Tag Archives: la linea

Polls give Morales a lock on Guatemala’s presidential runoff

Jimmy Morales, a former comic actor and a populist, anti-corruption candidate, should easily become Guatemala's next president. (Facebook)
Jimmy Morales, a former comic actor and a populist, anti-corruption candidate, should easily become Guatemala’s next president. (Facebook)

He is in many ways an accidental man of the moment, the man standing on stage who can most credibly claim, as his slogan goes, that he is ni corrupto ni ladrón — ‘neither corrupt nor a thief.’guatemala flag icon

Jimmy Morales, the 46-year-old former comedian, who just a few years ago graced shampoo bottles across Guatemala in an afro wig and blackface, is now the overwhelming favorite to win the country’s presidential runoff on Sunday, October 25, with one recent poll for the Prensa Libre giving him 67.9% of the vote to just 32.1% for the former first lady, center-left Sandra Torres. Other polls show similar gaps in Morales’s favor.

*****

RELATED: Torres edges Baldizón into Guatemalan runoff with Morales

RELATED: The contour of Guatemala’s new Congress is very conservative

*****

Barring a complete change of heart, Morales will become Guatemala’s next president.

So who is he and what does he believe? How did a comic actor wind up leading Central America’s largest economy? Most importantly, what will his election mean for Guatemala’s future? Continue reading Polls give Morales a lock on Guatemala’s presidential runoff

Torres edges Baldizón into Guatemalan runoff with Morales

jimmymorales

It was already tumultuous and historic week in Guatemala.guatemala flag icon

The country’s congress, after months of protest, stripped a sitting president of his immunity from prosecution. That president, Otto Pérez Molina, subsequently resigned, and officials then arrested and imprisoned him on corruption charges in relation to a scandal that’s already swept up more than a dozen ministers and Pérez Molina’s former vice president, who resigned in July.

Nevertheless, Guatemalans went to the polls on Sunday to choose both a new president and the entire 158-member Congreso, among other local municipality offices. Unsurprisingly, none of the presidential candidates won an absolute majority, so Guatemalans will vote again in an October 25 runoff.

guatemala 2015

One of the candidates in that runoff will be independent candidate Jimmy Morales (pictured above), the leader of the previously little-known Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN, National Convergence Front). A comedian, Morales is a political neophyte whose campaign has railed against Guatemala’s political elite, a call that’s resonated as this week’s crisis hit its crescendo.

* * * * *

RELATED: Yes, progress in Central America, but don’t call it a ‘spring’

* * * * *

Sounding an anti-corruption note tempered by social conservatism and nationalist tones, Morales has the populist momentum heading into the runoff because he’s a newcomer viewed as unsullied by the sordid taint of corruption that infects more established politicians, including his two main rivals. Continue reading Torres edges Baldizón into Guatemalan runoff with Morales

Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity six days before vote to replace him

gcityPhoto credit to Quetzalvision.

Six days before Guatemalans go to the polls to choose a successor to president Otto Pérez Molina, the country’s congress voted to strip the term-limited incumbent of his immunity, opening the way for what might become the first prosecution of a Guatemalan president on corruption charges in Guatemala.guatemala flag icon

The vote today in Guatemala’s Congress was historic, and it will make Sunday’s unpredictable general election even more difficult to forecast. But it wasn’t exactly a bombshell, even though it seems like a key turning point in the gradual maturation of Central American democracy and law.

When Pérez Molina, a retired army general, took office, he quickly found himself on Washington’s bad side when he argued for drug legalization as a solution to the decades-long failures of the US-led war on drugs. At home, however, he was regarded as a tough-on-crime conservative whose military background might help police efforts to reduce drug- and gang-related violence, despite murmurs about his role in various human rights abuses during Guatemala’s sprawling decades-long civil war that reached a gruesome nadir in the early 1980s.

perezmolina

During his presidency, however, Guatemalans became increasingly angry over the corruption that, at best, took place on Pérez Molina’s watch and that, at worst, directly implicates Pérez Molina (pictured above). So far, 14 ministers have resigned as a result of a wide-ranging customs fraud scheme, referred to as La Línea, including seven ministers in August alone and finance minister Dorval Carías last week. Roxana Baldetti, Guatemala’s first female vice president, resigned in May and is now in prison pending trial on corruption charges. Pérez Molina continues to deny any wrongdoing on his part, and he defiantly refused to resign just last week in a press conference, buttressed perhaps with the support of Guatemala’s wealthiest businessman, telecom magnate Mario López Estrada.

Since a United Nations report first revealed the customs scandal in April, however, many Guatemalans have grown skeptical of Pérez Molina’s claims of innocence and, though he survived a congressional vote to remove his immunity last month, prosecutors later announced that they believed Pérez Molina is implicated in the customs scandal. Today’s congressional decision will allow prosecutors to move forward with tax evasion, money laundering or other corruption charges, and it makes it much less likely that Pérez Molina will survive in office until January, when Guatemala’s next president will assume power. Notably, even members of the conservative Partido Patriota (PP, Patriot Party) that Pérez Molina founded in 2001 supported the decision to lift his immunity, the recommendation of a congressional committee examining the scandal.

Corruption is rampant in the region, but voters are increasingly engaged and have started pushing back against the perception of widespread graft. Protesters in Honduras this summer are demanding accountability from officials, and in last year’s Costa Rican election, outgoing president Laura Chinchilla’s administration was seen as so scandal–plagued that her party’s candidate, San Jose mayor Johnny Araya, withdrew from a runoff rather than face a shellacking from his rival, the soft-spoken diplomat and political neophyte Luis Guillermo Solís.

So where does that leave the Guatemalan presidential election? Continue reading Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity six days before vote to replace him