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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1952 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Guatemala

After many months of tricks to keep anti-corruption President Elect Bernaldo Arévalo from taking office, including fully suspending his political party, the man has finally entered the National Palace. It took up till the last minute, a nine hour last legislative holdout from the establishment that reportedly involved such high level strategies as literally blocking the Congressional floor with a chain. I’ve mentioned it before but Arévalo is the son of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected leader, so for him to finally take the stage against an increasingly brazenly anti-democratic establishment has symbolic significance.

So, now that he’s here, what next? He wants to fight crime, pursue antitrust policies, lower drug prices, clean up the waterways (which are estimated to be over 90% polluted), control migration to keep the US (which backed him throughout all of the attempts to disqualify him) happy, and of course fight corruption. Much of this will be very difficult with a legislative minority, but there’s at least some stuff he can do on his flagship anti-corruption agenda via the executive office itself:

The opposition to Arévalo was so intense because he promised to continue the unfinished business of the CICIG anti-corruption commission, shuttered after it revealed graft at a massive scale, implicating everyone from politicians and business elites to unions to religious and university leaders…

Arévalo’s ability to effect structural change will hinge on three key fronts: reforms of the government contracting system at the heart of a slew of corruption scandals; the recovery of the Attorney General’s Office; and nominations to the high courts.

Contracting reforms may offer Arévalo the best chance to deliver concrete quality-of-life improvements. If he manages to make spending more transparent and more efficient, especially on infrastructure and health, the public will see better roads and more medicines on hospital shelves before the year is out. Greater private investment may also pour into the country.

The other two fronts are thornier. The Attorney General’s Office is controlled by Consuelo Porras, sanctioned by the U.S. for “significant corruption.” (She denies wrongdoing.) Her second tenure as Attorney General (2022-26) has produced a stream of decisions that have undermined anti-corruption investigations. Guatemala’s Odebrecht prosecutions are a case study of impunity; the prosecutors who sent corrupt officials to jail were themselves imprisoned or forced to leave the country.

Arévalo does not have the constitutional authority to remove her but insists he will ask her to resign immediately. He may succeed by starving her of resources. If she does resign, Arévalo will likely have to pick her replacement from the other five candidates approved by a commission in 2022, a list that includes relatively clean choices.

Meanwhile, the court system is scheduled for major changes in 2024, on the order of 250 new judicial appointments, including all 13 Supreme Court seats. This is a major opportunity for reform, but nominations come from the National Lawyers’ Guild, itself beset by corruption allegations, and must go through Congress.

I'm not too versed with Guatemala and it's issues, what's the likelihood he gets assassinated by some cartel or whatever criminal equivalent they have there if he reaches too far?

Other than that, I am somewhat hopeful that his is legitimately successful in cleaning house as an example that it may be possible in the US as well.

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