September 15, 2023
Guatemala’s presidential election has hurt more people’s feelings than first thought. It has gotten bitter. We have not seen something like this happen in real time in the region, but like Central American politics, it seems like par for the course.
Here we have the outgoing administration investigating the electoral process they oversaw, in an attempt to besmirch the incoming president elect. I knew the media and some elites were backing his opponent, former First Lady Sandra Torres, but this is just too much. WE saw this with the transition between former US presidents Bill Clinton to George W Bush, which was extremely messy- some reports had it that the Clinton’s left the Whitehouse trashed where they were so upset with the Bush v Gore decision.
Due to the recount effort and litigation between Bush and Al Gore leaving the election undecided until December 12, 2000, Bush’s official transition was abbreviated to just 39 days.
The reports and political analysts had written off president elect Bernardo Arevalo from the rip. They made him seem as if he was some outsider with no hope and that it was totally out of the realm of possibility that he would even place, let alone win the entire thing. But he proved the pollsters and the media plants wrong and at the same time shown them to be untrustworthy.
Not since the US presidential elections between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 have polls been so wrong and those living and swearing by them be so totally embarrassed with their faux pas.
Now they have Arevalo choosing to disengage from the transition process and further calling for retaliation against those that have caused the delay and confusion over his transition phase.
We just hope that it does not end in violence and people getting hurt. Because if the people that were depending on Arevalo are not served immediately like how they voted and supported him for, it can get messy.