Bernardo Arevalo, Guatemala's electoral surprise, makes corruption fight top priority

Bernardo Arévalo, presidential candidate with the Seed Movement, gives an interview in Guatemala City, Tuesday, June 27, 2023. Arévalo will compete in a presidential runoff election on Aug. 20. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)

GUATEMALA CITY — Bernardo Arevalo, the surprise candidate in Guatemala's first round of presidential voting, says the choice in the country's Aug. 20 runoff is a clear one: Continue living under a corrupt system with his rival or rebuild the country's democracy with him.

In an interview with the Associated Press Tuesday, the social democratic lawmaker said he believes his anti-corruption message resonated with voters. Now he just needs a lot more Guatemalans to hear it.

His rival, Sandra Torres, was the top vote-getter Sunday in a field of nearly two-dozen presidential hopefuls and Arevalo was second with neither getting nearly enough votes to win outright, setting up the runoff election between them.

But their vote totals were so low they fell below the nearly 1 million null votes cast by disenchanted voters, meaning both candidates have work to do to expand their support.

There is no shortage of Guatemalans desperate to see someone bring down the country's corrupt power structures. For Arevalo, that means spreading his message beyond the urban youth, who in particular supported him in the first round of voting.

"We believe that today there has been an awakening, we are arousing hope and conviction in the people," said the 64-year-old diplomat and lawmaker.

He explained that if he wins the presidency, the executive branch will cease to be the source of "that fundamental lubricant of the corrupt system." Instead, his administration would focus on battling corruption and recovering co-opted institutions.

President Alejandro Giammattei's administration has weaponized the Attorney General's Office, pursuing critics and the same prosecutors and judges who had previously waged the fight against Guatemala's corrupt networks of politicians, business elites and drug traffickers.

Arevalo said he would bring back some 35 lawyers, prosecutors and judges who have fled into exile to escape persecution from Giammattei's administration. Together with them he will create a strategy to rebuild the justice system and take up the corruption fight again.

He would ask for the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras -- sanctioned by the U.S. government as a corrupt actor -- and with the help of the former justice workers he wants to create a National Anticorruption System.

"If we want to keep living under the reign of corruption, vote for Sandra Torres," Arevalo said. "We want to have the chance to re-establish institutions to have a decent government."

"This message penetrated, this message generated, awakened hope, mobilized the people fed up with corruption," he said. "Now what we have to do is expand to get to more people, make more people hear it, convince themselves that there is a chance and move forward."

If he does come out ahead Aug. 20, he conceded that his administration's path would not be easy. He would face an opposition congress controlled by some of the very people he accuses of populating the corrupt system.

But Arevalo said he was ready to make alliances with sectors that accept his principles and are unequivocal in their opposition to corruption.

"When we have met with business figures that have some doubts, after speaking very frankly they tell us, `well, we feel very comfortable with your proposals,"' he said.

Arevalo is the son of Juan Jose Arevalo, one of only two leftist presidents in Guatemala's democratic era.

The elder Arevalo, who governed from 1945 to 1951, is credited with establishing foundational elements of Guatemala's democracy that remain in place today, including its labor code and social security.

In 2019, the son won a seat in the congress for the Seed Movement, which he had helped found. He previously was a career diplomat, serving as Guatemala's ambassador to Spain and a deputy foreign affairs minister in the administration of President Ramiro de Leon Carpio during the mid-1990s.

Arevalo is already seeing how the opposition will paint him: a communist, a foreigner -- he was born in Uruguay but is Guatemalan.

"What we're seeing are people who feel like the control of the state is slipping through their hands and they're beginning to use those old scare tactics that they've used to scare people historically for decades," he said. "They are just attempts to distract the people."

His administration would attack corruption so that it can begin to get at Guatemala's root problems like the poverty that drive tens of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the United States each year.

"The problem of migration in Guatemala is a development problem," he said. "How are we not going to have migration to the United States when we have a state that doesn't give a future to the people?"

"Guatemala has again become a pariah nation," he said.