Tío Bernie and the New Coup
Minutes after midnight on January 15, 2024, Guatemala’s new president Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in after declaring that he would “fulfill with patriotic love the position of president of the Republic.” The ceremony, however, had initially been scheduled to take place at 3:00 pm, local time, the previous day. The cause of more than eight hours of delay? Several conservative members of Congress refused to recognize a delegation from the President-elect’s progressive party, in a bid to obstruct the inauguration. The opposition to the transition stemmed from a deeply entrenched conflict between Arévalo and the majority of the Guatemalan Congress - the new head of state being swept the popular vote as a crusader against corruption, while the Congress is regarded internationally as deeply corrupt. This was the last of several attempts to reverse the results of the election Arévalo won in August 2023 with 60.91 percent of the vote.
Bernardo Arévalo is known affectionately among supporters as Tío Bernie (“Uncle Bernie”). Beyond a simple nickname, the moniker partly references his progressive political similarities to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. Arévalo also drew support at the ballot box from Guatemala’s historically marginalized communities, chiefly the indigenous peoples of the country.
In the months that followed Arévalo’s election, one of the top figures seeking to thwart his inauguration was Guatemalan Attorney General Consuelo Porras. Multiple times, her office sought to nullify the results of the vote on grounds of electoral fraud, even if fraud claims were repeatedly refuted as false by independent monitors. In 2021, she was flagged by the U.S. State Department as an “undemocratic and corrupt,” politician. The attempts by Porras’ office to keep Arévalo from starting his presidency were seen as unreasonably fierce, and Arévalo’has declared that he would seek her resignation, a call which she has since boldly refused.
Bernando Arévalo was successfully inaugurated. However, the attempted thwarting of the transition confirmed fears, which had abounded following his election, about the possibility of a coup d’etat.
What makes the inauguration of Arévalo even more fascinating is that it is a microcosm of a new trend across Latin America in the past two decades. Throughout the region, the definition of a coup has become muddled and confused, as the term has come to be loosely interchangeable with “political crisis.”
Historically, and still today in much of the world, coups have been relatively easy to identify and define. A coup is typically conducted by the military, often in a violent manner. Above all else, however, it is technically an undemocratic unseating of an incumbent government, even if it might, such as in the various military upheavals of the Mexican Revolution, end up leading to democratic change.
Across Latin America, however, a new type of coup may be emerging, overseen not by generals and comandos, but instead by lawyers and bureaucrats.
In Brazil, an investigation that allegedly sought to expose corruption among the leftist Workers’ Party and that became known as Operação Lava Jato (“Operation Car Wash”) began in 2014, ultimately leading in 2018 to the arrest and imprisonment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who had been president for two terms between 2003 and 2011. Consequently, the Supreme Court at the federal level ruled that he was ineligible to run in the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil, while some polling suggested his likely victory. Instead, the path was cleared for the triumph of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
At first glance, this was a textbook legal process, but in 2019 The Intercept Brasil reported on leaked conversations on the app Telegram between prosecutors revealing their deliberate intent throughout the proceedings to prevent Lula from seeking a third term in 2018. Four years later, in 2022, Lula returned and won that very third term. His electoral victory was widely attributed to successfully campaigning on reuniting a deeply polarized Brazil, as well as highlighting the shortcomings of the then-incumbent Bolsonaro administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other mishandlings of public services. Conversely, Bolsonaro scored the endorsement of Sergio Moro, the leading judge who presided over Lava Jato proceedings. Moro was hardly an outlier, as most of the prosecutors involved in the investigation were of Brazil’s political right. The operation’s leading prosecutor Deltan Dellagnol, for example, was later elected to Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in 2022 as a member of the right-wing NOVO Party. Months later, in June 2023, he was ejected from the nation’s legislature on the grounds that he had previously engaged in fraud.
In 2019, elections in Bolivia appeared to hand a decisive victory to the incumbent, socialist President Evo Morales, and his party, Movimiento al Socialismo (“Movement for Socialism”) or MAS. Following the vote, however, an audit by the Organization of American States indicated what it claimed was “manipulation,” of vote counts. In response, Morales quickly agreed to hold new elections in an attempt to remedy international concerns. Hours later, however, he abruptly resigned, alongside much of his cabinet. Following a convoluted passage through the line of succession to the presidency, center-right Jeanine Áñez, the Second Vice President of the Bolivian Senate, declared herself President of Bolivia. Seemingly plucked from obscurity and the nearest politician to power who conveniently wasn’t a member of the MAS, Áñez’s seizure of the office triggered nationwide unrest as well as polarized reactions internationally. The governments of Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others, voiced support for Morales, denouncing Áñez’s rise to power as a coup. The United States, however, under former President Donald Trump, gave Áñez total support as the legitimate new president.
There is no single way to label these extraordinary situations. The political contexts which surround them are profoundly complex. Lava Jato had a widespread effect on parties other than the PT, and Morales had previously been denied an additional term by popular referendum. It is, however, undeniable that such dramatic government upheavals went through without the express approval of the civilian population - the denial of Lula’s candidacy was the subject of widespread protests, and no Bolivian citizen ever voted for Jeanine Áñez.
The crises that struck Brazil in 2018 and Bolivia in 2019 bear a commonality with the tense scenario that nearly prevented a democratic transfer of power in Guatemala. All three crises were generated by generally undemocratic efforts that ran contrary to popular will, but none of them were the subject of direct military interference. The new pattern they present shows that coups, should they be labeled as such, are increasingly initiated and pursued by bureaucrats rather than the military.
These extraordinary situations elicit extensive debate over what truly constitutes a coup. In Guatemala, the attempt to prevent Bernardo Arévalo’s ascension to the presidency by members of a government plagued by corruption echoes the nation’s grim history of dictatorship which followed a military takeover in 1954, culminating in the genocide of indigenous Guatemalans in the 1980s.
Each of these chaotic events raises profound questions for onlookers worldwide that go beyond asking, “what constitutes a coup?” In times of crisis, who in government can be trusted to represent popular will? More importantly, who can be trusted to enforce it?