Conservative Alejandro Giammattei has blazed a long, strange path to Guatemala’s presidency, which he won on his fourth try.
The 63-year-old spent several months in prison in 2008, when he was director of the nation’s prison system, after some prisoners were killed in a raid on his watch. He was eventually acquitted of wrongdoing.
Until courts prevented some of the more popular candidates from running in this year’s race, he also appeared to be a long-shot candidate in a tumultuous campaign season.
Photo: AFP
However, on Sunday, his get-tough approach to crime and his socially conservative values, including his strident opposition to gay marriage and abortion, finally parlayed favor with Guatemalan voters in a presidential runoff.
Leaning on the crutches he uses because of his multiple sclerosis, Giammattei acknowledged in his emotional victory speech that it had been a long road.
“We won. We are very excited, it is logical, it has been 12 years of struggle,” Giammattei said. “Twelve years waiting to serve my country.”
With about 98 percent of polling places reporting, the Guatemalan Supreme Electoral Council said that Giammattei had about 58 percent of votes, compared with about 42 percent for former first lady Sandra Torres.
About 8 million Guatemalans were registered to vote, but in a nation beset by poverty, unemployment and migration issues, turnout as low as 45 percent appeared to suggest widespread disillusionment with the political status quo in general.
“I just hope Giammattei keeps his promises and really fights corruption,” Guatemala City resident Leonel Regalado said. “We hope he won’t steal, because that would be too much for him to steal as brazenly as [outgoing Guatemalan president] Jimmy Morales has.”
The presidential campaign was marked by a chaotic succession of judicial decisions, intrigues, illegal party changes and accusations of bad practices that truncated the candidacies of two of the three presidential favorites.
Giammattei’s key rival, Torres, who had been married to and divorced from former Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom (2008 to 2012), focused on improving education, healthcare and the economy during the campaign.
She also proposed an anti-corruption program, but her Unity for Hope party came under fire because some of its mayoral candidates were accused of receiving contributions from drug traffickers for their campaigns.
She became a key contender after Chief Prosecutor Thelma Aldana was barred from the race on the grounds that she lacked a document certifying that she did not have any outstanding accounts from her time overseeing a public budget as prosecutor.
Unity for Hope party secretary-general Oscar Argueta conceded defeat on Sunday.
The new president takes office on Jan. 14 and will most immediately face the task of attempting to stem the large flow of migrants headed toward the US.
At least 1 percent of Guatemala’s population of about 16 million has left the country this year.
On July 6, the Morales administration signed an agreement with the US that would require Salvadorans and Hondurans to request asylum in Guatemala if they cross through the country to reach the U.S.
The new president will have to decide whether to nullify or honor the agreement, which could potentially ease the crush of migrants arriving at the US border.
In addition to migration, Guatemalans say they are most concerned about entrenched corruption.
Three of the past four elected presidents have been arrested after leaving office on charges of graft. Morales decided to disband and bar a UN-supported anti-corruption commission after he became a target for alleged campaign finance violations.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the