Pro-Arévalo demonstrations continue

Oct. 4, 2023

Guatemalan president-elect Bernardo Arévalo said he is confronting a concerted effort to keep him from taking power after his upset election win. "I expected resistance from some powerful actors, but it was not clear what type of actions to expect," Arévalo said yesterday at the Wilson Center, in Washington DC. "What I see now is what looks like a coup in slow motion." (AFP)

Pro-Arévalo demonstrators in Guatemala have maintained highway blocks since Monday, demanding the resignation of attorney general Consuelo Porras, in the midst of ongoing efforts from the Public Ministry to overturn Arévalo’s electoral victory, reports Soy 502. (See yesterday’s post.)

Senior U.S. government officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, met with Arévalo yesterday and expressed support for the president-elect "following last week's undemocratic efforts to undermine the will of the Guatemalan people, intimidate election authorities, and prevent the peaceful transition of power," in reference to a prosecutor’s raid on electoral authorities. (Reuters, see yesterday’s post.)

More Guatemala

• Arévalo’s promises to tackle endemic corruption and reverse years of democratic backsliding won’t be easy to keep in a country where autocracy refers to “a hydra-like establishment, where removing one corrupt actor only reveals another,” writes Azucena Morán in Jacobin.

• “To democratize the country, Semilla’s newly sprouted seedling will not only need collective support to displace the corrupt actors and narco-political elites currently running the Guatemalan government. It will also have to gain political legitimacy itself. This will require the president-elect to shift strategies from providing a political middle ground against the corrupt establishment to laying the foundation for his agenda.” (Jacobin)

Colombia

• Colombia’s government issued a long awaited public apology, yesterday, for the extrajudicial killings of 19 civilians who were slain by the military and registered as rebel fighters — the so-called false positives scandal between 2004-2008. “These (killings) should have never happened,” Defense Minister Iván Velásquez said. (Associated Press)

• Colombia’s transitional justice body officially recognized the strategic use of sexual and gender-based violence by armed groups and security forces in the Colombian conflict, and launched an in-depth study of how sexual and gender-based violence was used as a weapon of war by armed groups. (InSight Crime)

Brazil

• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's approval rating has slipped slightly after nine months in office, but almost half of Brazilians say the admininistration is doing a better job than that of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, reports Reuters.

• A drought in Brazil has pushed up the temperatures of Lake Tefé, in the Amazon, leading to a mass die-off of Amazon River dolphins there. (New York Times)

Argentina

• Argentine presidential candidate Sergio Massa, who represent the ruling Union por la Patria coalition, has promised to build a “national unity government” with Argentina’s opposition politicians if he wins this month’s election — a bid to overcome libertarian, political outsider Javier Milei’s lead position in the polls, reports the Financial Times.

• Former president Mauricio Macri seems anxious to support Milei, saying at a Harvard presentation yesterday that his Juntos por el Cambio coalition should support Milei’s agenda if he wins the presidency in the upcoming elections — a comment that garnered pushback from the Juntos por el Cambio coalition candidate Patricia Bullrich, reports La Politica Online.

Regional

• “A roadmap for the Caribbean’s energy transition,” an Atlantic Council report by David Goldwyn, Eugene Tiah, and Wazim Mowla,  presents “a five-step roadmap is designed to ensure that the region’s future energy systems are reliable, affordable, and resilient to the effects of climate change and exogenous economic shocks, and can underpin economic growth across the region”. (See today’s Just Caribbean Updates.)

Haiti

• An international force in Haiti — like the Kenya-led mission approved by the UN Security Council on Monday — “will never work without a functional government in place,” argues Pierre Espérance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, in a New York Times op-ed. Security assistance must be overseen by a transitional government, which must “create the conditions for safe and fair elections, so that leaders unaffiliated with gangs can run for office and people will feel free to vote for them. Only under a credible and clean transitional government will police and security forces — from Haiti or anywhere else — be able to do their job.” (See yesterday’s post.)

• The U.N.’s lead child welfare agency, UNICEF, said the unchecked violence in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince is spreading and intensifying in the Artibonite Valley, the country’s breadbasket. Children are being terrorized and their livelihoods destroyed amid unprecedented hunger, malnutrition and a resurgent cholera epidemic. More than 100 schools have shut down due to the violence and only one in four health facilities across the region remains accessible. Roughly a third of the population, nearly half of them children, now require humanitarian assistance, reports the Miami Herald.

Regional Relations

• U.S. President Joe Biden thanked his Kenyan counterpart, William Ruto, for agreeing to lead a multinational mission to intervene in Haiti, a day after the United Nations Security Council voted to endorse the effort.

• Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is emerging as the leading candidate for the role of United Nations Secretary-General in the upcoming selection process scheduled for 2026, according to CaribDailyNews.

Migration

• “The recent interceptions of boats carrying migrants towards the Dutch Caribbean again reveal lucrative human smuggling and trafficking routes as more than 7 million Venezuelans flee their country,” reports InSight Crime.

Dominica

• Sylvanie Burton swore in as Dominica’s first woman and Kalingo Indigenous president on Monday. (St. Vincent Times, CARICOM Today)