Polls close in Guatemala’s presidential runoff as voters hope for real change

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Polls closed in Guatemala on Sunday evening after a tumultuous campaign that pitted an anti-corruption advocate against a former first lady seen as an ally to the outgoing government in a presidential runoff election.

The two candidates offered starkly different paths forward. Former first lady Sandra Torres became an ally of outgoing, deeply unpopular President Alejandro Giammattei in her third bid for the presidency. Her opponent, Bernardo Arévalo, with the progressive Seed Movement, rode a wave of popular resentment toward politics to his surprise spot in the runoff.

But moves to drag the electoral process into the courts after the first round of voting in June led many Guatemalans to wonder what was to come between Sunday’s results and the transfer of power Jan. 14.

Central America’s most populous country and the region’s largest economy continues to struggle with widespread poverty and violence that have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the U.S. in recent years.

Voting appeared to have been peaceful. The Attorney General’s Office, which sought unsuccessfully to suspend Arévalo’s party before the vote, announced several arrests for interference with the process, but they appeared to be minor.

Political analyst Renzo Rosal noted the heavier than usual presence of uniformed agents from the Attorney General’s Office at voting centers across the country “could be taken as a form of intimidation.” The Associated Press saw such agents at several voting centers.

Antonio González voted late Sunday, shortly before polls closed, at a teachers’ school in the capital.

The 42-year-old tractor-trailer driver said he hoped Guatemala’s powerful would respect the will of the voters. He wants someone to tackle corruption and improve education and the economy. Without those things, Guatemalans will continue to migrate to the U.S. like two of his co-workers recently had.

Thinking of the future of his children, he said, “We hope that they improve the economy, that there’s work.”

Poll workers at each voting table immediately began tallying ballots. One person would unfold each ballot, show it to the party observers at the table and announce which party received the vote.

Roxana Abigail González voted for Arévalo, hoping that he would make a difference for her future. “I think he could be a good president,” she said.

The 25-year-old student lives in Villa Nueva, a gritty hillside suburb above the capital. Thieves and gangs that extort businesses and kill those who don’t pay roam its cratered streets. González said she has had the possessions she carried stolen multiple times, making her nervous to venture out alone.

Among her long list of hopes for Guatemala’s next government are more security, jobs for the poor families whose children she sees begging in the streets and more hospitals.

González wants to continue on to college and study business administration. She loves to cook and dreams of having her own restaurant one day, but the threat of extortion is so great that she’s unsure if it’s possible. “People can’t keep a business,” she said.

At the school where she voted, the election coordinator estimated that by late morning the flow of voters was only about half of what they had for the first round of voting in June.

Earlier in the day, residents of Santo Domingo Xenacoj lined up to vote at the local primary school in the mountains about an hour west of the capital. The Volcano of Fire puffed in the distance as men in jackets and women in traditional embroidered blouses wrapped in shawls against the chill came out to vote.

Juan Xocoxi Chocoyo, a 60-year-old farmer and driver, was the first in line. He said he shared his vote only with God, but that the issues weighing on his mind as he entered the voting booth were the lack of work and the rising cost of everyday products.

He is unemployed and subsists on the corn and beans he grows. He used to grow a variety of vegetables, but it became too expensive.

“There’s no work, (the cost) of everything went up,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no work and there are poor who go hungry.”

Clara Top, a 43-year-old seamstress in town, said she voted for Torres, because she has promised to give poor families monthly bags of food staples. “She helps the most needy,” Top said.

At a school in the center of Guatemala City, about a dozen people waited for polls to open. “I got up very early. I’m motivated by the right I have to vote,” said Sergio Antonlín, a 62-year-old vendor. “What I hope is that something positive for the country comes out of this, we’re tired of the old corrupt politics.”

The first round of voting on June 25 went relatively smoothly until results showed Arévalo had landed an unexpected spot in the runoff. The fact that the preliminary results were dragged into Guatemala’s co-opted justice system has raised anxiety among many Guatemalans that voters will not have the final word Sunday.

Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office is investigating Arévalo’s party for allegedly gathering fraudulent signatures for its registration years earlier. The party has dismissed the accusations as politically motivated.

Torres, in her closing campaign event Friday in Guatemala City’s sprawling central market, suggested she would not accept a result that didn’t go her way. “We’re going to defend vote by vote because today democracy is at risk (and) because they want to steal the elections,” she said.

Arévalo, a lawmaker and former diplomat, is the son of former President Juan José Arévalo, the first leftist president of Guatemala’s democratic era. The elder Arévalo is still revered by many for establishing fundamental elements of Guatemalan society such as social security and labor regulations.

But Torres has painted her opponent as a radical leftist who threatens Guatemalans’ conservative values on issues including sexual identity and abortion.

“We’re not going to let them influence our children with strange and foreign ideologies,” she said Friday.

Having run largely populist campaigns, capitalizing on her oversight of the government’s social programs during the presidency of her then-husband Álvaro Colom, Torres drifted sharply rightward this time, abandoning the social democratic history of her National Unity of Hope party and launching unsubstantiated attacks at Arévalo that she herself suffered during earlier failed campaigns.

Delmi Espino, a 46-year-old teacher, came to vote in Guatemala City with her mother. “It’s incredible how we managed to get to this point after everything that has happened in the electoral process,” she said. “How’s it possible that now there’s an investigation of one of the two parties?”

“It doesn’t matter that we need security, education or health, if you don’t fight corruption,” she said. “We want a president who cares about the country.”