Bernardo Arévalo
Bernardo Arévalo has been president of Guatemala since January 2024, the sociologist and former diplomat whom the polls of June 2023 had at three per cent and who came second in the first round with twelve. The courts had removed the three leading candidates before the vote. He then won the run-off of August against the former first lady Sandra Torres by twenty-one points on a promise to end the corruption that had run the country since the international commission was expelled in 2019. The five months between the run-off and the inauguration were the attempt to stop him, by the attorney-general Consuelo Porras, who had his party's registration suspended, its offices raided, the ballot boxes seized, and the electoral tribunal's magistrates indicted. There was a congress that voted at midnight on the day of the inauguration to delay it. The Indigenous authorities' hundred-and-six-day blockade of the roads, the Organization of American States and the American sanctions on the officials involved got him sworn in at one in the morning on 15 January 2024. He was born in Montevideo in 1958, the son of the president of 1945-51 whose spring of reforms Árbenz continued and the CIA's coup of 1954 ended, and grew up in exile in Uruguay, Venezuela, Mexico and Chile, coming home at fifteen. He studied sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, took a doctorate at Utrecht, was ambassador to Spain at thirty-seven and deputy foreign minister during the peace accords. He worked for twenty years for the Swiss peace foundation Interpeace before founding the Semilla movement out of the anti-corruption protests of 2015 and entering congress in 2020. The presidency has been the attorney-general he cannot remove, whose term ran to May 2026 and who has kept prosecuting his party, his ministers and the journalists. There was a congress in which his party's seats were suspended, and a supreme court he has begun to renew. There were the roads and the hospitals, the poverty at fifty-five per cent and the migration to the north that Trump's deportations have reversed, and a country whose institutions were built to stop him and have so far not. He has said that the pact of the corrupt is the enemy and that the state must be recovered one office at a time. The election of 2027 will say whether four years was enough.
- Lived: 1958 CE – ?
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, diplomat, politician
