Indigenous people played a key role in bringing Guatemala’s current president, Bernardo Arévalo, to office. The 67-year-old sociologist made a surprise run-off in the 2023 elections and eventually won with 58 per cent of the vote. Arévalo came to office at the head of an emerging party, the Movimiento Semilla (‘Seed Movement’), formed by urban professionals with the aim of fighting corruption, defending human rights and strengthening the rule of law in Central America’s most populous country. For the country’s most disadvantaged and discriminated populations, which include a large number of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples (who make up 43.75 per cent of the population), Arévalo is the most hopeful political figure to emerge in many years.

Yet, despite his landslide victory, he came close to not being sworn in due to judicial manoeuvres by the national prosecutor’s office at the service of the so-called ‘pact of the corrupt’, an alliance of MPs accused of crimes, extreme right-wing politicians, members of the Guatemalan business elite and drug trafficking organisations. Attorney General María Consuelo Porras tried on several occasions to overturn Arevalo’s electoral victory through a series of legal proceedings against him and his party.

The fact that these manoeuvres, which succeeded in hindering and delaying the inauguration process, didn’t ultimately prevent Arévalo and his vice-president, Karin Herrera, from assuming control of the executive, is in large part thanks to Guatemala’s Indigenous communities. For 106 consecutive days, between 2 October and 15 January, thousands of Indigenous protesters, led by the 48 cantons of Totonicapán and the Indigenous mayor’s office of Sololá, took turns permanently occupying the area around the public prosecutor’s office in Guatemala City, the nation’s capital.

With the support of trade unions, peasant groups, Movimiento Semilla itself and the leftist Indigenous party Winaq (founded by Indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú), Indigenous leaders called for an “indefinite national strike” accompanied by massive traffic blockades. This gradually grew to 142 simultaneous road blockades, which paralysed large swaths of the country.

Public pressure, coupled with strong international diplomatic support for the election results to be respected, eventually made it possible for the new government to take office. But almost eight months later, the cautious hope that many Indigenous communities held at the beginning of the year is giving way to frustration. While Arévalo has presented a legislative initiative to change the rules governing the public prosecutor and make it possible for the attorney general to be deposed by the president, Porras remains in her post for the time being and Movimiento Semilla remains legally disqualified by her (its supporters can form the government in their individual capacity but have no parliamentary group of their own in Congress and cannot sit on legislative working commissions). This has further artificially weakened Movimiento Semilla’s position in the chamber, where it is the third largest political force, with 23 of the 160 seats. At the same time, Arévalo has been forced to include members of other parties in his own executive and govern with the public prosecutor’s office and part of the judiciary working against him and for the ‘pact of the corrupt’. In practice, Arévalo can only count on his most loyal ministers, his political will and a reduced margin for action. Guatemala’s most impoverished and vulnerable populations often fail to understand these complex circumstances and simply see their only promise of changing decades, even centuries, of discrimination, economic oppression and despair fading away.

“The original peoples don’t have a single representative in the government”

One of the most prominent grassroots leaders coordinating the marches to defend democracy was Professor Luz Emilia Ulario Zavala, the Indigenous mayor of Santa Lucía Utatlán, in the south-western department of Sololá. She held this post of biannual traditional authority until 31 December last year and her period in office largely coincided with the protests. Half a year later, she has become pessimistic about the current situation: “Our hopes are fading because the ‘pact of the corrupt’ has not been dissolved; on the contrary, it has been strengthened,” Ulario tells Equal Times. “We are attentive” to the steps that Arévalo may take, “but there is already a certain disenchantment on the part of the population because the president didn’t choose anyone elected by the people to govern with him. The original peoples don’t have a single representative in the government. Not one,” she says.

Arévalo was the first Guatemalan president to mention Indigenous peoples in his inaugural address, and his subordinates have kept their commitment to meet with a group of Indigenous authorities every month. However, according to Ulario, after half a dozen meetings, they are still busy with formalities “and a lot of bureaucracy,” when “the needs of the people are well known, there is no need for so much protocol”.

This worries the Indigenous communities because “the people placed all their hopes” in Arévalo, but “there is terrible corruption at all levels of government, from the mayors to the ministries, as well as in Congress”. Making changes, she says, “is going to cost him a lot, although if he manages to make the three branches of government independent, truly autonomous, that would be enough”.

Moreover, Movimiento Semilla “is a movement designed from a middle-class perspective. In the [government’s development] plan [which focuses on investment in the country’s basic infrastructure, which has helped it win support among business chambers] we don’t see the Maya, the Garifuna or the Xinca”. Ulario does not see “the political will to be inclusive” of Indigenous peoples, perhaps, as she believes, due to the racism deeply imbedded in Guatemalan society. “I believe that racism still continues. There are currently professionals from the four groups [Mayan, Xinca, Garifuna and Ladino (mestizo)] who are jurists, political scientists, doctors and business administrators. There are so many who are prepared to take on responsibilities but I believe that there is still this idea that the people are incapable of governing the country”. Moreover, although she sees in the president a decent, honest and well-meaning man, Ulario feels that his advisors and assistants, some inherited from previous governments, “are not guiding him well” and hindering his relationship with the Indigenous people from within.

Everything for the people...but without the Indigenous

“We understand perfectly well that he can’t just be the president of the Maya or the Xinca,” says Ulario. “But while he does have to take everyone into account, he also has to be more inclusive. The Indigenous peoples would have supported him, as they did before he took office, but he didn’t know how to take advantage of this. Now I don’t think he’ll be able to improve his image with the population. These communities might end up abandoning him because they are not blind.”

Luis Linares, labour coordinator for the Asociación de Investigación y Estudios Sociales (ASIES), agrees with Ulario. “The mobilisation of the Indigenous peoples was crucial to ensuring that the conspiracy to block the inauguration of Bernardo Arévalo was unsuccessful,” he says. He was thus surprised when the new government appointed “people linked to the business sector” but not to the Indigenous communities. “It’s not that there should be an exchange of favours, but I do believe that he should have asked the Indigenous peoples, their leadership, who were present and whom he visited the very night he took office, which was seen as a sign of good relations to come, to propose a possible ministry or relevant position,” in order to break with the “anomaly we have had in Guatemala in terms of the lack of Indigenous participation” in politics. Only the current labour minister, Míriam Roquel (linked to the Winaq party), is of Mayan K’iche’ ethnic origin, though she is not linked to Indigenous community organisations.

“The government is experiencing difficulties in terms of credibility,” says Linares. “The obstacles it faces are within a framework of inherited [government] corruption, mainly in public procurement”. He believes that the government’s monthly contacts with Indigenous groups are essentially “measures to gain time, to be able to say that they are talking, but without any results”. The government, he says, should develop “an agenda to address the historical deficits faced by Indigenous peoples”. Although Guatemala signed the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (C169) in 1999, it has only implemented rigged consultation processes with Indigenous peoples, with interlocutors often subservient to the interests of the country’s business sector. These consultations have often failed to include properly regulated compensatory measures for the Indigenous communities affected by certain economic activities, especially those of extractive companies.

From the government, President Arévalo’s own private secretary, Ana Glenda Tager, acknowledges to Equal Times that “it is important to manage the expectations of the population, as we have inherited a profoundly weakened state, without sufficient resources and with certain political and criminal interests.”

Indeed, “one of the main challenges we face is to cleanse public institutions within the framework of democratic rules and the rule of law, while also attempting to respond to the urgent needs of the citizens,” she assures. Tager, a sociologist and Arévalo’s collaborator before coming to government, confirmed that amongst those needs are those of the Indigenous peoples, and that “in response to a request from the Assembly of Indigenous and Ancestral Authorities, the president institutionalised a permanent dialogue table with Indigenous authorities from across the country in March.” Tager continues: “During the first stage of the government, dialogue has been prioritised” with them, as they are “emerging political actors who hold great legitimacy, being directly elected in community assemblies.” Indeed, “we are working to include other representative voices of the Indigenous peoples in different dialogue spaces,” although the established table “aims to address the development priorities of the Indigenous peoples and establish a frank dialogue to hear their voice on the major national issues.”

In this regard, the secretary reaffirmed that “the Government is committed to increasing the representation of indigenous peoples in institutions during its four-year term.” After all, its cabinet “included the perspective of Indigenous peoples in the principles of its General Government Policy 2024–2027,” and “the most urgent needs are being defined jointly” to enable “short, medium, and long-term actions.” Racism and inequalities are a constant among the difficulties they face. “There are widespread dynamics of exclusion,” says Tager, “but it is important to consider the territorial and vision differences that exist among the various peoples. The president has signed shared work agendas with ancestral authorities of the Ixil, Chortí, and Xinka territories, and others are being prepared.”

The Arévalo government has committed itself to dialogue with Indigenous organisations to implement a rural development policy, although issues of inequality in the distribution of wealth remain on the table, such as “47 per cent chronic malnutrition among children under five, which in Indigenous departments such as Quiché and Huehuetenango rises to 70 per cent”. This “affects a person for life, including their learning abilities,” says Linares. This situation is particularly unacceptable considering that the country “has adequate conditions for food production yet is suffering from chronic malnutrition comparable to that of countries devastated by war, such as Yemen and East Timor”.

For Julio Coj, leader of the Unión Sindical de Trabajadores de Guatemala (UNSITRAGUA), himself of Mayan Poqomam origin, child malnutrition, poverty, illiteracy and lack of opportunities will only make the country less and less competitive.

“I’ve said it to the business leaders and I say it to the minister of labour,” he tells Equal Times. “What are they waiting for? In 15 or 20 years they won’t have a skilled workforce. All these malnourished children are going to go to school and they’re not going to perform.”

Meanwhile, state infrastructure has been intentionally kept outdated, insufficient and “plagued by corruption” because it was in the interests of the business community to do so. To the extent they are now agreeing to come to terms with Arévalo, it’s “because they will be able to privatise all these areas. Education, health, airports, ports – they will all go into private hands. This is what Arévalo himself said was going to happen [to modernise the country] with a policy of public-private partnership, because the state doesn’t have the economic capacity to do it alone. In the end those who benefit most are the business elites.”

Coj continues: “That is their strategy. Those who generate wealth for them, the workers, live in such poor conditions that they have to emigrate and become cheap labour. Meanwhile, 74 per cent of our jobs are in the informal economy,” while only 13 per cent of the remaining workers affiliated to social security are Indigenous. They face a government whose “political will is there,” Coj says, although with so many limitations that it would already be a great achievement if these four years of Arévalo’s government [in Guatemala, presidents serve a single four-year term] were at least enough to enforce Guatemala’s own labour, trade union organisation and social protection laws.

Better to have a friend at the helm, even if his hands are tied

However, it must be borne in mind that “Arévalo’s government is different” to previous ones, and “fighting against the tide is quite difficult,” Luis Cortez, secretary general of the Central General de Trabajadores de Guatemala (CGTG), tells Equal Times. In this regard, for Indigenous people in particular and workers in general, having a friendly president, even one whose hands are tied, is preferable to dealing with an ally of the ‘pact of the corrupt’. “Now at least we know that we have a friend there, although he is not doing as well as we might have hoped because the only power he has is the executive,” while the rest of the state is against him. “We understand the situation in the country. The system is corrupt, you can approach this corrupt structure with good intentions, but then they sit you down, they condition you and tell you: ‘Either you do it this way or we report you to the public prosecutor and you go to jail.’” In their negotiations with the government and the ILO to work on the Roadmap (initiated in 2013) to end violence against unions and workers and guarantee labour rights and freedoms, the unions have given Arévalo a period of confidence through February 2025 to be able to take the first steps in this direction. “Many people are getting impatient. My answer has always been: Comrades, look: this is not going to be fixed in four months. You have to be patient. You have to believe and trust because at least we have a government that is different to the previous ones.”

We are talking about a country with a high crime rate (16.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, according to the United Nations Development Programme), which isone of the ten worst countries in the world for workers, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Barely a month and a half ago two more trade union leaders were murdered in Guatemala, in addition to two other recent deaths of “defenders of Indigenous peoples, a lawyer and a member of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC),” says Cortez. All of this is designed to “sow terror and despair,” he stresses, and to make people think that “the president is not doing anything”. He hopes that there will be no more deaths among defenders of nature, Indigenous peoples and labour rights, although “we know that in four years it will not be possible to fix much,” because “employers and municipalities are involved here. They are the biggest violators of workers’ rights” and regularly dismiss union members en masse without consequence. And yet, he reaffirms, “it is only through trade union organisation that respect for labour rights has been enforced”.

Rafael Segura, organising secretary of the Confederación de Unidad Sindical de Guatemala (CUSG), tells Equal Times: “The Guatemalan trade union movement has a mixture of hope and scepticism that the current government will achieve significant changes in favour of labour rights, freedom of association and the minimum wage.”

Although it is possible to view the opportunity that Arévalo represents with optimism, there is also “scepticism due to the historical relationship between the country’s business elites and Guatemala’s previous governments”. Coj agrees with both: there have been political manoeuvres to ‘boycott’ Arévalo, including recent and provocative forced judicial expropriations of Indigenous peoples, intended to sow disillusionment with the executive, “as if to demonstrate that the government that the people voted for was not the right one, and to ensure that they will not vote for Semilla in the next elections. And a people with tremendous illiteracy, with great poverty and needs, want immediate answers,” Coj says. “But this will not be easy to achieve because we have a very strong oligarchy and a very conservative business sector, especially in agriculture, and the executive has had no choice but to ally itself with them. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t even complete a year in government.”

All the interviewees agree that the racism that Indigenous people suffer in society is at least not reflected as much in the trade unions, though they still see much room for improvement. Many Indigenous trade unionists hide their origin, dress like the Ladino population and even avoid using their surnames so as not to feel excluded, admits Coj, although this is not the case with him. It is still “necessary to actively promote their participation in union leadership roles,” as well as to support their development “with training and skills building programmes adapted to their specific needs, and to create an inclusive union environment that values cultural diversity,” acknowledges Segura.

“We have suffered exclusion, discrimination and racism since 1492,” says Ulario Zavala of Sololá.

“We have always been slaves in one way or another. We have been made invisible, we have been excluded from everything and we continue to be excluded. This time the straw that broke the camel’s back was the lucidity of the people in the face of the arrogant manipulation of their votes. That was when the people fought back, because their vote had to be respected.” The Indigenous peoples, despite having higher illiteracy rates, are very “aware of all the evils” they have suffered, as Ulario says. This was the reason for their demonstration of strength a few months ago: “It wasn’t only because of the votes, it’s the sum total of everything their people have experienced for more than 532 years”. And therein lies the real hope for Coj: “The day that the people understand that we can only fight unjust laws if we are organised and united is the day that Guatemala will be able to change,” he says. “No government will be able to change [things] alone, automatically, if there are no people organising behind it, people in the streets fighting and making political proposals.”