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.

After protests against a mining project erupted into violence over the weekend, Guatemala’s government imposed martial law and a curfew in El Estor and filled the town of 20,000 residents with security forces.

A national strike shook Guatemala last week following the removal of a top anti-corruption prosecutor. In El Salvador, while walking a precarious fiscal tightrope, Nayib Bukele handed a rare olive branch to civil society groups critical of his administration.

The firing of an anti-corruption prosecutor has sparked an angry reaction from civil society and demands for the resignations of President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General María Consuelo Porras.

For more than three years, Juan Francisco Sandoval headed the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI), a prosecutorial unit specialized in high-stakes corruption cases investigating the upper echelons of Guatemalan politics and business.

“We still have no testing or contact tracing strategy to control the pandemic,” Óscar Chávez, of independent think tank and data clearinghouse Lab Datos GT, told El Faro English. “As we see a spike in cases almost double that of the peak in 2020, in reality, we know that the impact of the pandemic is much broader, but we just can’t see it.”

For the last five years of our lives, we’ve not been able to hug him and say: “Have a good day, Dad.”