country in which democratic normality reigned, one could only hope that the electoral authorities would validate the electoral results and that the transition process between the old and new governments would begin.
But Guatemala has stopped being a democracy. It never had a democracy of good quality after the 1996 Peace Accords, but even so, that democracy of poor quality has gradually ceased to exist. In its place, a dictatorship has gradually emerged that, as happened with previous military dictatorships, is obscured in the functioning of the republican institutions that hide the true backbone of power. In the era of military dictatorships and during the first civilian governments observed after 1986, that backbone was the armed forces. This situation diminished in the following governments until the moment arrived when they occupied the place they have now: decisive in their neutrality so that democratic continuity continues its course or is interrupted, but without being the power that was hidden under the current government.
Today the power of the State is exercised by a coalition of interests with various actors. The hypothesis can be ventured that the backbone for its economic power is the Guatemalan ruling class, synthesized in the so-called G-8 because it is considered that there are eight of the most important groups of economic power in the country. Another determining economic group can also be mentioned that would be linked to the first by hidden, shameful ties. I am referring to organized crime, particularly drug trafficking, which would extend its networks of power through the corrupting effect that its economic power gives it. It is also possible to establish the hypothesis that local drug trafficking organizations in Guatemala would be associated with the various drug cartels in Mexico, particularly the most powerful: the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel.
Drug trafficking extends its invisible networks of power by establishing relations with the ruling class in an activity that is essential to it: money laundering. It is not a phenomenon exclusive to Guatemala but is a widespread and essentially necessary fact in all countries where drug trafficking becomes an activity of lesser or greater importance. In Mexico, the northern triangle of Central America and much of the Caribbean, drug trafficking takes on major importance as it is the gateway to the largest drug market in the world, the United States.
Drug trafficking also extends its corrupting effects through the financing of political parties and with this a good part of the country’s political class, which includes government officials, the Judiciary, deputies, mayors, etc., become intertwined with that hidden power. This also includes political actors such as those expressed in the neo-fascist organizations that operate in the country and that have been extremely belligerent in the exercise of psychological warfare and judicial warfare against those who have opposed the racket of interests, which is colloquially called the Corrupt Pact.
In its ideological offensive, neoliberalism has presented the State not only as essentially unnecessary (the delusional version of this ideology is the so-called “anarcho-capitalism”) but also as the source of all evil and corruption. But corruption is a calamity that involves businessmen, state officials and far-right pressure groups alike. As in the case of Guatemala, the intertwining of licit and illicit capital, corrupt officials and neo-fascists becomes the way capitalism works.
This is the true plot of the Corrupt Pact and there lies the strength it has shown in the second half of 2023. Until now the Corrupt Pact has resisted the largest popular uprising observed in the recent history of Guatemala. It has also resisted pressure from the White House, the OAS, the European Union and most Latin American governments. Apparently he is not giving up on the coup plans that seek to prevent Bernardo Arévalo from assuming the presidency on January 14. The lukewarmness of international pressure and the ironclad shared interests of the Pact of Corrupts explain how, despite being shaken, the strength of criminal governance has not collapsed. The Corrupt Pact remains emboldened and seems to care little about the political crisis we have observed.
Several signs are announced on social networks that allow us to glimpse the coup d’état in progress: eliminating the right to pre-trial the Supreme Electoral Tribunal that has recognized Arévalo’s victory; elimination of Vice President Guillermo Castillo’s right to pretrial so that he does not assume the presidency if President Giammattei resigns; acceptance by the Supreme Court of Justice of an amparo requesting that the electoral results be ignored and ignorance of the same by the Constitutional Court; elimination of the right of pre-trial to Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera to be able to prosecute, imprison or exile them; Giammattei resignation; appointment by Congress of a substitute president who would hold office for the time necessary to hold new elections.
These are the coup plans. It remains to be seen if they will be successful. It will depend on the strength of the new popular attack against the coup. Also international pressure that is not only declarative but is accompanied by measures that affect business interests. Perhaps it also depends on Bernardo Arévalo and Movimiento Semilla being more assertive in their alliance with the vast indigenous and popular movement that their victory has unleashed.
