GUATEMALA 2023: FROM AUTHORITARIAN DEEPENING TO DEMOCRATIC RESURGENCE

Résumé 0

Guatemala’s 2023 was defined by the year’s most stunning and tumultuous election in all Latin America. After his shocking second-place finish in the first round, little-known anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo of the young Movimiento Semilla party won the presidency. Following years of increasing democratic decline and a vicious lawfare campaign against regime opponents, the 2023 election, which was meant to further bolster authoritarianism, became a democratic breakthrough. This article takes stock of the 2023 electoral cycle, analyzing the social, political, and international factors favorable for authoritarian consolidation alongside the surprising dynamics of democratic resilience. Guatemala’s recent anti-democratic slide was spurred not by executive aggrandizement but by prosecutorial and judicial entities on a political mission and intent on using legal instruments to criminalize dissent. However, through a combination of divisions in the ruling coalition, momentum from prior anti-corruption mobilization, and robust international backing, actors from below, namely indigenous communities and the broad-based opposition movement cultivated by Semilla, saved Guatemalan democracy. In so doing, they carved a path toward political renewal that few could have imagined a year earlier, though its promises remain fragile and uncertain.