How the Biden administration helped avoid a coup in Guatemala

Last edited Sun Jan 14, 2024, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)

By MARY BETH SHERIDAN AND NIC WIRTZ
THE WASHINGTON POST • January 12, 2024

After a reform-minded professor won the presidency of Guatemala - one of the Western Hemisphere’s most notoriously corrupt countries - governments around the world watched the fallout with alarm.

Guatemalan authorities seized ballot boxes on dubious claims of fraud. They tried to dissolve the party of the winner, Bernardo Arévalo, and investigate him criminally. With months to go before he took office, the beleaguered president-elect warned of a “slow-motion coup.”

On Sunday, Arévalo is to be sworn in, in what could be a turning point for a nation that’s hemorrhaged migrants to the United States. He’s reached Inauguration Day in large part because of the determination of Guatemalan citizens fed up with corruption. But U.S. diplomats played a key role, in one of the Biden administration’s most aggressive campaigns to shore up democracy in the hemisphere.

Behind the scenes were career U.S. bureaucrats with decades of experience in Latin America - the sort of briefcase-toting professionals who melt into the crowds on the D.C. Metro. They targeted Guatemalan politicians and influential business people with a blizzard of sanctions, stern public statements and quiet arm-twisting. “I don’t think we would have made it if the U.S. didn’t get as involved as they did,” said Dionisio Gutiérrez, one of Guatemala’s richest business executives and an outspoken critic of corruption.

More:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/300-suspects-arrested-in-major-operation-in-peru/3107740

https://web.archive.org/web/20240114121350/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/12/bernardo-arevalo-guatemala-inauguration-biden/

Or:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/12/bernardo-arevalo-guatemala-inauguration-biden/