Guatemala - A triumph and a warning about democracy
The narrative wars about democratic institutions are just getting started
Bernardo Arévalo's inauguration as president of Guatemala was a triumph for democracy in the hemisphere. The good guys won. The forces of evil lost.
I feel absolutely certain about the above statement.
Guatemala's president fought for months and beyond the final hours to win against a lame duck Congressional majority attempting to rig the rules, a court system that backed those congressional decisions, and a corrupt attorney general who engaged in politicized investigations to overturn the election. Citizens mobilized to make sure that the coup wouldn't happen. The international community that assembled to cheer on the new president's inauguration pulled off a successful pressure campaign against a corrupt political elite that has had years to consolidate control. Hooray!
Here comes the caveat.
Latin America is a region where presidents have too much unilateral authority and use that power to roll over Congress, ignore the Supreme Court, and dodge corruption investigations by Attornies General. The other recent instances in which populist presidents have brought a mob of supporters to protest outside the Congress as a form of pressure against the politicians inside have been some of the darkest days for democracy in the hemisphere in the past decade. Foreign influence to force transitions of power has a pretty ugly history in this hemisphere including in Guatemala.
But, you'll argue, "What happened in Guatemala this year is different!" Absolutely. I totally agree. Arévalo's party was unfairly targeted by the courts, the AG, and the members of the previous Congress. The protesters were there to defend a democratically elected president against a corrupt elite who tried to prevent him from taking power. The hemispheric leaders stood up for democracy in a way we only could wish would happen in other countries.
But something about the situation bothers me and it should bother you too. That narrative that got Arevalo to power over the elites who tried to keep him out has a troubling parallel to the narrative that also benefitted Hugo Chavez and Nayib Bukele and Rafael Correa and Jair Bolsonaro as they won power and then attempted to overturn those who worked against them and consolidate control. I’m not worried about Arévalo being the next caudillo. But I am worried that the next caudillo will benefit from everything that helped Arévalo.
Democracy should not and cannot be "I know it when I see it." I wrote about this same uncomfortable issue last year in a column defending Brazil's ban on Bolsonaro as a future presidential candidate, trying to explain how that action was different than the candidate bans in Venezuela, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where the bans are an absolute violation of democracy. At the time I wrote, "democracy advocates should be debating the details, not dodging the uncomfortable contradictions that the issue sometimes presents." While I still believe in debating the details, I also worry about how that detailed debate is being used by authoritarians in effective and dangerous ways.
I'm sure I could lay out in detail across many paragraphs how the situation with Arévalo differs from Bukele or Maduro or Bolsonaro. But it's bad for those who want to defend democracy that it requires such nuance to explain why sometimes anti-corruption investigations are a pro-institutional force and other times a weaponized assault on democracy. When we do that, our arguments start to sound a lot like the other side. Unfortunately, the claims vs counter-claims are translated by voters into "the truth is unknowable" or "both sides are wrong/corrupt," which doesn't help.
Guatemala shows how corrupt elites have weaponized the focus of democracy advocates on institutions. They've corrupted the checks and balances that are supposed to help maintain democracy. They thrive in the space where the average citizen throws their hands up and gives up on believing that there is an accurate truth. They've embraced "lawfare" as a force against democratic candidates even as they've railed against it when corruption investigations and sanctions have turned on them. In the process, they've forced those of us who want a more democratic region into a space where our narratives too often parallel theirs. While I'm certain that down at the detailed level, the good side is right and the bad side is wrong, I also know that debating at that detailed level too often feels like being pulled into the mud when it comes to winning over voters and citizens.
We have a year of elections coming up and in many countries, there is a candidate who looks like the mirror image of Arévalo. There is a candidate in El Salvador who should be constitutionally forbidden from running, a party in Mexico that has dodged every corruption investigation that could threaten its hold on power, a ruling regime in Venezuela that forcibly shut down the elected Congress that tried to oppose it, and a candidate in the United States who brought a mob of supporters to try to force the Congress to do his bidding while falsely claiming electoral legitimacy.
The Arévalo inauguration is a triumph of democracy, but it also displays just how hard defending democracy has become in this hemisphere. It's a warning for the rest of this year's elections. The narrative wars about institutions and anti-corruption are going to get ugly.