Guatemala is immersed in uncertainty, after the Constitutional Court (CC) ordered this Saturday the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to suspend the officialization of the results of the elections of June 25 on suspicion of “fraud” denounced by nine political parties. Among them, the National Unity of Hope, whose candidate for the Presidency of the country, Sandra Torres, was the most voted, after bringing together 15.8% of the votes. In principle, the second electoral round is scheduled for August 20, in which Torres will compete for the Presidency of Guatemala with the candidate of the Seed Movement, Bernardo Arévalo de León, who received 11.7% of the vote and who has already denounced that the resolution of the CC has been issued “outside the legal framework”.
Specifically, the CC stressed that the TSE must suspend the qualification of the results, so that, by August 20, “everything has been duly cleared up,” once the Departmental Electoral Boards and that of the Central District call a new scrutiny review hearing, as they have requested in an amparo promoted by the general secretaries of nine political formations, among which is also the official party Vamos. In it, the representatives of the parties “will be able to assert the objections and challenges that they deem pertinent, especially those that generate the doubts that they have raised.”
Thus, the CC has granted provisional protection to the Political organizations that have denounced that in the June 25 elections there has been an “obvious intention to provoke fraud” given the “existing discrepancies between the certifications of the records of the Vote Receiving Boards and the data published by the TSE. In this sense, twelve parties, among which are the nine that have raised the amparo, have censured in a joint statement that a “large number of acts present inconsistencies, alterations and other discrepancies”, which supposes a “serious situation that puts the electoral process and democracy itself at risk.”
Thus, They asked that “the last instances be reached to determine who the material and intellectual authors are” of what they already call a “fraud”. Among the nine complaining parties are the two candidates that the polls predicted would be competing for second place in the elections: Zury Ríos, from the Valor Unionista coalition, and Edmond Mulet, from the CABAL party.
The circumstance occurs that the TSE had not yet finished counting the 5.5 million votes castGiven that 0.88 percent of the votes remain to be counted in an election in which the number of null votes (966,389) was even higher than that obtained by the winning candidate, Sandra Torres (881,592), which represented 17.3%, while the blank vote reached 6.9% (388,442) and abstention stood at 39.5%, due to widespread discontent among the population over the lack of response to your needs.