Comedian Jimmy Morales wins sweeping victory in Guatemalan elections.
| Autor | Reynolds, Louisa |
Jimmy Morales, an actor who quit television comedy to run for office, promising to stamp out corruption, won a landslide victory in the Oct. 25 presidential election.
With 100% of ballots counted, Morales had 67% of the vote, compared with 32% for his rival, former first lady Sandra Torres, of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE). This is the largest margin of victory in a presidential election since Guatemala returned to democratic rule in 1985 after 36 years of authoritarian military rule.
The outcome tallies with the result predicted by Costa Rican polling firm Prodatos and published by Prensa Libre on Oct. 21, which gave Morales 67.9% of the votes and Torres 32%.
Initially, voter turnout was low but gradually gathered pace before the polling stations closed at 5 p.m. Preliminary results indicated that only 54.37% of those registered to vote decided to do so, a significantly lower turnout than in the first round on Sept. 6, in which 71% of those registered cast their vote.
Morales' landslide victory came six months after former President Otto Perez Molina (2012-2015), his former vice president Roxana Baldetti, and a cohort of top government officials were involved in a massive customs fraud scandal known as La Linea. In a separate scandal, Edgar Barquin, the vice presidential candidate of Libertad Democratica Renovada (LIDER), which had been predicted to win the first round, was accused of involvement in money laundering when he served as president of the Bank of Guatemala (NotiCen, April 23, 2015, and Aug. 6, 2015).
The magnitude of these scandals prompted an unprecedented wave of protests demanding Perez Molina's resignation that finally forced him to step down on Sept. 1 and led to a record-high turnout during the first round as many voters were hopeful that the elections would bring about change (NotiCen, Sept. 3, 2015).
By the time the second round took place, however, the momentum generated by the protests had died down and had been replaced by a deep sense of apathy and disaffection with the two finalists.
Among those who decided to stay home was 40year-old personal defense instructor Jorge Mario Marroquin, who says this is the first time he hasn't voted since he turned 18. "Even though I live less than a block away from the polling station, I decided it was a waste of time; people are fed up with politics as usual," says Marroquin. "I was really happy when I saw people outside Congress demanding Otto Perez Molina's...
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