Guatemala elections: Campaigning begins amid public distrust

Guatemala City — The campaign got underway in earnest last month ahead of Guatemala’s general election, with political messages filling the streets, local broadcasts and social media.

But less than three months before the June 25 vote, concerns are mounting among national and international observers about the integrity of the process.

“There is a lot of distrust in the environment around the elections,” Gabriela Carrera, a political science professor at Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala City, told Al Jazeera. “This is the result of the incompetence of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal … combined with a series of arbitrary decisions made by the magistrates.”

At least 30 political parties will contest the upcoming election, with more than 22,000 candidates running for president, congress, regional parliament and councils across the country. But Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which rules the elections, has blocked several opposition candidates from running, according to Human Rights Watch. Observers say this raises a red flag.

“Arbitrarily blocking candidates because they pose a threat to the [political] the establishment is serious,” Ana Maria Mendez Dardon, the Central America director of the Washington Office on Latin America, told Al Jazeera. “It has also brought little credibility to the institutions that protect the integrity of the [electoral] process.”

A spokesman for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal told Al Jazeera that the body followed constitutional standards, noting that the matters at stake are complex.

Blocked candidates include left-wing indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, who took fourth place in the 2019 presidential election, and Roberto Arzu of the right-wing Podemos party. Cabrera was barred over an alleged issue related to a payment her running mate had received while he was ombudsman, while Arzu was barred for allegedly campaigning before the legal period.

Cabrera and her supporters have been protesting her exclusion since February. Meanwhile, a Guatemalan prosecutor is seeking to waive the immunity of another presidential candidate, Edmond Mulet, after calling for an investigation into a judge who ordered an investigation of nine journalists from El Periodico newspaper. Candidates usually enjoy immunity from prosecution during an election campaign.

Allegations of corruption

While the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has ruled against several popular candidates, it has allowed many others with alleged links to corruption to run.

Zury Rios, the daughter of former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt and a candidate from the right-wing Valor party, are among the presidential front-runners, according to a February CID Gallup poll. Rios, who previously served in Congress from the mid-1990s to 2012, was temporarily barred from running in 2019 due to a constitutional ban on relatives of coup leaders holding the presidency. There have been a number of conflicting rulings over the years as to whether such bans should be enforced.

Her candidacy is largely supported by the Guatemalan economic and military elite, but her participation has raised concerns among the families of victims affected by state violence during her father’s dictatorship. Last month, activists and victims of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, in which more than 200,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared, demonstrated against her candidacy and called for more transparency in elections.

Other candidates running for legislative or mayoral positions face charges of bribery, drug offenses or other criminal charges, including some sanctioned by the United States.

“The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has accepted these candidates as a message of deep rejection of this type of sanction,” said Mendez Dardon. “It says, ‘I don’t care now.'”

This is the first general election since the closure of the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, which closed its doors following the 2019 vote after the government chose not to renew its mandate.

Since then, judges, prosecutors and investigators involved in corruption or transitional justice cases related to Guatemala’s civil war have been targeted by authorities and far-right groups, and some have been forced into exile in recent years.

The rollback of democratic institutions since the commission’s ouster has led to upcoming elections, which analysts say are the most worrying since the country’s return to democracy in 1985 after years of military dictatorship.

“We are seeing the first limited elections since 1985,” Edie Cux, a lawyer and election observer with the independent watchdog group Mirador Electoral, told Al Jazeera.

“There is a manipulation of the system, from registration to the [practice of] buying votes, to manipulating elections and the legal system. These elections qualify as limited and a step towards autocratic rule.”