Caribbean & Central America - September 2026

On 5 August Guatemala’s congress voted to create a new autonomous national port authority (APN) as part of efforts to attract investment, overhaul the country’s logistics sector, and improve competitiveness.

Under the new legislation (Decreto 20-2026), the APN will be an autonomous state entity with five directors: four public officials and one representative from the private sector. The APN replaces the national port commission (CPN), an official technical and advisory entity which was created in 1972. Its establishment marks the culmination of a process started in 2024, when Decreto 26-2024 required that its creation be debated.

The new legislation also reorganises which state entities are responsible for the country’s ports; introduces new rules for the development of infrastructure; brings port protection standards in line with international norms; sets out a long-term planning model for ports; and provides for a transitional period of 18 months for the new institutional structure to be implemented and the functions of existing port authorities to be transferred or wound down.

Guatemala’s ports have experienced significant congestion in recent years, with reports of ships facing long queues to unload at both of the country’s main port terminals – Puerto Quetzal in the Pacific department of Escuintla and Santo Tomás de Castilla in the Atlantic department of Izabal. In May national daily La Hora reported that from 3-5 May for example, there were eight ships in port at Puerto Quetzal, but another 23 offshore waiting to dock. This adds to shipping costs and pushes up the price of imported goods for consumers. 

Efforts to address this were complicated by a legal fight over who had the right to operate the Terminal de Contenedores Quetzal (TCQ) container terminal at Puerto Quetzal. The issue was entangled in the corruption scandal that brought down former president Otto Pérez Molina (2012-2015), and this held back investment at the port due to a lack of legal certainty, although the case was finally resolved in favour of APM Terminals (APMT), the Dutch subsidiary of Danish shipping company Maersk in April 2017. There have also been wider allegations about corruption at the port, which President Bernardo Arévalo, who took office in January 2024, has cited as a contributing factor to operational dysfunction. 

The idea is that by reforming port governance, Guatemala will be able to attract investment in port facilities to upgrade and modernise them, increasing capacity and facilitating the flow of goods and industrial inputs. It is also the latest in a series of attempts by Arévalo to kickstart investment, following the Ley de Infraestructura Vial Prioritaria roads law, approved on 12 November 2024, and the competition law signed in December that year.

The law constitutes “one of the most significant reforms to Guatemala’s port framework in decades,” said UK-headquartered advisory group IR Global in a statement published on 7 August. According to the statement, one of its main benefits will be to consolidate what was previously a “fragmented legal and institutional structure,” by “creating a comprehensive framework for the planning, development, authorization, operation and supervision of Guatemala’s port system”. This includes the creation of new mechanisms allowing private participation in port developments, such as public-private partnerships and port administration agreements, providing new avenues for attracting much-needed investment. 

The move has been met with great enthusiasm at home and abroad. Guatemala’s private sector welcomed the law, with the leading private-sector lobby, Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras (Cacif), along with the US chamber of commerce (Amcham) in Guatemala, among those to issue support statements. The initiative also has backing from the US administration led by President Donald Trump, with the US embassy in Guatemala releasing a statement on 3 August calling on lawmakers to back the bill. According to the statement, the reform is a “decisive step towards increasing Guatemala’s competitiveness, boosting trade with the US and generating growth for the whole region”.

It is also worth noting that a team from the US Army Corps of Engineers (Usace) visited Puerto Quetzal in February 2025 to assess the facility and discuss future cooperation on infrastructure projects [EB-25-06]. Usace has since committed to feasibility studies, and the US Inspector General will oversee Guatemala’s selection of a construction contractor “to ensure fairness and transparency,” according to a statement, last updated in March 2026, from the US International Trade Administration, a US government agency. In addition, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggested that "timely implementation of the ports law…would help reduce legal and procedural uncertainty and crowd in private participation” in a report published on 5 August. 

Backing from Guatemala’s powerful business lobbies, as well as Washington and the IMF, suggests that the new law has a good chance of attracting investment in the country’s ports. However, new institutional structures and legal frameworks are unlikely to be sufficient to overcome the negative effects of the continued influence of corruption networks over procurement and construction, which has held back project development. In effect, technical changes will confront a political economy that has resisted Arévalo’s reform efforts.

While the Puerto Quetzal project, overseen by the US, has a better chance of proceeding without major corruption issues, attracting private investment in projects that will require significant long-term investment is likely to remain a challenge for Guatemala. And with general elections scheduled for June 2027, uncertainty around political risk will continue to be a drag on investment decisions. In addition, US elections in 2028 could also affect investor confidence, with a future government in Washington potentially taking power with different policy priorities in trade and international relations.

Remittance record

On 6 August Guatemala’s central bank (Banguat) released new figures showing that the country received remittances totalling US$2.47bn in July. This is the highest monthly figure on record for remittances sent back to family members living in Guatemala from expatriates residing primarily in the US. The July figure, which was up by 4.2% on the same month a year earlier, brings remittances for the first seven months of the year to US$15.45bn, a year-on-year increase of 6.6%. These figures reflect the resilience of remittance inflows amid evolving US law enforcement and migration policy shifts, sustained by a community of more than 3m Guatemalans living in the US, most of them with irregular status.