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Former First Lady Sandra Torres is out of the 11 September presidential race; thus the ruling centre-left Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE), the country’s biggest party, and its right-leaning ally, Gran Alianza Nacional (Gana), are left without a candidate. On 8 August the constitutional court (CC) upheld previous rulings by the supreme court of justice (CSJ) and the electoral authorities (TSE) disqualifying Torres - who was polling second - on the grounds that, despite her divorce from President Alvaro Colom, explicitly aimed at sidestepping the constitutional ban on presidential candidacy of close relatives of the incumbent, their relationship still “exists”. Despite earlier threats to the contrary, the UNE has accepted the verdict. Yet its refusal to endorse any of the ten remaining candidates (nine of whom represent different strands of the Right, while the left-wing indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchú stands little chance) has triggered speculation as to where these votes will migrate. The other imponderable is whether the frontrunner, former general Otto Pérez Molina of the Partido Patriota (PP), can manage a first round victory – making him the first candidate since the end of the country’s 1960-1996 civil war to do so.
Having staged demonstrations in Guatemala City to put pressure on the courts and having threatened to challenge the electoral outcome were Torres not allowed to participate, the UNE had evoked fears of a repeat of the violence and the undermining of the institutional processes that had characterised the other high-profile (and ultimately successful) attempt to overturn a court decision disqualifying the candidacy of the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983) in 2003 [RC-11-08]. Yet, its decision to back down was possibly motivated by the fact that the court’s decision was unanimous and the seven magistrates (five main judges and two alternates) included two allies: Gloria Porras, who had been picked by Colom, and her alternate, Héctor Trujillo, who is rumoured to be Torres’s personal lawyer.
Who stands to benefit?
The UNE remains by far Guatemala’s biggest party, with 93,065 registered members as of June 2011, according to the TSE, to which can be added the 30,671 registered Gana members. This compares to 48,823 for the PP. Granted, the notorious lack of ideology underpinning party politics in the country has led to some unexpected alliances; in this contest alone, the alliance between Viva, the party of former evangelical pastor Harold Caballeros – who, unlike Torres was successful in his appeal against a TSE ruling disqualifying his candidacy [RC-11-07] -, and the left-wing Encuentro por Guatemala, of the human rights activist Nineth Montenegro, raised a few eyebrows. Yet neither Colom – Guatemala’s first centre-left president since the end of the 36-year civil war (1960-1996) – nor Torres - who a US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks noted was “to the left of her [ex] husband”- were likely to back Pérez Molina.
Similarly the UNE’s decision not to endorse either the second or third-placed presidential candidates, Eduardo Suger of the Compromiso, Renovación y Orden (Creo) or Manuel Baldizón of the dissident UNE group Libertad Democrática Renovada (Líder), was not a surprise. An academic who founded the Galileo technical university in the capital in 2000 and a member of the traditional conservative elite, Suger ran for the right-wing Centro de Acción Social (Casa) in 2007, coming in fourth, and for the Desarrollo Integral Auténtico (DIA) in 2003, trailing seventh. In the 2007 run-off, he backed Pérez Molina who, according to the local press, has invited him to take part in a future PP government. An UNE alliance with Baldizón, a businessman from the rural northern region of Petén (Torres’s home turf) who represents an emergent form of populism, was also unlikely: Baldizón’s decision to split with the ruling party in 2008 to found Líder as a vehicle for his own political ambitions [RC-08-12], which considerably reduced UNE representation in congress (currently at 32 seats compared with 28 for Líder), left bad-blood within the UNE, which accused him of using the party ticket to get elected to congress.
The first poll, since the 8 August CC ruling, showed Baldizón – who has most clearly courted Torres’s support base (the poor, rural majority) with promises to continue her social initiatives – benefiting most from her exclusion. In the poll by Prodatos, published on 23 August in the national daily Prensa Libre, he surged to 18.5% (up ten percentage points on an earlier July poll), while Suger is on 11.3%. Yet the poll also suggests this poses little threat to Pérez Molina, who is on 39.6%, albeit still short of the 50% plus one needed for an outright victory.
Presidential debates
In its first report released in July, the electoral watchdog Mirador Electoral flagged up as a familiar concern: the dearth of debate and failure of the presidential candidates to present their proposals to the public, noting that up to the end of July, of the 11 presidential candidates (which at the time included Torres), only six had published a manifesto.
In one of the few debates between the three leading candidates, all predictably advocated a hard-line (‘mano dura’) approach to crime. Baldizón, whose headline-grabbing campaign proposal is a pledge to bring back the death penalty, suggests creating a national guard to replace the national police (PNC). Suger proposed using former military officials to coordinate an intelligence system (although he stopped short of proposing a joint military-police task force). While Pérez Molina declared himself in favour of continuing the process of police reform, it is worth noting that his manifesto calls for the establishment of inter-institutional security task forces to comprise the PNC, the civilian intelligence directorate (Digici) and the army (the inclusion of the latter in citizen security violates the 1996 Peace Accords [RC-11-08]).
The three candidates also paid lip service to the need to address the country’s entrenched poverty (51% of Guatemala’s population are classed as poor, with a further 15% classed as extremely poor) and continue government programmes such as the flagship cash transfer scheme ‘Mifamilia Progresa’, which the UN has since called for to be institutionalised. Such has been the success of the scheme (which benefitted some 814,625 families in 273 municipalities at end 2010, at an annual cost of US$138m), that in response to the question of whether he would “publicly pledge to continue the program”, posed in a US cable released by WikiLeaks, Pérez Molina “smiled wryly and said "I'll have to".”
The ten candidates, in rough order of popularity, are: Otto Pérez Molina (Partido Patriota); Manuel Baldizón (Libertad Democrática Renovada, Líder); Eduardo Suger (Compromiso, Renovación y Orden, Creo); Mario Estrada (Unión por el Cambio Nacional); Patricia de Arzú (Partido Unionista); Harold Caballeros (Viva- Encuentro por Guatemala); Rigoberta Menchú (Frente Amplio de Izquierda); Juan Gutiérrez (Partido de Avanzada Nacional); Adela Torrebiarte (Acción de Desarrollo Nacional); and Alejandro Giammattei (Centro de Acción Social).
The exclusion of Torres from the presidential race leaves Rigoberta Menchú, the indigenous leader and Nobel peace prize laureate, as the sole presidential candidate representing the Left. Running for the Frente Amplio de Izquierda [RC-11-05], Menchú’s chances, however, are minimal: polls show her in seventh place with less than 3% of the vote, suggesting the continued disappearance of the more radical Left associated with the aims and objectives of the 1996 Peace Accords from the political sphere.
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