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GUATEMALA CITY –
Guatemala progressive presidential candidate Bernardo Arevalo took a commanding lead in preliminary results over former first lady Sandra Torres in an election where frustrated voters demanded change from corrupt politics.
With about 70 per cent of ballots counted, Arevalo led with 59 per cent to Torres 36 per cent of the vote.
Outsider Bernardo Arevalo appeared to be the “virtual winner” of Sunday’s election to be Guatemala’s next president after voters became angry at widespread corruption and leaders’ failure to tackle it.
A potential victory by the progressive candidate is almost certainly distressing politicians who have been enjoying impunity for corruption, along with some members of the monied elite and their allies in organized crime.
With more than 97 per cent of the votes counted, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported that the son of former president Juan Jose Arevalo, representing the Seed Movement, led former first lady Sandra Torres by 59 per cent to 36 per cent.
Supreme Electoral Tribunal Magistrate Blanca Alfaro called Arevalo the “virtual winner” and called for an immediate national dialogue to begin to reconcile the country’s deep political divides.
President Alejandro Giammattei congratulated Arevalo in a tweet on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. He invited Arevalo to begin an orderly transition the day after the results are certified.
The results are unlikely to be the last word: It took more than two weeks for the results of the first round of voting in June to be certified. Losing parties got the courts to intervene and order a review of precinct vote tallies.
When electoral authorities were finally ready to certify, the Attorney General’s Office announced an investigation into signatures that the Seed Movement had gathered to register years earlier as a party. That investigation continues, and prosecutors appear to be on a path to stripping Arevalo of his party.
The two candidates offered starkly different paths forward. Torres became an ally of the outgoing, deeply unpopular Giammattei in her third bid for the presidency. Arevalo, with the progressive Seed Movement, rode a wave of popular resentment toward politics to his surprise spot in the runoff.
But moves to drag the electoral process into the courts after the first round of voting in June led many Guatemalans to wonder what was to come between Sunday’s results and the transfer of power Jan. 14.
Central America’s most populous country and the region’s largest economy continues to struggle with widespread poverty and violence that have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the U.S. in recent years.
Voting appeared to have been peaceful. The Attorney General’s Office, which sought unsuccessfully to suspend Arevalo’s party before the vote, announced several arrests for interference with the process, but they appeared to be minor.
Political analyst Renzo Rosal noted the heavier than usual presence of uniformed agents from the Attorney General’s Office at voting centres across the country “could be taken as a form of intimidation.” The Associated Press saw such agents at several voting centres.
Antonio Gonzalez voted late Sunday, shortly before polls closed, at a teachers’ school in the capital.
The 42-year-old tractor-trailer driver said he hoped Guatemala’s powerful would respect the will of the voters. He wants someone to tackle corruption and improve education and the economy. Without those things, Guatemalans will continue to migrate to the U.S. like two of his co-workers recently had.
Thinking of the future of his children, he said, “We hope that they improve the economy, that there’s work.”
Poll workers at each voting table immediately began tallying ballots. One person would unfold each ballot, show it to the party observers at the table and announce which party received the vote.
Earlier Sunday, Roxana Abigail Gonzalez voted for Arevalo, hoping that he would make a difference for her future. “I think he could be a good president,” she said.
The 25-year-old student lives in Villa Nueva, a gritty hillside suburb above the capital. Thieves and gangs that extort businesses and kill those who don’t pay roam its cratered streets. Gonzalez said she has had the possessions she carried stolen multiple times, making her nervous to venture out alone.
Among her long list of hopes for Guatemala’s next government are more security, jobs for the poor families whose children she sees begging in the streets and more hospitals.
Gonzalez wants to continue on to college and study business administration. She loves to cook and dreams of having her own restaurant one day, but the threat of extortion is so great that she’s unsure if it’s possible. “People can’t keep a business,” she said.
At the school where she voted, the election co-ordinator estimated that by late morning the flow of voters was only about half of what they had for the first round of voting in June. Turnout was considerably lower at about 44 per cent compared to 60 per cent in June, according to electoral authorities.
Earlier in the day, residents of Santo Domingo Xenacoj lined up to vote at the local primary school in the mountains about an hour west of the capital. The Volcano of Fire puffed in the distance as men in jackets and women in traditional embroidered blouses wrapped in shawls against the chill came out to vote.
Clara Top, a 43-year-old seamstress in town, said she voted for Torres, because she has promised to give poor families monthly bags of food staples. “She helps the most needy,” Top said. Torres’ base was largely among the rural poor.
The first round of voting on June 25 went relatively smoothly until results showed Arevalo had landed an unexpected spot in the runoff. The fact that the preliminary results were dragged into Guatemala’s co-opted justice system has raised anxiety among many Guatemalans that voters will not have the final word Sunday.
Torres, in her closing campaign event Friday in Guatemala City’s sprawling central market, suggested she would not accept a result that didn’t go her way. “We’re going to defend vote by vote because today democracy is at risk (and) because they want to steal the elections,” she said.
Torres has painted her opponent as a radical leftist who threatens Guatemalans’ conservative values on issues including sexual identity and abortion.
“We’re not going to let them influence our children with strange and foreign ideologies,” she said Friday.
Having run largely populist campaigns, capitalizing on her oversight of the government’s social programs during the presidency of her then-husband Alvaro Colom, Torres drifted sharply rightward this time, abandoning the social democratic history of her National Unity of Hope party and launching unsubstantiated attacks at Arevalo that she herself suffered during earlier failed campaigns.
Delmi Espino, a 46-year-old teacher, came to vote in Guatemala City with her mother. “It’s incredible how we managed to get to this point after everything that has happened in the electoral process,” she said. “How’s it possible that now there’s an investigation of one of the two parties?”
“It doesn’t matter that we need security, education or health, if you don’t fight corruption,” she said. “We want a president who cares about the country.”