Guatemala 2023 General Election

The EU mission names Carlos Pineda of Prosperidad Ciudadana, disqualified less than a month before the vote while leading the polls, Roberto Arzu of Podemos, and Jordan Rodas, the vice-presidential candidate of the Movimiento para la Liberacion de los Pueblos, and finds that in none of those three cases did the grounds meet the requirements for a reasonable restriction; the body of the same report lists a third presidential candidate, Oscar Castaneda of Poder, among those made ineligible by what it calls an arbitrary and selective interpretation of the law by the Tribunal, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court. Pineda's exclusion followed a 19 May administrative appeal court order annulling his party's 2022 national assembly, which removed all 1,438 of its candidates at every level. The OAS mission records that of 41,430 candidates registered as of 22 June, 4,155 (10 per cent) had been excluded, including four presidential tickets, that the resulting uncertainty delayed ballot printing by a month and eroded citizen confidence in the electoral and judicial authorities, and that registered candidacies were still being changed on 23 June, two days before the vote, forcing ballots to be reprinted in two municipalities.

On 1 July 2023, in file 3731-2023, the Court granted a provisional amparo to nine parties, ordered the departmental electoral boards to convene a fresh scrutiny review hearing and compare the tally sheets, and required the Tribunal to suspend the qualification and officialization of results meanwhile. The Tribunal issued no uniform procedure, so boards adopted their own: some reviewed only challenged votes, others carried out a full review of all tally sheets. Hearings ran 4 to 6 July and produced only minor modifications; the review of all 2,023 Guatemala City tally sheets added 605 votes for Arevalo. The Tribunal announced the final first-round presidential result on 12 July in Agreement 1328-2023.

A first-instance criminal judge, identified by the IACHR as the Seventh Investigative Criminal Court, ordered the Citizen Registry on 12 July 2023 to revoke Semilla's legal personality within 24 hours; the State of Guatemala later told the IACHR that the order was a precautionary measure under article 82 of the Law against Organised Crime, while article 92 of the Electoral and Political Parties Law prohibits suspending parties during an electoral process. The head of FECI announced it almost simultaneously with the Tribunal's announcement of the first-round presidential result the same day. The Constitutional Court granted Semilla a provisional amparo on 13 July declaring that the criminal order did not affect Agreement 1328-2023, the Supreme Court granted a definitive amparo on 18 August, and the Citizen Registry nonetheless executed the suspension on 28 August. The IACHR and the OAS mission date the dissolution of Semilla's parliamentary group by the executive committee of Congress to 30 August; the EU mission gives 29 August. The Tribunal revoked the suspension on 3 September.

The EU mission counts more than forty FECI actions against the Tribunal, including raids on its premises on 13 and 20 July and on Semilla's headquarters on 21 July, and records tampering with sensitive election materials and the seizure of the tally sheets of all five elections. On 12 September prosecutors raided the Centre of Operations of the Electoral Process where electoral material was held; the OAS mission noted that under article 243 of the Electoral and Political Parties Law, which has constitutional rank, only the Tribunal and the departmental electoral boards may verify and qualify electoral documentation. On 29 September, in what the OAS mission called the fifth operation conducted by the Public Prosecutor's Office since the elections and one carried out without due cause, original documents of Acts 4 and 8 were confiscated while Tribunal officials were prevented from communicating or recording the operation and the court orders were not shown; the IACHR puts the total removed at more than 125,000 documents and original records, and International IDEA describes 160 ballot boxes holding around 125,000 first-round records.

Prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant against the director of the Tribunal's Citizen Registry for not suspending Semilla, and around the announcement of the run-off result sought to have the immunity of the five Tribunal magistrates and of the registry director lifted. The EU mission records that they demanded the names of the more than 5,000 data-entry clerks who processed the provisional results, and of some 28,000 employees of departmental and municipal authorities and polling stations in the department and city of Guatemala; on 22 August FECI gave the Tribunal five days to hand over the names and positions of all polling station members, all reviewers, all data-entry coordinators and all departmental board members, together with the location of every polling station. The OAS mission's statement of 29 September records that the Public Prosecutor's Office had asked for the immunity of the regular and alternate Tribunal judges to be lifted over the alleged crimes of fraud, breach of duties and abuse of authority, and the IACHR records the resulting impeachment proceedings. International IDEA records that on 30 November 2023 Congress stripped four of the five magistrates who organised the election of their immunity, on an Attorney General's complaint alleging corruption in the procurement of the TREP system, that a judge barred those four from holding office in March 2024, and that the Tribunal has since worked with one magistrate and substitutes.

The OAS mission responded the same day that articles 234 and 235 of the Electoral and Political Parties Law set out the grounds for nullity exhaustively and that the reasons the Ministry alleged do not fit them, that under article 125(c) of that law the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is the only body competent to decide on the validity or nullity of an election, and that the Tribunal had already proclaimed the results and closed the electoral process on 31 October. The same statement records a further request to lift the immunity of President-elect Bernardo Arevalo and members of Movimiento Semilla. The Constitutional Court had already ruled on 14 December 2023, in file 6175-2023, that Congress and its Executive Board must guarantee the taking of office of every official elected in the 2023 process, and the handover took place on 14 January 2024.

The EU mission's social media monitoring identified 57 opaque Facebook pages, 15 of them presenting as news sources, which boosted at least 51 deceptive political advertisements; many were administered from outside Guatemala, and five became inaccessible the day after the first round. It also observed groups of real, anonymous and bot-driven accounts operating in coordination, locally known as netcenters, moving allegations of fraud, intimidation and accusations against international observers across platforms, including through manipulated content and deepfakes, and found that the platforms did not enforce meaningful action against it.

The mission stated on 12 September 2023 that it had analysed the findings on which the complaints of irregularities in both rounds were based and verified that they were unfounded: there was no evidence that the yellow copies of Document Number 4 transmitted from voting centres in the first round had been altered, and the very isolated tally-sheet errors in both rounds did not change the order of preferences, let alone approach a second-round margin of more than 20 percentage points and almost 875,000 votes. It repeated on 29 September that it found no elements casting doubt on the results, and on 8 December answered the specific allegation that tally sheet 4 had been adulterated by comparing the sheets used against the model published in Agreement 50-2023 and finding the information fields identical, with nothing added or removed and the only difference being that the model ran to two pages and the printed sheet to one. The Constitutional Court-ordered review of the first-round tally sheets returned the same result the Tribunal had already announced, and a domestic observation mission running a parallel vote count reached the same conclusion.

The EU mission records that the party insisted on irregularities in both rounds without substantiating them and challenged the results before the Supreme Court, which dismissed the petition. Of the five annulment requests the Tribunal received after the run-off, the UNE petition challenged the certification of the second-round results on the ground that one Tribunal magistrate lacked the competence to sign the agreement announcing them. Sandra Torres did not concede and did not appear in public after the vote. The OAS mission separately examined the complaints of irregularities in both rounds and reported that it had verified them to be unfounded.

The EU mission records that most parties publicly expressed confidence in the TREP before the vote and that those which later questioned it, including UNE, provided no reliable evidence of misuse; within two hours of the close of run-off polling the Tribunal had published over 99 per cent of the tally sheets corresponding to the preliminary results. The OAS mission found that complaints about the pace of TREP processing on 20 August rested on erroneous calculations, and that the flow matched both the national simulation of 18 August and the mission's own election-day observation; on 29 September it reiterated that the TREP is a non-binding quick count that usurps no function of the Tribunal, that the counting and recording of votes is by law the polling boards' task, and that the TREP figures coincided with its own and with those of domestic observation. Answering the Public Ministry's later claim that the system had been preloaded, the mission recorded that it had itself verified the zeroing of the TREP databases and repositories at 17:00 on election day and the results repository still at zero at 18:00.

According to the Public Ministry the party counterfeited around 5,000 of the signatures required for registration in 2018, including those of twelve deceased individuals, and paid around 175,000 quetzales from unknown funds to do so. The EU mission notes that such procedural irregularities, if they exist, should carry legal consequences but cannot restrict freedom of association, and that the Constitutional Court held on 5 October 2023 that a political organisation may be suspended through criminal procedure only where the justification is reasonable, proportional, suitable, necessary and strictly indispensable. No finding on the underlying allegation appears in the evidence cited on this page.

In its statement of 12 September 2023 the OAS mission held that the actions of the Public Prosecutor's Office and of the criminal court that authorised them lacked expedience and proportionality, evidenced a political instrumentalisation of the criminal prosecution apparatus, and might constitute the offences of prevarication and abuse of authority; in its statement of 29 September it described the Office's permanent siege of the Tribunal without grounds or clear motivation as a political persecution reminiscent of those carried out by authoritarian regimes. The State of Guatemala replied to the IACHR that the Public Ministry is an autonomous, technical and apolitical body, that the search of Tribunal headquarters complied with the law and a judge's order in a case under seal, that the impeachment procedure exists to safeguard judicial independence, that every judicial resolution in the case was duly reasoned and issued by the competent court, and that the investigation in no way sought to alter the election results.