Can Peer Pressure Protect Guatemala’s Democracy?

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Guatemala’s president-elect decries attempts to block his inauguration, Argentina gets its first taste of shock therapy, and Mexico’s migration agency runs out of money.

At first glance, tiny Guatemala and giant Brazil may not appear to have much in common. But Guatemala is currently experiencing post-election political tensions that echo the turbulent weeks following Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory last year.

Outgoing Brazilian president and election runner-up Jair Bolsonaro for weeks refused to formally concede the race and—as reporting has since revealed—attempted to convince military officials to stage an intervention to keep him in power. Even after Bolsonaro allowed Lula to take office in January, his supporters stormed the country’s capital in Brasília and wreaked havoc inside before being removed by security forces.

Like Lula, Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arévalo is facing unusual obstacles to taking office that appear to be politically motivated. Arévalo is an anti-corruption reformer whose presidential win this August shocked observers. His under-the-radar candidacy was able to skirt the attention of conservative elites in Guatemala’s judiciary, who had disqualified reform-minded candidates who appeared to have a shot at winning.

Last week, prosecutors at Guatemala’s attorney general’s office—a body friendly to the nation’s political and business elite—asked the country’s election court to nullify the presidential vote. This followed a lawsuit by another state prosecutor claiming that Arévalo’s party was illegally registered. Arévalo, due to be sworn in on Jan. 14, 2024, has not been shy about calling the legal challenges a “coup” attempt.

As they did with Brazil, other countries in the Western Hemisphere have spoken up to defend the peaceful transfer of power in Guatemala. The presidents of Chile, Brazil, and Colombia issued statements, as did the Alliance for Development and Democracy—a group that comprises Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. The Organization of American States also passed a resolution condemning “the ongoing abusive exercise of power” by government prosecutors and supporting the results of the election.

U.S. officials have held several meetings with Arévalo to reinforce their support for his peaceful inauguration. On Monday, the State Department announced visa restrictions on a whopping nearly 300 Guatemalans whom it says were undermining the rule of law amid efforts to block him from taking office.

“A commitment to uphold Guatemala’s place among the community of democratic nations will be crucial for the future of U.S.-Guatemala relations” a bipartisan group of U.S. senators said following last week’s attempt to nullify the presidential vote.

The United States has emphasized that it plans to step up economic cooperation with Guatemala once Arévalo becomes president. Jose W. Fernandez, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, told Foreign Policy that Guatemala’s situation offered a chance to “break a cycle” of inequality and corruption and also to “benefit from the investments and the economic opportunities that will be brought about by stability and the rule of law.” Arévalo “will have a short honeymoon, so he needs to get out of the gate quickly,” Fernandez said. “We are prepared to help with that.”

One recent example of how Washington has increased economic outreach to Latin American partners is the U.S.-convened Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), of which Guatemala is not currently a member—but which Fernandez said was open to new participants. Outgoing Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei did not attend last year’s Summit for the Americas, where APEP was launched, amid tensions over U.S. criticism that his attorney general had protected corrupt actors.

APEP is geared toward showing that democracies can deliver economically. Some of its financial benefits are visible in Costa Rica, Fernandez said, where the United States will be holding a conference in January on workforce development for the semiconductor sector. Costa Rica is among the countries where Washington is investing in job training for tasks that are part of the semiconductor supply chain, such as chip assembly and testing.

Fernandez traveled to Guatemala last week, where he emphasized support for the peaceful transition of power and held meetings with politicians, business representatives, and civil society members. A similar flurry of U.S. diplomacy occurred in Brazil last year, when Bolsonaro had not yet conceded his defeat and had held back from denouncing protests by his supporters—casting doubts about whether Lula would be sworn in.

On Tuesday, Giammattei said that a peaceful transfer of power would occur in Guatemala, and on Thursday, a ruling by the country’s top court said that a handover must occur. If it does, analysts predict that the Arévalo administration—and its proposed policies—will continue to face obstruction. That’s because many people linked to the country’s old elite still hold offices in the judiciary and other influential institutions.

The struggle to inaugurate Arévalo is perhaps Latin America’s clearest test this year of whether nearby countries can help shore up a democracy that is at a textbook breaking point. Washington’s track record on this issue in Central America is spotty as of late: Years of U.S. sanctions have neither weakened Nicaragua’s dictatorship nor kept Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele from what many call unconstitutional moves to extend his time in office.

In Brazil in 2022, the United States had more luck. U.S. officials threatened to cut off military cooperation with Brazil if the military blocked Lula from taking office, and in the end, the military chose not to intervene. In Guatemala, the recent U.S. sanctions represent similar stick-waving. But the promise of greater investment if Arévalo takes office adds an economic carrot to the U.S. strategy as well.

Sunday, Dec. 17: Chileans vote on whether to approve new draft constitution.

Tuesday. Dec. 19: A court holds a hearing for the suspect in the assassination case of former Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024:  Arévalo is due to be sworn in as president of Guatemala.

A vendor sells newspapers featuring articles about the inauguration of new Argentine President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires on Dec. 11.Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images

Milei’s shock doctrine. New Argentine President Javier Milei’s inaugural address on Sunday promised a painful economic shock to fight the country’s persistently high inflation, which in November stood at a year-over-year rate of 161 percent. In his somber speech, Milei warned that Argentines would experience stagflation and a drop in real wages before conditions improve, asserting that “there is no alternative” to these policy steps.

On Wednesday, Milei’s policy team delivered on those promises, announcing a 54-percent devaluation of the official peso-dollar exchange rate and a range of public spending cuts. Argentina’s major creditor, the International Monetary Fund, praised his announcements. Milei’s team held a series of meetings with the fund as they prepared to take office.

On the campaign trail, Milei pledged to dollarize Argentina’s economy, prompting broad skepticism from experts who doubted that such a step would solve the country’s deeper fiscal problems. But the president has appeared to back down from that promise in recent weeks, choosing a more centrist economy minister than many had predicted. (For more reading the tea leaves of the first days of the Milei administration, check out a Reddit AMA that I hosted on Monday.)

Chile’s constitutional whiplash. This weekend, for the second time in two years, Chileans will vote on a potential new constitution. But the charter in question this time would take the country in a vastly different direction than the previous draft would have.

Last year, voters rejected the first rewrite because they found it too progressive. Now—according to polls—many Chileans appear to be turned off by elements of the second draft charter that they consider overly conservative. The document includes language that may make it easier to block the legalization of abortion and enshrines tax benefits for wealthier Chileans. It was written by a popularly elected committee whose biggest faction is Chile’s far-right Republican Party.

Migration policy changes. Earlier this month, Mexico ordered its immigration agency to stop busing migrants from near the U.S.-Mexico border to more southward locations and to halt deportations due to lack of funding, The Associated Press reported.

Mexico has carried out the busing policy at different points over the years, usually when it aimed to decongest cities with crowded migration shelters. Several officials in Mexico’s northern border cities told the newspaper Milenio that they worry that the suspension of deportations will result in even more migrant arrivals at the northern border and possible closures of international bridges into the United States.

Some analysts expressed doubt that the funding problem cited as the reason for the changes was real and worried that it could be a pretext to having the National Guard eventually assume some migration management responsibilities as a step toward the militarization of immigration policy. And indeed, this week, officials announced a “migrant containment plan” that will be jointly run by Mexico’s military and migration agency in the state of Sonora.

On the other side of the border in the United States, migrant rights advocates have further reasons to worry: Republican lawmakers are demanding tougher restrictions on asylum-seekers’ ability to enter the country in exchange for the party’s support in passing financial aid for Israel and Ukraine. As of Thursday afternoon, the changes being debated in Congress had not been fully made public. Advocates have raised alarms about making sweeping reforms to immigration policy based more on congressional horse-trading than on policy effectiveness.

• The Shortest Path to Victory in Ukraine Goes Through Crimea by Luke Coffey and Peter Rough
• It’s Time to Reconsider Turkey’s NATO Membership by Sinan Ciddi
• Why Is Venezuela Threatening a Land-Grab War in Latin America? by Alexandra Sharp

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, speaks during a plenary session during the COP28 climate conference in Dubai on Dec. 13.Fadel Dawod/Getty Images

This year’s United Nations climate conference, known as COP28, was gaveled to a close on Wednesday in Dubai. Envoys from Latin America and the Caribbean helped shape several of its key accomplishments. The summit’s historic final deal called for a “transition away” from fossil fuels.

Colombia was one of the world’s most vocal oil exporters to demand the turn away from fossil fuels—and the largest exporter to join a call for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty. Brazil, meanwhile, was a founding member of a new alliance aimed at making food systems more resilient and sustainable. The country also fought to include language about reaching zero deforestation—and then reversing it—by 2030 in the final agreement. And Barbados’s goal of creating a loss and damage fund became a reality.

Beyond the headline outcomes, Latin American envoys and regional organizations at COP28 made progress on climate finance in quiet but consequential ways.

Researchers from the Inter-American Development Bank, the RAND Corporation, the Monterrey Institute of Technology, and policy planning group 2050 Pathways Platform launched a study timed to coincide with the conference that calculated the financial benefits of a net-zero transformation for Latin American countries and presented an open-source data methodology to help them craft strategies for emissions reduction. A green transformation would lead to $2.7 trillion in net benefits to Latin America and the Caribbean by 2050 when compared to traditional development, the researchers found.

While countries regularly present emissions-reductions targets as part of the U.N. process, only 68 have created detailed strategies for where and how to cut emissions—known in COP lingo as “long-term strategies”—Colombian climate policy analyst Marcela Jaramillo, one of the paper’s co-authors, told Foreign Policy.

Some authors of the study advised Costa Rica in creating its own long-term strategy with a similar method, launched in 2019. That strategy helped Costa Rica raise more than $2.4 billion for implementation of the plan, “quite a considerable amount of funding for a country as small as Costa Rica,” Jaramillo said.

Many countries are struggling with their net zero planning, saying “‘we can’t afford fancy consultants. We don’t have the time. We have too many other problems,’” said RAND’s Nidhi Kalra, another researcher on the study. “By lowering the barrier to decarbonization planning, we hope we’ll get more countries doing it.”