Guatemalan prosecutors take aim at Arévalo
Nov. 17, 2023
Guatemalan prosecutors have asked the Supreme Court to strip president-elect Bernardo Arévalo and several members of his party of their immunity for allegedly making social media posts that encouraged students to take over a public university in 2022, reports the Associated Press.
“If upheld, the Attorney General’s Office request would leave Arévalo exposed to arrest, potentially burying his presidency before it begins,” reports InSight Crime.
Arévalo and critics have accused the attorney general’s office of implementing a “slow motion coup” aimed at preventing Arévalo from assuming office in January. (See yesterday’s post.) Yesterday he said the moves are an assault against democracy.” (AFP)
Yesterday’s announcement followed a series of raids linked to the case — a student protest following what they considered the fraudulent election of a new rector for the country’s only public university — during which the Attorney General’s Office arrested other members of the Semilla party, including a congressional candidate from the 2023 elections, reports InSight Crime.
The OAS condemned the latest moves by the Attorney General's office as “actions of a political nature that distort the electoral process.”
Later yesterday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller announced that 11 more Guatemalans would face U.S. visa sanctions for undermining democracy. (La Hora)
Argentina ends drawn out electoral season
Argentine voters will determine their next president on Sunday, in a runoff election billed as the most consequential since the country’s return to democracy, exactly 40 years ago. The last public polls, a week ago, had Peronist Sergio Massa and libertarian Javier Milei neck-to-neck, with a slight advantage for the firebrand political outsider. If the election season has felt like the World Cup for politics buffs, this match will be decided by penalty shootout. (Americas Quarterly profiles the two candidates.)
Milei’s camp has already started preparing the terrain to challenge negative results, airing unsubstantiated claims of irregularities in the general election — with clear comparison to similar efforts in the U.S. and Brazil following the electoral losses of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, respectively. “Milei, who has promoted conspiracy theories blaming leftists for the violence in Brasília, seems to be following a similar script in Argentina,” reports the Guardian.
Many Milei supporters are echoing his allegations, and some have announced plans to protest outside the nation’s electoral authority on Sunday, reports the New York Times.
Argentines are simultaneously angry at the political establishment, and afraid of how things might get worst — the election is a competition to determine the lesser evil, reports Reuters.
Milei has spurred voters angered by years of economic dysfunction, and a political class that seems stuck in a rut and disassociated from real life concerns. But his extremist positions have also galvanized sectors to vote for Massa in defense of democracy, despite disliking him and the Peronist party. (Washington Post)
Pre-runoff Argentina is like Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously ratifying a broad, inclusive democracy, and a destructive, anarchic leap into the abyss. On Sunday we will open the ballot box and find whether the democratic cat is alive or dead. But this is real life, not a philosophy thought experiment, both narratives will continue to be true on Monday, and will be a crucial challenge for whoever wins the presidency.
More Argentina
An unusually high number of international politicians have weighed in on Argentina’s election, in part because of “the election’s potential to alter Argentina’s foreign relations,” writes Catherine Osborn in the Latin America Brief.
Haiti
Kenyan lawmakers voted to support a request to deploy hundreds of police officers to Haiti in a U.N.-approved mission aimed at supporting Haitian efforts to quell gang violence. (Reuters)
But Kenya’s high court extended orders blocking the deployment of police officers to Haiti, yesterday. High Court Judge Chacha Mwita said he would issue a ruling on Jan. 26, effectively delaying the sending of security officers to Haiti, reports the Associated Press.
Regional Relations
Latin America “has not escaped the global polarization unleashed by war between Israel and Hamas, producing a heated and increasingly venomous public debate,” writes Oliver Stuenkel in Americas Quarterly. “That is partly because, in numerous countries, divisions over the conflict in the Middle East fall largely along domestic partisan lines—contrary to the war in Ukraine, where left and right hold largely similar positions.”
The U.S. Biden administration said it prepared to revoke all licenses recently awarded to Venezuela if President Nicolás Maduro doesn’t present a path toward fairer elections by the end of November, reports Bloomberg.
Following the Venezuelan Maduro government’s failure to respond favorably to easing of U.S. sanctions, there is a small window of time to salvage the Barbados Accords before the end of the month. “Otherwise, US policy makers will have no choice but to reimpose sanctions and support without equivocation Machado as the opposition presidential candidate for the 2024 election,” argue Michael McKinley and Patrick Duddy in the Wilson Center’s Weekly Asado.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping yesterday. They said the countries would deepen anti-drug cooperation, including illegal trafficking of fentanyl precursor chemicals. But AMLO’s “track record on fentanyl makes meaningful cooperation difficult for many observers to imagine,” writes Catherine Osborn in the Latin America Brief.
Mexico
Ismael Villagómez, photographer for a newspaper in Ciudad Juárez was found shot dead in the driver’s seat of a car, the fifth killing of a journalist in the Mexico so far in 2023. (Guardian)
Honduras
“The trial of a high-level drug trafficker associated with the MS13 in Honduras may shed light on the extent of the gang’s involvement in the transnational drug trade,” reports InSight Crime.