Guatemalans head to the polls, hoping their new leader will bring real change

GUATEMALA CITY – After a tumultuous marketing campaign, Guatemalans head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, hoping that the nation’s subsequent leader will supply aid from emerging costs and get a maintain on crime and corruption.

The two applicants be offering starkly other paths ahead. Former first woman Sandra Torres become an best friend of outgoing, deeply unpopular President Alejandro Giammattei in her 3rd bid for the presidency. Her opponent, Bernardo Arévalo, with the revolutionary Seed Movement, rode a wave of common resentment towards politics to his surprise spot in the runoff.

Central America’s maximum populous nation and the area’s greatest economic system continues to fight with fashionable poverty and violence that experience pushed loads of 1000’s of Guatemalans to to migrate lately.

The first spherical of balloting on June 25 went rather easily till effects confirmed Arévalo had landed an surprising spot in the runoff. The proven fact that the initial effects had been dragged into Guatemala’s co-opted justice system has raised anxiousness amongst many Guatemalans that electorate will now not have the ultimate phrase Sunday.

Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office is investigating Arévalo’s birthday party for allegedly amassing fraudulent signatures for its registration years previous. The birthday party has brushed aside the accusations as politically motivated.

Torres, in her final marketing campaign match Friday in Guatemala City’s sprawling central marketplace, steered she would now not settle for a end result that didn’t cross her means. “We’re going to defend vote by vote because today democracy is at risk (and) because they want to steal the elections,” she stated.

Arévalo, a lawmaker and previous diplomat, is the son of former President Juan José Arévalo, the first leftist president of Guatemala’s democratic generation. The elder Arévalo remains to be respected by means of many for organising elementary components of Guatemalan society reminiscent of social safety and hard work rules.

But Torres has painted her opponent as a thorough leftist who threatens Guatemalans’ conservative values on problems together with sexual identification and abortion.

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

Having run in large part populist campaigns, capitalizing on her oversight of the govt’s social systems right through the presidency of her then-husband Álvaro Colom, Torres drifted sharply rightward this time, forsaking the social democratic historical past of her National Unity of Hope birthday party and launching unsubstantiated assaults at Arévalo that she herself suffered right through previous failed campaigns.

Torres picked the capital’s major marketplace as the native center of her populist pitch, beginning and finishing her marketing campaign on this hub of trade. But some distributors there stated they see a better probability for change in Arévalo.

One of them is Enrique Velásquez, who sells thread, yarn and different provides.

The 29-year-old is a part of a adolescence growth in a rustic the place the moderate age is 26, in comparison to 38 in the United States. He hopes an Arévalo management would generate extra self assurance in the nation’s politics and make real adjustments slightly than simply guarantees.

As for Torres’ makes an attempt to paint Arévalo as a risk to Guatemalan households, Velásquez stated that she is truly best speaking about protecting one more or less circle of relatives, the one with a mom, a father and kids. But, he added, there are unmarried moms and unmarried fathers, grandparents elevating grandchildren, divorcees and widows from the nation’s violence. “They wouldn’t take those people into account.”

Gays, lesbians and transgender people aren’t trying to influence anyone’s children, he went on. “Times have changed.”

Arévalo advised supporters in the capital’s central plaza Wednesday night time that incorrect information and fearmongering, “is the work of those who don’t want Guatemala to change.”