MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan-born Bernardo Arévalo de León wins Guatemalan elections

Arévalo de León was born in Montevideo when his father and former president went into exile

Uruguayan-born Bernardo Arévalo de León of the center-left Semilla (Seed) Movement, a sociologist with a PhD in Philosophy and also the son of a former head of state, will become Guatemala's next president after Sunday's landslide at the runoff victory over former First Lady Sandra Torres Casanova of the National Unity of Hope (UNE)

Arévalo de León will be sworn in on Jan. 14 for a four-year term, replacing the incumbent Alejandro Giammattei (right). With 99.8% of the votes counted, Arévalo obtained 58.04% of them against Torres Casanova's 37.2%. Some 9.4 million Guatemalans were registered to vote.

Arévalo's victory puts the political class, which for a long time enjoyed impunity, as well as members of the elite and their allies in corruption and organized crime, in a state of maximum alert, it was reported.

Sunday's were the most controversial elections in Guatemala since 1986, due to the high levels of judicialization and the intervention of the Attorney General's Office, headed by prosecutors sanctioned for corruption by the US State Department.

The Guatemalan Prosecutor's Office accused Arévalo de León's party of an alleged case of false signatures in its creation process in 2018. Last Thursday, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Rafael Curruchiche, assured that he could issue arrest warrants and pre-trial petitions against Semilla party cadres.

Juan José Arévalo Bermejo ruled Guatemala from 1945 to 1951, after the revolution that overthrew General Jorge Ubico. After the fall of Jacobo Árbenz's government in 1958, Juan José Arévalo was forced to go into exile in Uruguay, where Bernardo was born, and returned to Guatemala in the 1970s with his entire family.

A decade later, Bernardo joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he began a career as a diplomat that led him to become Vice Minister between 1994 and 1995, as well as Ambassador to Spain. After his diplomatic work, he worked in organizations on different continents and was an advisor on various issues at the United Nations, institutes, and universities in the United States.

As a politician, Arévalo was part of the movement that in 2015 led protests to demand the resignation of the then Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina, an event that triggered the formation, along with other intellectuals, of the party of social democratic, environmentalist and progressive ideology Movimiento Semilla.

With the new party, Arévalo declined his candidacy to promote former prosecutor Thelma Aldana, who could not participate in the 2019 elections. Arévalo was elected to Congress where he has dealt with issues related to Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, and Security, among others. Bernardo Arévalo is a moderate leftist who has focused his message on the need to fight corruption in his country with the creation of a National Anticorruption System. He intends to address the security problem in Guatemala with a strengthening of the National Civil Police and the control of prisons, in addition to the generation of employment through public works. Arévalo de León also said he would follow his father's guidelines.

Giammattei congratulated the winner on X, formerly known as Twitter, and invited him to begin an orderly transition the day after the results are certified.