In 2023, presidential elections were held in Guatemala, and the country chose to protect democracy. With a longstanding history of corruption entrenched throughout the political and economic environment, Guatemalans were used to presidents who followed the bidding of the elite class. During former president Alejandro Giammattei’s term, V-Dem flipped Guatemala’s classification of an “electoral democracy” to an “electoral autocracy”. In 2023, Giammattei upheld the criminal oligarchic rule but ultimately failed at maintaining executive power for the elite coalition. Giammattei attacked the media, lawyers, and judges who had ruled against corruption and reversed state accountability for human rights violations. The ruling elite had control of the executive, the judiciary, and, at times, the electoral body, but their coalition was fragmented, unorganized, and not unified as a collective, and ultimately was limited by mass mobilizations led by a highly advanced network of Indigenous organizers and activists. 

After Bernardo Arévalo managed to go undetected and finish in second place in the first presidential race, the ruling elite was shaken. Arévalo won by huge margins, and since there was little evidence of election fraud, the elite coalition’s attorney general, Consuelo Porras, began working to ban Movimiento Semilla (Arévalo’s party). The ruling coalition needed to undermine the independence of the electoral tribunal, and continued their pattern of using courts, prosecutors, and state agencies to undermine the Guatemalan electoral process. To Attorney General Consuelo Porras’ disappointment, the TSE would not affirm the ban on Movimiento Semilla or reject the election results, and became the first major protector against democratic backsliding in 2023. Their defiance put into question the legitimacy of Porras and meant the ruling elite had lost a key institutional partner they needed to overturn the election. Instead of backing down and accepting the loss of the election, loyalist prosecutors shifted from the legal-institutionalist strategies the country had used before the election to more extreme extra-institutional strategies. On September 29th, prosecutors, protected by the police, raided the headquarters of the country’s top electoral authority, seizing more than 125,000 files with information related to the country’s June 25th general election. To the general Guatemalan public, this move was one of many that discredited the elite coalition’s legitimacy and accountability. 

The day following the seizure, a collective of Indigenous organizations announced a nationwide strike, taking advantage of the window of opportunity the elite had just gifted them by acting rashly. At this point in Guatemala, there was widespread disillusionment with democracy, and support for democracy was low. However, blatant anti-democratic actions by the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, and the ruling elite marked a return to the anti-corruption public sentiment felt in Guatemala in 2015. There were a couple of key strengths of the 2023 electoral mobilization. Firstly, it built on an extremely historic anti-corruption movement that began in 2015, which estimated that one out of every six people in Guatemala participated in these protests. The anti-corruption mobilizations set the stage for the 2023 mobilization’s success. Student groups, business owners, women’s and human rights organizations, and many other civil society organizations came together in 2015, creating a pro-democratic counter-coalition that lacked leadership. When the country’s largest Indigenous organization came together to declare a national strike in defense of democracy, the strength of the elite coalition began to waver. In a country with almost half its population of Indigenous Maya descent, the protagonism of Indigenous leaders in the movement was critical in gaining the massive support needed to effectively resist the regime’s attempts to stay in power.

Resistance efforts led by a broad prodemocracy coalition were successful. It’s important to note the strength of the organizational capacity of Indigenous groups. Through both short-term and long-term strategies, thousands of Guatemalans mobilized. The strike was just the start. Pro-democracy citizens continued to fight and display an inspiring degree of capacity and organizational resilience to fight threats to democracy. One of the critical aspects to the movement was its nonviolent nature. Protestors engaged in a variety of activities, peacefully advocating for more protections to democracy and the removal of elite loyalist Attorney General Consuelo Porras. Building off the strike, protesters marched, set up roadblocks and encampments, and effectively exercised their right to resist. In response to these activities, Attorney General Consuelo Porras ordered the mobilizations to stop, hoping for support from the Minister of the Interior, Napoleón Barrientos. When Barrientos refused to send police forces to repress the protests, Porras forced him to resign, signaling even further fragmentation among the elite coalition to Guatemalans. 

Through Indigenous leadership, Guatemalans successfully resisted a competitive authoritarian regime, ensuring a peaceful transition of power following the 2023 election of Bernardo Arévalo. When the elite coalition exposed how far they were willing to go in attacking key democratic institutions by raiding the electoral tribunal, it opened a window of opportunity for anti-corruption organizers to mobilize to protect the election. The mobilizations in 2023, built on the 2015 anti-corruption protests, were enriched by the organizational capacity of Indigenous leaders, maintained both national and international attention on Guatemala, and deepened the country’s democracy. Democratic resurgence in Guatemala occurred in 2023 because a broad pro-democracy coalition capitalized on regime errors and overreach, resisting these authoritarian tactics through nonviolent civil resistance.