Bernardo Arévalo of the progressive Movimiento Semilla won just 11 percent of the vote in the presidential election’s first round on June 25, but it was enough to give him the surprise second slot in the August 20 runoff ballot.

Guatemalan agents and police raided the offices of the Seed Movement of presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo on Friday as part of an investigation into alleged wrongdoing in the party’s formation.

Left-of-center opposition legislator Bernardo Arévalo shattered all forecasts, seizing second place in Guatemala’s presidential elections on Sunday and advancing to an August runoff. Arévalo will face political boss Sandra Torres.

After Zamora’s sentence, Brian A. Nichols, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, stated that “This verdict threatens independent journalism and freedom of expression in Guatemala.”

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — A Guatemalan tribunal sentenced newspaper founder José Rubén Zamora to six years in prison Wednesday in a money laundering case, concluding a trial that press freedom groups decried as a political persecution aimed at silencing a critical voice.

Reporters from various newsrooms conducted a symbolic funeral and protest Monday morning in front of the Supreme Court after elPeriódico, the leading investigative outlet in Guatemala, was forced to close after 27 years amid the trial of publisher José Rubén Zamora.

After candidate registration for Guatemala’s June elections closed this weekend, electoral authorities, toeing the line for far-right political operatives, have spuriously excluded two presidential tickets, clearing the way for conservative Zury Ríos.

An Indigenous female farmworker leader hopes to become Guatemala’s next president. But Thelma Cabrera faces an uphill fight after the country’s Electoral Tribunal refused to allow her to register her candidacy.

Thousands of people demonstrated in Guatemala on Tuesday to protest a court’s decision not to allow an Indigenous candidate to register for the country’s June 25 presidential elections. Thelma Cabrera was to have been the presidential candidate for the leftist Peoples Liberation Movement

Nine months before the presidential election, the country’s right-wing regime is fracturing into rivaling projects as progressive groups discuss the elusive idea of a united candidacy. Meanwhile, electoral authorities are indulging the pre-campaigning by the ruling party and top conservative Zury Ríos.

“¡No nos callarán!” —They will not shut us up!— chanted dozens of concerned citizens and journalists outside the Palace of Justice in Guatemala City on Monday morning as they waited for the hearing of prominent journalist José Rubén Zamora.

Guatemalan authorities arrested more than a dozen alleged members of a migrant smuggling network near the shared border with Mexico early Tuesday, including four sought by the United States in connection with the death of a migrant in Texas in 2021.

The Huehuetenango-based crime ring Los Huistas is trafficking cocaine produced by Colombian FARC dissidents for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel through the turf of its rival, the Sinaloa Cartel. The arrests of colluding Guatemalan military officers and the Huistas’ family ties to legislators beg the question of just how far the drug trade has penetrated the government and politics.

Guatemala, in Brief: The persecution of independent judges and prosecutors pressed onward with the order to put former top state attorney Virginia Laparra on trial. The shady Foundation against Terrorism, lead architect of the legal attacks that have already pushed two-dozen anti-corruption operators into exile, has named among its next targets the human rights ombudsman and three of the country’s most influential judges.

The judge in possession of incendiary testimony accusing President Alejandro Giammattei of illicit campaign finance announced she has left the country for exile in the United States, saying she feared an assassination attempt from the Guatemalan government.

A leak of more than eight million company documents revealed how a mining company operating illegally in a Maya Q’eqchi’ town near the Caribbean coastline bought local police and Indigenous leaders, spied on journalists, classified residents as allies or enemies, and sought to expel communities from ancestral land.

An El Faro investigation revealed that a former confidant of President Alejandro Giammattei testified under oath that the Guatemalan leader negotiated a bribe of $2.6 million USD from construction firms to fund his 2019 campaign.

The community of Agua Caliente, one of 16 Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the El Estor municipality, is demanding that the Guatemalan government give them title to their land and the right to determine how its natural resources are exploited.

In a fractured civil society, Indigenous authorities have become increasingly influential in the construction of broad-based political movements connecting Indigenous communities and campesino cooperatives with urban middle-class progressives. One such leader, Martín Toc, believes he can someday be president of Guatemala.

CHEPOL, Guatemala (AP) — Anxiety was high Saturday in Guatemala amid uncertainty about loved ones who might have been on the tractor-trailer that crashed in southern Mexico while jammed with smuggled migrants, killing 55 people and injuring more than 100.

José Luis Araneda Cintrón, a Guatemalan lawyer, began the process before Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal to found a political party called “Nuevas Ideas,” the same name as that of President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. The new party’s cyan logo is identical to that of the Salvadoran party.