Former comedian Jimmy Morales swept the vote in the second round of the Guatemalan presidential elections, riding a wave of disillusionment with a corrupt government.
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A supporter holds up a baby as he waits for Jimmy Morales, the National Front of Convergence party presidential candidate, during a campaign rally in Guatemala City, Thursday, October 22, 2015. “My commitment remains to God and the Guatemalan people, and I will work with all my heart and strength not to defraud you”. “I have received a mandate, and the mandate of the people of Guatemala is to fight against the corruption that has consumed us”.
A former TV comedian with no experience in government has won the run-off vote in Guatemala’s presidential election. The victor will have to respond quickly to demands for deep reform, said Alejandro Maldonado, who took over as interim president after Otto Perez Molina swapped the presidential palace for a prison cell September 3.
Many saw Morales’ victory as a sign of the growing frustration with traditional politicians in the country.
“He (Morales) has no program and no team”, Hugo Novales, a Guatemalan political analyst, told TIME. “We are exhausted of the same faces”.
Morales will have to govern with just 11 seats in the 158-seat Congress.
A social conservative who campaigned on the slogan “Neither corrupt nor a thief”, Mr. Morales capitalized on the popular fury against the political system, rising quickly in the polls in recent months.
Morales promised Guatemalans that he would strengthen controls and build a more transparent government. His former vice president has also been jailed in the multimillion-dollar graft and fraud scheme.
According to Morales, the migration problem will continue in Guatemala as long as insecurity, lack of jobs, opportunities for economic development, access to health and education prevail.
He’s backed by a right-wing political party founded by ex-officers from the country’s brutal civil war, a few of whom have been implicated in a few of the war’s worst abuses, but other than sweeping out corruption and a vague commitment to lowering taxes and limited government, his plans for running Guatemala are pretty unclear. Ovalle is another product of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in Fort Benning Georgia, as was the now disgraced and jailed former president, Perez Molina, who also had been involved in army operations in the Ixil Triangle area in the 1980s. “We are going to offer constructive support that will benefit the country”.
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“That’s a risk.” The United States falls at number 17 on the global Transparency corruption perceptions index, with a score of 74 on a scale where 0 is “highly corrupt” and 100 is “very clean”.
