In a benevolent twist of history, Bernardo Arevalo He achieved the position that his father had honored. The coup conservatism that began in Guatemala the tragic Caribbean and Central American drift that navigated between guerrillas, revolutions and dictatorships of the left and right, finally resigned itself to handing over power to a true democrat. At least in the chapter that has just begun, Guatemalan history is redeemed. The new president was born in Montevideo, far from his country, due to the exile that the obscene coup d’état imposed on his father. Juan José Arévalo built a liberal and progressive democracy after winning the first truly clean and free election, which had made possible the “October Revolution” that in 1944 put an end to the unjust ancient regime prevailing since 1871.
Juan José Arévalo was an educator, both in the university cloisters where he taught philosophy and in the educational programs he designed, and in the presidency of his country. It was he who taught the vast poor and peasant majority of the Mayan ethnic group that they had the right to freely choose their rulers and control them through the Legislative and Judicial powers. He also taught him that the oligarchy of white landowners and the banana multinational They had no right to economically oppress her and marginalize her from “public affairs.” During his mandate he also promoted the social democratic reforms that were continued by his successor in the presidency: Jacobo Árbenz. Juan José Arévalo and his co-religionist Árbenz put Guatemala on the path that should lead it out of a retrograde and racist feudalism, to reach a modern democracy with a market economy.
But the United States made the mistake of believing the banana company United Fruit when he described those presidents as communists and, through the CIA, even supported with bombings the bloody coup d’état that turned an obscure character into dictator: Colonel Castillo Armas.
The country that could have radiated its democracy to the entire region ended up being the domino that knocked down the possibilities of democratization and modernity in the rest of Central America and the Caribbean.
With the lucid objectivity that he usually distances himself from in his political conferences and journalistic essays, Mario Vargas Llosa shows the dimension of the North American error in his novel Tiempos Recios, and reflecting on the blow that he overthrew Árbenz and exiled Arévalothe great Peruvian writer explained that all the dictatorships of the second half of the 20th century in the isthmus and in the Antillean arc, including that of Fidel Castro, were in one way or another a consequence of the mistake that Washington made induced by unscrupulous banana businessmen who prevailed in the region.
Guatemala could have been what Costa Rica is since the government of José Figueres, the president who abolished the army and launched major institutional and social reforms. What could be sustained in Costa Rica was destroyed by the coup imposed on Colonel Castillo Armas.
The authoritarian drift included the fight of insurgencies such as the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and exterminating dictatorships such as that of General Efraín Ríos Mont. Until the “Firm and Lasting Peace Agreements” arrived, which, in December 1996, closed 36 years of internal conflict. However, subsequent democracy was left in the hands of a decadent political leadership that purged corrupt governments such as that of Otto Pérez Molina, whose vice president, Roxana Baldetti, headed a monumental system of customs fraud, and Jimmy Moraleswho collected complaints ranging from illegal financing of the electoral campaign to sexual harassment and gender violence.
The peak of corruption and institutional decay was reached with Alejandro Giammatteiwho also received bribes, used prosecutor Consuelo Porras to expel the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) from the country and to prevent the winner of the last election from assuming the presidency.
That winner at the polls, whom authoritarianism and corruption tried to overthrow before he took office, is Bernardo Arévalo, son of the president who inaugurated the democratic “golden era” that was crushed by United Fruit, the CIA and the Guatemalan army.
Like his father, he is an academic. From the sociology chairs, he moved to diplomacy in the eighties, holding positions in the chancellery of León Carpio’s government. But he never dove into politics until he founded the Semilla movement. With the same liberal and social democratic spirit that his father called “spiritual socialism”, Bernardo Arévalo proposed a free economy but without monopolies or feudalism, and an institutional framework freed from the corruption and decadence of the ruling class that took over politics in recent decades. He ran for a seat in Congress and ended up defeating the candidate of the populist left, Sandra Torres, in the 2023 presidential runoff.
There were more than 30 coup plots against the government of Juan José Arévalo. They tried to overthrow his son before assuming power, with a number of complaints filed by judges associated with the corrupt ruling class that covered up Jimmy Morales and Giammattei. Attorney General Consuelo Porras was the instrument that the corruption establishment used the most to block her path, invalidating her electoral victory. But in a dark tomb of history, this time the United States acted in the opposite way as it did in 1954. Now it was pressure from Washington that was imposed on the conservatives’ sleeves to frustrate Arévalo’s inauguration.
