Bernardo Arévalo’s experience in peacebuilding and diplomacy eminently qualify him to lead Guatemala as the conflict-riven country’s next president, those who know him say. But first he will have to overcome forces that could keep him from taking power.
Guatemalans voted for Arévalo in a landslide Sunday, but his opponent, former first lady Sandra Torres, has not conceded, or said anything for that matter.
The election results have not been certified, a legal step necessary for Arévalo to become president.
That’s not the only hitch: The attorney general’s office also continues to investigate the registration of his Seed Movement party and has already asked a judge once to suspend it. And even if Arévalo takes the presidency, Guatemala’s powers that be could hamstring him as leader when he takes power in five months.
Arévalo and those who know him say that he wants to unite his country. It’s his platform of eradicating corruption that has earned enemies among the political and economic elite.
The 64-year-old son of former President Juan José Arévalo was born in Uruguay, where his father was in exile following the ouster in a 1954 CIA-backed coup of his successor President Jacobo Árbenz, whom the US saw as a threat during the Cold War.
He came to Guatemala as a teenager before leaving again to continue his studies overseas. Then Arévalo did what few Guatemalan children of privilege do these days, he went back.
The country suffers a continuous brain drain, not only from hundreds of thousands of migrants travelling illegally to the US in recent years, but also among the best-educated, who study abroad and never return.
