TOPIC: 2024 elections

-OpEd-

BUENOS AIRES – Toward the end of the last century, Guatemala, a small, Central American republic with a wealth of culture and natural beauty, faced a promising horizon. After decades of internal fighting and human rights abuses, under the wider ideological framework of the Cold War, we entered the new millennium with some basic, institutional pledges starkly absent in preceding decades. In principle, these would favor economic growth, reduce socio-economic divisions and help consolidate democracy.

Today, the country is a victim of the failure to honor those pledges.

Between 2000 and 2022, Guatemala's per capita income grew by 1%, compared with 2% for Costa Rica in the same years. Likewise, low job-creation rates have pushed millions to seek a better life abroad, mostly in the U.S., and embark on an illegal and dangerous path that often leads to death. The remittances sent back by Guatemalan migrants have come to make up 19% of the national economy.

Nor has an end to the civil war helped establish a democratic republic with modern governance and a stronger civil society. Recently, the founder of the national daily El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, was convicted in a faulty legal process that seemed to be a case of political retribution. This was in fact clumsily alluded to by the chief prosecutor in the case, Rafael Curruchiche.

In 2021, he became the target of U.S. sanctions for obstructing anti-corruption investigations, for "disrupting high-profile corruption cases against government officials" and making "spurious" claims against legal investigators.