Jorge Serrano Elías
Jorge Serrano Elías was president of Guatemala from January 1991 to June 1993, the evangelical engineer who had been the president of Ríos Montt's council of state and who won the election of January 1991 with sixty-eight per cent in a run-off against the newspaper owner Carpio, the first Protestant elected president in Latin America. He ended his presidency by dissolving the Congress and the supreme court on 25 May 1993 in imitation of Fujimori's self-coup of the year before, which lasted a week and failed. The country's constitutional order was restored by the army, the business chambers and the constitutional court together, which nobody had expected of any of them. He was born in Guatemala City, an industrial engineer of the San Carlos university with a doctorate from Stanford. He was a member of the Elim church, the head of the council of state under the junta of 1982 and 1983, the candidate of 1985 who came third, and the founder of the Solidarity Action Movement, which won in 1991 as the party of the man who had never been a general. The two and a half years were the peace talks resumed with the URNG in Mexico under the UN's observation. There was the recognition of Belize in September 1991, which the country's nationalists have not forgiven and for which the Congress tried to impeach him. There were the privatisations, the inflation brought down, and the corruption that the Congress and the press investigated. In May 1993, with the students in the streets over bus fares and the Congress refusing his budget, he announced on television that he had suspended the constitution, dissolved the Congress and the court, and would govern by decree. The Congress met anyway and the court ruled the decree void. The army's commanders, after four days, told him they would obey the court. He flew to El Salvador on 1 June and then to Panama, which gave him asylum. It has refused eleven extradition requests since. The Congress chose the human rights ombudsman de León Carpio to finish the term, which was the opposite of what the coup had intended. Serrano has lived in Panama for thirty years, a businessman with a farm and a case in Guatemala for the theft of fourteen million dollars from the state that has never been heard. He is the president whose coup against the constitution made the constitution.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, engineer, politician
