Each one promises to be the capital letter with which a new history for Guatemala will begin. But upon closer examination of his circles, made up of recycled figures and ghosts from the past, doubts arise about this ‘clean slate’ illusion. Edmond Mulet, Zury Ríos and Sandra Torres are among the first places in the vote intention polls for the Guatemalan presidential elections on June 25. In alphabetical order, these three proposals for the country are presented here, all navigating the spectrum of the right, in elections marked by widespread discontent with the elites and the current political system.
Clear diction and elegant manners, Edmond Auguste Mulet Lesieur, is the male share of the presidential trio with the most options. He is a candidate for the center-right party founded and led by him: Cabal, which in Guatemala is used as a colloquial expression to say “exact.” At 72, it’s the second time this thin, soft-spoken man has run for president of Guatemala. In 2015, although it was his first participation, he obtained third place in the voting.
Leading Guatemala: Mission 23
His most applauded letter is his national and international diplomatic career of more than 20 years, during which he directed the Guatemalan embassies to the European Union, Belgium, Luxembourg and the United States. Mulet is also the highest-ranking Guatemalan diplomat in the United Nations hierarchy. Throughout his career, he oversaw 22 missions around the world, which is why he says running the Guatemalan presidency would be his “23rd mission.”
A former high-ranking UN official, Edmond Mulet has the advantage of a long diplomatic career
The candidate also worked as a journalist. He began as an apprentice in the workshops of the ‘Diario de Centro América’, then he was an opinion columnist for the weekly ‘¡Alerta!’, the magazine ‘Crónica’ and the newspaper ‘elPeriódico’. The latter closed in May of this year, after the imprisonment of its founder José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, which several international organizations and NGOs denounced as a political case. When expressing his rejection of the criminal prosecution of journalists, Mulet found himself denounced by the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (Feci), Rafael Curruchiche before the Supreme Electoral Tribunal for early campaigning.
The indelible shadow of adoptions
However, his career until then free of scandals was stained at the beginning of the 80s, when he practiced as a lawyer. He was captured and faced criminal proceedings on suspicion of belonging to a network of illegal adoptions of children for Canadian couples. The lawyer was released a few days later, and Mulet has asserted on multiple occasions that sending minors with tourist passports to another country was a common and legal procedure. However, during that time, more than 35,000 boys and girls were given up for adoption, many for the profit of criminal structures. Economic, social, security, and State modernization are the four axes of the Mulet program, with education, malnutrition, and the fight against corruption as priority issues.
To articulate his fight against corruption, he promises to create a virtual platform for anonymous complaints to encourage citizen participation. In an interview with France 24, he declared: “We have to face corruption head on, otherwise we will continue in this spiral of collective suicide, on this path of perdition. Because corruption has infected everything in Guatemala, it is corroding the bowels of the lives of Guatemalans.
And with an obvious resemblance to the policies of neighboring Nayib Bukele, Mulet’s plan also includes the construction of a high-security remote prison with zero communication to the outside to combat the extortions that are coming out of prisons today, as well as the installation of security cameras on every block in the country and the implementation of life imprisonment for gang members. However, on issues that cause division, for example, extractivism, judicial processes for crimes committed during the civil war and the nationalization of electric power, Edmond Mulet maintains neutral positions.
“Ready to be the first servant of the Republic of Guatemala,” her biography announces in advance on Twitter. Zury Mayté Ríos Sosa, 55, is the candidate of the far-right Valor-Unionista coalition. Elegant and always smiling, her supporters describe her as a firm and charismatic woman, for whom “politics is not a field for the weak.”
Zury Ríos is presented as the option of conservative values
The first time he experienced an electoral campaign was in 1991, at the age of 22. He headed the public relations office of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), the party that his father had just founded. And a few years later, it was as a presidential candidate that she experienced those campaigns; those elections being the fourth attempt of hers.
A surname that leaves no one indifferent
However, the path to participate as a candidate in the elections was difficult for her due to the shadow of her father. The applicant confessed to France 24 that she was fed up with the international media always associating her with her father, and with the same expressions: “daughter of the dictator” or “daughter of the genocide.” But it is difficult to ignore the figure of his father, General Efraín Ríos Montt, de facto president between 1982 and 1983 through a coup, accused of crimes against humanity for having responsibility for the destruction of the Mayan ethnic group. Ixil during the internal armed conflict.
Ríos Montt faced trial and was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, a sentence that was annulled by the constitutional court, which ordered a repeat of the process, which was not concluded because the general died. The presidential candidate accompanied her father throughout the entire process and she affirms in interviews with the media that her father died “innocent.”
Zury Ríos with his father, Efraín, after leaving a trial, in which he was not defeated, for the alleged massacres committed during his regime, on January 26, 2012.
In 2003, before the Guatemalan general elections of that year, Zury Ríos was accused of being one of the organizers of the so-called ‘Black Thursday’. This date refers to Thursday, July 24, 2003, when FRG officials and supporters led a massive demonstration in Guatemala City to protest the rejection of Ríos Montt’s candidacy by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The protest, between attacks on passers-by and street chaos, ended with the death of journalist Héctor Fernando Ramírez, who was covering the events.
Zury Ríos has affirmed more than once that her father was her inspiration. But taking his last name also meant losing big legal battles. In 2019, the Constitutional Court recommended to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal not to accept the candidacy of Zury Ríos for the presidential elections, by putting article 186 of the Political Constitution of the Republic before: the children of coup leaders cannot participate. But if that norm truncated previous attempts to dispute the presidency of Guatemala, this year the court left the way free.
Follow the model of Nayib Bukele
And it is with a softer image, giving up dark hair and changing her black clothes for a wardrobe with the colors of the political parties of conservative ideology -such as blue and white-, that the candidate hopes this time to seduce the voters. She is in favor of the death penalty and against abortion. In an interview with France 24 during a political rally in a Guatemala City market, the candidate assured: “We ask Guatemalans that if they want us to work for them, they know that we are the only option.” And echoing the program that her followers have been defending since the beginning of the campaign, she declared that she had as a rudder: “God, respect for private property, respect for the pursuit of happiness and freedom of thought.”
It was following these beliefs that his political project called «Agenda 4.40» was developed. But the candidate says that she also took El Salvador and Colombia as a model to create her security strategy – which constitutes her main axis – since in both countries, according to her, “a strong impact in the area of security” has been achieved: “We have to recognize that President Bukele has had the character, strength and determination to apply the law,” Ríos declared. Finally, and although they do not appear in his Agenda 4.40 plan, the establishment of the death penalty, the rejection of abortion, as well as same-sex marriage, are essential issues for Zury Ríos, which he did not hesitate to raise in his past campaigns.
«If you vote for the same ones, they will continue the same. We have already lost eight years,” he launched into attendance at a campaign closing rally attended by France 24 in the municipality of Mixco. The life of this veteran politician named Sandra Julieta Torres Casanova began in 2003, as the founder of the National Unity of Hope, UNE.
Sandra Torres got to know the ins and outs of power when she was First Lady in the period 2008-2011
The centrist party was believed to be in decline, but it resurfaced until today it is the largest political formation in Guatemala, with the largest number of mayors and deputies elected for the period 2020-2024. It is also the party that led his then partner, Álvaro Colom, to the presidency in 2007. Sandra Torres, who is 67 years old today, was the first lady of Guatemala between 2008 and 2011, a role she played promoting social programs aimed at supporting farmers, reducing poverty and child malnutrition.
Divorce for love of the presidency
The one who is not afraid to repeat that she “has too many pants”, has been seeking the presidential chair since 2011. And for this she divorced Colom, to comply with the law that did not allow direct relatives of the president in turn to seek the presidency. However, that same year, the Constitutional Court invalidated her candidacy, considering her determination as “fraud of law.”
In 2015, he did manage to sign up but lost to Jimmy Morales. In 2019, Torres suffered another defeat, this time against Alejandro Giammattei, the current president of Guatemala, and for this contest as well, the polls predict that voters will take it to the second round.
Sandra Torres was married to Álvaro Colom, but separated from the then president to participate in the 2011 elections
Upon reaching the Presidency in 2019, Giammattei fulfilled one of his campaign promises: that Sandra Torres be brought to justice. Sandra Torres was arrested on September 2, 2019 for allegedly illegal electoral financing and illicit association just three weeks after losing the elections. She was detained for a few months before being placed under house arrest. Finally, in November 2022, a Guatemalan court decided to close the criminal proceedings against the candidate, considering that there were insufficient elements for Torres to face an oral and public debate for the crime of illegal electoral financing.
Originally from one of the departments most abandoned by the State
In her professional career prior to politics, the woman with green eyes edged in black has developed as an investor, executive and businesswoman, and had her own textile company. Unlike her two rivals who were both born in the capital, Sandra Torres comes from the department of Petén, one of the poorest in Guatemala. Her outreach to her indigenous communities led her to study Quiché, one of the country’s 22 Mayan languages.
The former first lady, like her opponents, affirms that she would apply Bukele’s strategies “to end the scourge of homicides, murders, and extortions in our country.” And there are no longer three, as Zury Ríos proposes, but four maximum security prisons that Sandra Torres promises to build. In statements to France 24, she emphasized: “I have not been saying it since now, I have been saying it for a while. Communications within prisons must be controlled. And I am going to declare the extortionists terrorists». She also proposes eliminating VAT on basic basket products and providing single mothers with half the minimum wage, and promises that if she becomes president, half of her cabinet will be made up of women.