How To Save a Democracy
Inside Guatemala’s liberal uprising.
Walking through the immaculate cobblestone streets of Antigua, Guatemala’s old capital, its newly elected congressman Diego Toledo tells me the story. Campaigning around his district, the 33-year-old political novice was stunned at the reaction he started getting. “People would tell us, ‘keep at it, the corrupt are afraid of you!’” he says.
During our interview, we are interrupted every few minutes by well-wishers stopping to shake his hand and thank him for his activism. “Stopping to greet a congressman warmly? That isn’t normal behavior for Guatemalans!” Toledo says with a smile. “People had gotten used to despising their elected representatives, but now look how they react!”
Guatemala’s transformation since June 2023 may be the most startling episode of democratic renewal anywhere in the world this century. For the first time in living memory, everyday Guatemalans of all backgrounds talk with pride about their government, which they have elected and fought for in the streets. After winning an electoral landslide, President Bernardo Arévalo, a little over one month into his term, has the support of four-fifths of the population.
Guatemalans know the corrupt old regime is down, but not out. Still, the story from Guatemala is amazing, and deserves to be much better known. In a little over eight months, an unlikely coalition of intellectuals from Guatemala City and indigenous activists from many different Maya nations teamed up with parts of the business elite and the U.S. embassy to unseat a ruthless kleptocracy, all without a trace of violence.
That’s not the kind of story you hear very often.
Arriving in Guatemala City at the end of January, I discovered a society just feeling its way around this unfamiliar reality. To have a president you’re proud of is a strange new feeling that has electrified a generation of young people. Yet, because of the way Guatemala’s institutions work, they’ve only captured one part of the state. And not necessarily the most powerful part.
How did it come to this?
The Empire of Unintended Consequences
Guatemala’s history reads like one long tragedy. Its densely populated highlands were subjected to some of the most horrific treatment Spanish colonialism had on offer. A brief democratic spring starting in 1945 under Juan José Arévalo was violently suppressed by a CIA-sponsored invasion in 1954. Che Guevara was in town at the time—it radicalized him into the hardcore revolutionary he became.
Later, a Marxist guerrilla set off the murderous civil war of 1960-1996, which devolved into acts of genocide against several indigenous Maya nations. 200,000 people were killed during the war, while many others simply vanished. In Guatemala City, I was surprised to see streets still covered with “Missing” posters for people who were never accounted for during that conflict. “I am looking for my family member,” they read, over faded, 1980s-era photos of victims and details of the circumstances of their disappearance.
Guatemalan history is a lot to take in, and almost all of it is terrible.
As the country emerged from war in the mid-1990s, the army officers who had presided over the bloodletting took off their uniforms and colonized the state. A viciously extractive kleptocracy, what Guatemalans refer to as “el pacto de corruptos”—the pact of the corrupt—infiltrated every part of the state.
Corruption is now built into all aspects of public life: every civic works project, whether it’s a school, a road, a water treatment plant or anything else flows to those offering the best kickback. Financiers bankroll presidential campaigns, looking to make a return on investment in the form of state contracts. Guatemalans call this the “original sin” of several recent administrations, where the start-up funding for campaigns is borne by connected players who later expect baksheesh from the politicians elected.
Big fortunes have been made this way, which is one reason why the chic parts of Guatemala City are now dotted with slick bars that wouldn’t look out of place in LA, as well as any number of Audi and Porsche dealerships. There’s a lot of wealth here, and it’s uber concentrated.
Guatemalans have long been outraged about this state of affairs, and pressure for reform has been constant. On paper, the country is well placed to combat corruption. Guatemala’s 1986 constitution creates a powerful Fiscal General, which is like an Attorney General, except he or she (in Guatemala, usually she) is wholly independent of the cabinet. And for most of this century, a strong, independent office of the Fiscal General has battled a succession of corrupt administrations. Sometimes the Fiscal won, as in 2015 when a U.N.-backed investigation led to the arrest and imprisonment of a notoriously corrupt president amid massive street protests.
But things changed for the worse in 2018, when then-president Jimmy Morales refused to reappoint the Fiscal General who investigated illegal funding for his election campaign. He also refused to reauthorize the U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission that had been her ace in the hole. The pacto de corruptos had learned that the Fiscal General is way too powerful an office to be allowed to slip out of their control. They have determined that only a die-hard corruption supporter—someone they can trust—can be entrusted its awesome powers.
So they appointed Consuelo Porras, a traditionalist Catholic apparently convinced that only her office stands between Guatemala and the woke mind virus of open homosexuality and free abortion. Steeped in the kind of conservative language Guatemala has imported from the United States, Porras went on to bat for anyone inside the pacto de corruptos’ circle of impunity. Her snarling persona and her constant attacks on enemies of the kleptocracy turned the Fiscal General’s reputation 180 degrees. Through pliant judges, Porras wielded near absolute control over who got sent to jail. She used that power energetically to intimidate critics into silence or force them into exile.
Foreign observers were appalled. The United States placed sanctions on Porras for abetting corruption in 2022. They also sanctioned her husband, whom she had appointed to a top Fiscalía job alongside her.
Still, with regime-aligned figures in control of the presidency, congress, the courts and the Fiscalía General, the pacto thought they were solid. Presidential elections were slated for 2023, but that didn’t worry them: Porras could always find a pretext to disqualify any uncomfortable challenger from the ballot. All the power vested in her office was turned into a key bulwark for the kleptocracy. Three separate candidates were disqualified from the ballot on flimsy pretexts after actions brought by Porras’s office. Only truly marginal candidates, people nobody had heard of who were polling at 0.7% in the polls, were exempted from this cull.
Candidates like Bernardo Arévalo.
A Glitch in the Matrix
Bernardo Arévalo is the kind of moderate, urbane intellectual who can usually be relied on to fall flat with 21st-century electorates. The son of Guatemala’s first ever democratically-elected president, Arévalo was born in exile in Uruguay and first visited Guatemala as a teenager.
Guatemalans, I found, tend to call him just “Bernardo.” He studied sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and obtained a doctorate from Leiden University in the Netherlands, with a 450-page dissertation on the relations between the civilian and military powers in Guatemala since the colonial era. Cerebral and congenitally moderate, he had spent years as an academic sociologist, interspersed with stints as a diplomat in Israel and Spain. In 2020, he was elected as a member of congress from a small, reform-minded center-left party, Movimiento Semilla.
A total electoral no-hoper, in other words.
Except the pacto miscalculated. Having banned all plausible reform candidates except Arévalo in the 2023 election, they created obvious incentives for reform-minded voters to rally around him. In a hugely fragmented field of 22 candidates, 15% of Guatemalans cast valid ballots for Arévalo in the first round in June, seeing him through to the second round run-off six weeks later. There, he faced a former first lady deeply enmeshed with the old kleptocratic power structure.
Overnight, the multilingual intellectual became the odds-on favorite to win the presidency.
Edgar Ortiz, a Guatemala City lawyer, famously characterized Bernardo Arévalo’s second-place finish in the first round as a “glitch in the matrix”—a possibility the ruling clique simply hadn’t considered. Once it happened, all kinds of other highly unlikely things began to happen in quick succession.
Fiscal General Porras seems to have thought that Arévalo could be dealt with in the usual way: that her office could bring suits before friendly judges and they’d just run Arévalo off the road, as they’d done to so many others. Soon, investigators dug up a complaint filed the previous May where a single citizen alleged his signature had been faked in the drive to register Arévalo’s party, and a judge threw Arévalo off the ballot.
People protested. The international community went up in arms, with the United States and the EU condemning an attack on democracy. The business community panicked, fearing sanctions.
But the move to disqualify him turned out to be the best media boost Arévalo’s campaign could have wished for. It was all the proof Guatemalans needed that he was the real deal: the pacto de corruptos feared him. A candidate to whom they’d barely given the time of day suddenly became a nationwide rallying point.
The pressure was too much for the regime. The decision barring him from the second round was reversed on appeal. And a jolt of electricity shot through Guatemala’s body politic.
The campaign for the second round convinced people like Diego Toledo, the new congressman I interviewed on the streets of Antigua, that a political earthquake was in the works. “Older people would stop us to say they grew up hearing about Bernardo’s father,” he told me.
Aware of the “original sin” of illegal campaign financing that had done so much to entrench the pacto de corruptos, the campaign was run on a shoestring. Heavy use was made of loudspeakers and social media. “We had no alternative but to get creative,” Toledo said, as he showed off his huge TikTok backlog from the campaign days. “I had kids running up to me on campaign tours saying they didn’t really understand about politics but all their friends were sharing our TikToks, and they were going to come out and vote for us.”
There was something in the air even then, so it wasn’t quite a shock when Arévalo swept the run-off vote with a stunning 61% in August. But it was still an almighty affront to the system.
What really surprised observers was that Arévalo won not just in Guatemala City but pretty much everywhere—including the Maya areas where everyone had assumed he had little chance. According to the country’s statistical agency, 37% of Guatemalans indigenous, and the remaining 63% ladino—the term for mixed-race people who speak Spanish at home. Indigenous Guatemala itself is hugely diverse, with more than 20 Maya languages and as many Maya nations mostly in the west of the country and one group that even pre-dates the arrival of the Mayas.
That these indigenous nations would turn out in numbers to support Bernardo Arévalo was far from obvious. Arévalo is a white guy: He speaks English, French and Hebrew, but he can’t speak any Maya language. I met many ladino activists who were only too aware of the cultural gulf: One told me sheepishly that they knew all along it was a weakness that just one member of congress elected for Arévalo’s Semilla party can speak a Maya language. But in Totonicapán, a department listed as 98% indigenous, his vote tally shot up from less than 8% to 68% in the second round. Nationwide, he won a decisive 61% percent.
This was too much for Porras and the pactos. Once again she moved against Arévalo, invalidating the result on the basis of a hare-brained allegation of election fraud that simply made no sense at all. But what happened next… well, what happened next might define Guatemalan society for the coming two generations.
Totonicapán Calling
Guatemala erupted, but not the way you’d expect. It erupted from the margins, with indigenous people in the lead. And not indigenous groups in some general sense, but one indigenous community. The biggest one. The K’iche’.
At the start of October, a K’iche’ NGO known as “the 48 cantons of Totonicapán” announced they would march on the capital to demand Fiscal General Porras’s resignation and Arévalo’s inauguration. With roots dating back to the 16th century, the cantons brought together the mayors of 48 K’iche’ settlements in one area of the Western highlands, some 200 km west of Guatemala City.
True to their word, in early October the 48 cantons started busing large numbers of villagers to the capital, setting up a protest camp in front of Porras’s office to demand her resignation. The protest was big, loud, and uniformly peaceful, inspired by principles of civil disobedience as old as time.
Watching videos of the protest now, what strikes you is that Bernardo Arévalo is seldom mentioned. K’iche’ leaders were at pains to emphasize they were not there to favor one politician or another. They were there to defend their votes.
If Arévalo’s name was seldom uttered, the name of Jesus Christ was constantly invoked. Most K’iche’ are observant Catholics, and the Totonicapán protestors were determined not to be outdone in their piety. Indigenous leaders worked hand-in-hand with priests, nuns and seminarians who actively supported their protest.
The protest went on for three entire weeks: an encampment of thousands of indigenous people from a city 200 km away living on site, eating from communal kitchens and toilets organized and supplied by the church and university activists. The demonstrations just about brought Guatemala to a halt. Road blockages forced the issue, making travel between different parts of the country impossible.
Though led by a single K’iche’ organization, the movement was the opposite of indigenista. It spoke the language of Guatemalan nationalism, pitching the protest as an invitation from one Maya nation—the biggest—to all the other nations in Guatemala to join them to defend the one source of power they had: their vote.
By this point, Semilla’s TikToker corps had clocked up quite a bit of experience, with every Semilla candidate running his or her own social media campaign. This kind of protest—joyful, cross-ethnic, idealistic, youthful, romantic, fun—was made for TikTok. Viral moments soon took a life of their own. One endlessly memed video shows young people moving towards a protest site: one faces the camera and says “tomorrow at 6!” and immediately afterwards a small child is shown walking inside a human-sized green traffic cone. The absurd little moment became a viral megahit, with everything from keychains to a video-game instantly commemorating “conito,” as the kid inside the cone came to be known: a new icon of resistance.
Other moments hit harder. At one point, the government brought out riot police to face down demonstrators blocking roads in Colonia Bethania, an old shantytown to the west of Guatemala City. A huge group of local motorcyclists gathered up, revving their engines and surrounded the cops to intimidate them out of their territory. Live news footage of police forced to retreat added to the revolutionary atmosphere. Images of regular people finding the courage to face down the corrupt authorities seemed to go viral day after day.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy worked to coordinate the motley coalition behind Arévalo. Some members of Guatemala’s business community had for years been sick to death of government corruption and quietly moved to support Arévalo. But without U.S. diplomats’ mediation they might not have been able to coordinate effectively with the indigenous authorities leading the fight on the street. The embassy helped solve that problem while state department officials wove a net of support for the protestors with counterparts from the EU and from democracies throughout the Americas.
In the end, the movement was supported by a coalition so broad that even the pacto de corruptos couldn’t resist it. Arévalo, the diplomat, skillfully wove together support from groups that had never been close to one another: indigenous rural Catholics and ladino urban progressives, American diplomats and Catholic priests, representatives of the old white oligarchy and penniless Maya campesinos.
The power elite around Consuelo Porras had no choice but to give way. Arévalo was inaugurated as president in January.
Non-violence Is Still the Way
The best news, considering its history, is that Guatemala is undergoing this deep political transformation without violence. That’s a fact with no precedents in the country’s history. Passions have been running red-hot since June last year, but constitutional order has not broken down. Arévalo’s rise has been tense, matters looked on the verge of boiling over more than once. They never did.
And yet, Fiscal General Consuelo Porras is still in the job. By choosing to cohabitate with her rather than trying to force her out, President Arévalo is making a consequential choice. Faced with such circumstances, many other Latin American leaders would’ve been tempted to change the constitution, or even rewrite it entirely through a constituent assembly. Not Arévalo.
As a president who respects the rule of law even when that’s deeply inconvenient, he is the role model Latin America needs today. The plan is to hang on until October, when the seats on the Guatemalan Supreme Court must be re-designated (the president gets the final say). Until then, the government faces maximum peril, with Porras and the existing courts able to convict a minister on almost any pretext. After October, facing a more balanced judiciary, her almost total power may be substantially constrained.
There are still very many ways Guatemala’s democratic revolution could go off the rails. But the fact that it’s made it this far in peace is already a kind of miracle. The democratic world must continue to stand by Bernardo Arévalo.
He’s not the hero Guatemalans dreamed of, but he sure seems to be the hero they need. As one Semilla activist put it to me: “On the square, during the protests, it felt like we were meeting our country for the first time. It was magical.”
Francisco Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion.
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Thank you so much for writing and publishing this! Now I'd really like to follow Guatemala's politics.. are there any publications I can follow? (Ideally English language)
Posts like this make me want to reconsider subscription. Is this what passes for reporting, "snarling persona" and "attacks on enemies of the kleptocracy"?