Biden Helped Save Democracy in Guatemala as Trump Surrogates Sought to Undermine It
Guatemala Shows Democracy Globally is on the Ballot in November 2024
In a story the media barely covered, a new democratically elected President in Guatemala took office early on Monday morning, even as corrupt rightwing forces did everything they could for months to stop his inauguration.
And if that sounds familiar, Trump forces were key players supporting coup plotters seeking to stop the new President Bernardo Arévalo from taking office.
Which highlights the stakes for global democracy in the coming US election.
The Fight for Democracy in Guatemala
Arevalo had won a surprise victory in August on an anti-corruption platform that mobilized large numbers of voters, particularly indigenous Guatemalans, to vote out incumbent Alejandro Giammattei, whose conservative government has been awash in corruption scandals.
Within hours of winning by overwhelming margins, the Giammattei-controlled Supreme Electoral Tribunal, prodded by Guatemala’s attorney general Consuelo Porras, suspended Arevalo’s reform party to block him from being sworn in. Protests and strikes erupted across the nation, paralyzing the country.
The efforts to block his Presidency would continue until the absolute last moment, as his swearing-in was delayed for hours as government-backed legislators refused to seat his party members and approve his ascension to the Presidency.
While the mass protest were a key factor in protecting the results of the election, as decisive, as detailed in this NY Times piece, was the extraordinary intervention of the Biden administration over months to cajole and threaten government officials not to block the swearing-in of Arevalo as President.
The Biden administration maneuvered for months in support of Mr. Arévalo…the United States imposed sanctions on Miguel Martínez, one of the closest allies of the departing president, Alejandro Giammattei, over widespread bribery schemes.
And in a pivotal move, the American authorities in December imposed visa restrictions on nearly 300 Guatemalans, including more than 100 members of Congress, accusing them of undermining democracy and the rule of law as they tried to weaken Mr. Arévalo and keep him from being inaugurated.
“The pressure from the United States has prevented a coup d’état; without that, we wouldn’t be here,” said Manfredo Marroquín, the head of Citizen Action, an anticorruption policy group.
This action by a US administration in support of democracy in the country is in sharp contrast to the past, where our CIA helped engineer a coup against the democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and backed the Guatemalan military dictatorship during the 1980s while it conducted genocidal extermination of the Mayan Ixil people.
The Trumpist Support for Attempted Coup in Guatemala
What is notable is that Trump allies were active in Guatemala in support of the coup plotters and attacking Biden’s intervention to support democracy in the country.
Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s Acting Director of National Intelligence and is touted to have a top foreign policy position in any new Trump Presidency, was in Guatemala this weekend meeting with the coup plotters. And to the end, he joined them in disputing the results of the election and, shades of Jan 6, dismissing the attempts to block the new President from office as merely a political disagreement. Here is Grenell’s tweet as the rightwing legislators were delaying the inauguration Sunday night, attacking Samantha Power who was leading the US delegation for the event.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah would join Grenell in attacking the Biden administration for holding coup plotters accountable. (Funny how Republicans suddenly think the border should be open when it’s their political allies seeking to enter the U.S.)
As the world recognized a new President in Guatemala, the Trumpists wanted to run their Jan 6th playbook of attempted coups worldwide.
The Battle for Popular Democracy in Latin America
As Ryan Cooper detailed in this piece for The American Prospect, the Biden administration gave similar support in Brazil to consolidate the democratic election of Lula De Silva against attempts by Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro to illegally hold onto power in the 2022 election there:
If Joe Biden had not won the U.S. election in 2020, it’s highly likely that Lula would not have been able to claim victory. Bolsonaro would have successfully rigged the vote, or simply attempted a putsch—and a second-term Donald Trump would have helped him do it. The danger of Bolsonaro and his movement remains, but they have suffered a major setback…
after news outlets called the election for Lula, Biden helped orchestrate a quick international embrace of him as president-elect. Quickly afterward, Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula—with a clear implicit warning of consequences should Bolsonaro try to cling to power.
Compare this as well to Bolivia where the Trump administration agitated against the incumbent left-leaning Evo Morales regime in 2019, then supported the military overthrow of the government in a coup, which included the storming of the Capitol by allied militants (basically the dry run for what Trump wanted on January 6th).
A mass mobilization in 2020 in Bolivia forced new elections and the party allied to Morales decisively won them, putting a lie to claims that Morales had somehow stolen the elections a year earlier. Those Bolivian leaders who participated in the coup and its puppet government were later tried and convicted. Republicans like Marco Rubio and Bill Cassidy demanded Biden sanction Bolivia for punishing the coup leader. While relationships with the Bolivian regime are strained, Biden has ignored those GOP demands for sanctions, while Trump no doubt would have heartily endorsed those efforts.
Biden’s Democracy Agenda vs. Trump’s Global Authoritarianism
More broadly, we can compare Biden’s agenda to Trump’s lavish praise of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi Jinping and, of course, his toadying to Russia’s Vladamir Putin. As China’s Xi further tightened his dictatorial control, Trump not only didn’t condemn it, he enthusiastically praised it:
"He's now president for life, president for life. And he's great," Trump said…at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday," Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.
Where Biden has made defending a democratic Ukraine a core platform of his Presidency, Trump has made clear his indifference and suggested that letting eastern Ukraine be absorbed into Putin’s dictatorship was a fine way to end the war - on Putin’s terms, of course.
And where Trump spent much of his Presidency criticizing democratic allied countries in favor of deals with dictatorships from Saudi Arabia to China, Biden has rebuilt alliances with democratic allies in Europe and Asia, convened multiple “summits for democracy” to bring together over 100 democratic nations worldwide - notably excluding authoritarian states like Russia, China, Turkey and Hungary - to highlight the need to challenge the rising tide of anti-democratic trends around the world, and created a new Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance within the US Agency for International Development to support democracy around the world. It was this last agency that stepped in to support Guatemala's democracy advocates in recent months.
Even in the case of Gaza, as I argued here, Biden has consistently argued that any outcome of the conflict must lead to Palestinian self-determination and a viable democratic state for the Palestinians. In comparison, Trump during his Presidency laid out a plan that would have obliterated any future for Palestinian self-governance
So whatever criticisms one may have of Biden’s foreign policy - and I’m honestly far more impressed with his actions than I expected during the 2020 primaries - there is little question that his policies are infinitely preferable to the complete threat to global democracy that another Trump Presidency would bring.
Guatemala now has a democratically elected President who may usher in reforms that are badly needed after decades of authoritarian and corrupt governments. Biden deserves real credit for that result- a partial redemption for the anti-democratic US policies of the past that undermined democracies there and around the world, and to which we might return if Trump gets elected again.