How Guatemala picks its judges and keeps generals from the presidency

How a court stopped a sitting president's coup

When Jorge Serrano Elías was inaugurated on 14 January 1991, one elected civilian government handed power to another, which Guatemala had not managed successfully before. His Movement of Solidarity Action had won 18 of the 116 seats in the Congress elected on 11 November 1990, so he governed from a small minority.

On 25 May 1993 he dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and moved to restrict civil freedoms, presenting the measure as a campaign against corruption. It failed. Protest across Guatemalan society and pressure from abroad both counted against it, and so did the decision of the army to enforce a ruling of the Constitutional Court against the takeover. Serrano left the country.

On 5 June 1993 Congress, acting under the 1985 constitution, elected Ramiro de León Carpio to complete the term. He belonged to no party. He was the Human Rights Ombudsman, holder of an office the constitution had written into existence and that the civilian government of Vinicio Cerezo had set up in 1987. Article 189 provides for exactly this: where both president and vice president are permanently absent, Congress appoints a successor by two-thirds of all deputies.

De León opened a campaign to "purify" Congress and the Supreme Court. In November 1993 an agreement brokered by the Catholic Church between his administration and Congress produced a package of constitutional reforms, and a popular referendum approved it on 30 January, in 1994 by one account in the research and 1995 by another. A new Congress was elected in August 1994 to serve out the unexpired term. The text in force today is known for that reason as the constitution of 1985 as revised in 1993.

Each piece of that sequence was an institution the 1985 text had invented. A court of constitutional review ruled against the head of state, an ombudsman answerable to Congress took his chair, and the army acted on a judgment it had no part in writing.

What the constitution was written to prevent

The constitution was drafted under military government. Efraín Ríos Montt had come to power after junior officers staged a coup on 23 March 1982, and his junta annulled the constitution of 1965, dissolved Congress, suspended political parties and cancelled the electoral law. General Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores overthrew Ríos Montt and called the election of a National Constituent Assembly, which voters chose on 1 July 1984. The assembly approved the text in May 1985.

Its transitory provisions show the handover being engineered step by step. General elections were set for 3 November 1985, with a presidential runoff on 8 December. Congress and the president were to take office on 14 January 1986, and the assembly was to dissolve itself the same day. Cerezo, the Christian Democrat candidate, won the runoff with some 68% of the vote; no civilian had been elected president in the 15 years before.

Several articles read as answers to the decades just ended. Article 186 bars from the presidency and the vice presidency the leader or chiefs of any coup d'état, armed revolution or similar movement that altered the constitutional order, anyone who took over the government as a result, and their relatives to the fourth degree of blood. It bars serving soldiers unless they left the army at least five years before the election is called, ministers of any religion, magistrates of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and anyone who was a minister in the six months before the vote. Article 187 bars anyone who has held the presidency by election, or exercised it for more than two years, from ever holding it again, and makes an attempt at re-election punishable.

Article 281 then puts Articles 186 and 187 beyond the reach of any amendment, together with the republican form of government and the principle of no re-election. The army is written down in Article 244 as professional, apolitical, obedient and non-deliberative, and soldiers on active duty may not vote. Transitory Article 21 adds that the constitution keeps its validity through any temporary interruption brought about by force.

The ban met its most obvious test in 2003. Ríos Montt, President of Congress in 2000, led the Guatemalan Republican Front, and the party argued that the events he took part in predated the constitution and so could not disqualify him. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal held that as a former putschist he was barred. In July 2003 the party brought supporters into the capital with transport, food and metre-long sticks, and the riots that followed became known as Jueves Negro, Black Thursday. The US embassy and the UN mission closed, and a journalist of the newspaper Prensa Libre was killed.

Who chooses Guatemala's judges and prosecutors

The constitution keeps the choice of the people who investigate and judge out of any one pair of hands, and the device it uses for this is the nominating commission. For the Supreme Court of Justice, Congress elects the magistrates for five years from a list of twenty-six candidates drawn up by such a commission. A representative of the rectors of the country's universities presides. The dean of the law faculty of every university sits on it, and so does an equal number of members elected by the General Assembly of the Association of Lawyers and Notaries, with a further equal number elected by the magistrates of the Court of Appeals. A candidate needs two-thirds of the commission, and no member may vote through a representative. The court has thirteen magistrates, and they elect one of themselves president for a year, also by two-thirds.

The same machinery, with variations, fills the other offices that hold power to account.

The attorney general heads the Public Ministry, which holds the power to bring criminal prosecutions, and the president can remove the holder only for a duly established justified cause. Freedom House records that in 2024 the president failed to pass a legal reform that would have let him dismiss the attorney general, and that a request to lift her immunity was rejected by the Supreme Court in August of that year.

Freedom House reported that the selection of new Supreme Court and appellate judges came to a halt in 2019. Congress appointed thirteen new Supreme Court magistrates in October 2024, to serve until 2029, and observers from the Organization of American States and the United Nations warned that the process had been marred by interference from the Public Prosecutor's Office.

How the Constitutional Court is put together

The Court of Constitutionality has five titular magistrates, each with a substitute, appointed for five years by five different bodies: the plenary of the Supreme Court, the plenary of Congress, the president in the Council of Ministers, the Superior University Council of the University of San Carlos and the assembly of the College of Attorneys. When a case of unconstitutionality is brought against the Supreme Court, Congress, the president or the vice president, the bench grows to seven, and the two extra magistrates are drawn by lot from among the substitutes. The presidency of the court rotates every year, beginning with the oldest magistrate and descending by age.

The court hears challenges to laws of general application in a single instance, hears in a single instance the petitions for amparo, the constitutional writ of protection, that are brought against Congress, the Supreme Court, the president or the vice president, and hears on appeal every amparo decided by any other court.

Through those powers the court has ruled on most of the episodes in this article, and its rulings since 1993 run in more than one direction. During the dispute over CICIG, the UN-backed commission against impunity described below, it overturned the president's order barring the commission's head from re-entering the country. In July 2023 it briefly suspended the results of the first round of the general election after defeated parties complained of irregularities, and in mid-December 2023 it issued the ruling that let the inauguration of the winner go ahead. In January 2024 it upheld the suspension of the winner's party.

How Congress and the president are elected

Congress has one chamber. Its deputies are elected directly for four years and may be re-elected, through a mixed system written into Article 157. Each department is an electoral district with at least one deputy and more in proportion to its population. The Municipality of Guatemala, the capital, forms a central district of its own, and the rest of the department of Guatemala forms another. On top of the district seats, a number equal to a quarter of them is elected from a single national list.

The chamber elected in June 2023 has 160 seats. Freedom House recorded the result as 39 seats for Vamos, the party of the outgoing president, 28 for the National Unity for Hope, 23 for Movimiento Semilla and 18 for Cabal, with the remaining 52 split between 13 parties. The BTI report measured the effective number of legislative parties after that election at 7.25 and electoral volatility at 44.25%, and it describes parties that serve as vehicles for individual candidates and change from one election to the next. Women held 20% of the seats in 2024, by Freedom House's count, and no affirmative measure exists for the election of Indigenous representatives, though 41.7% of the people counted in the 2018 census identified as Maya.

Many kinds of legislation need a two-thirds vote, so even a party with a majority of its own has to bargain. Constitutional reform outside the chapter on individual rights needs two-thirds of all deputies and then ratification by a popular consultation, the national vote that Article 173 reserves for political decisions of special significance. Changing the individual rights in Chapter I of Title II requires Congress, again by two-thirds, to convene a separate National Constituent Assembly.

The president must be a Guatemalan of origin over forty years of age. A candidate who wins an absolute majority is elected outright; otherwise the two leading candidates meet in a second round held between forty-five and sixty days later. The term is four years, served once.

Why a UN commission investigated inside Guatemala

In December 2006 the government of Óscar Berger reached an agreement with the United Nations to create the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known by its Spanish initials as CICIG, which was established in 2007. It was an independent body designed to assist the Public Prosecutor's Office, the national police and other investigative bodies, with authority to run its own inquiries and refer cases to the national courts.

Its weight became plain in 2015. On 16 April that year the commission issued a report implicating officials in a customs fraud known as La Línea, in which importers paid bribes to have their tariffs reduced. CICIG presented cases so often on Thursdays that Guatemalans began to speak of "CICIG Thursdays", but it was a Friday press conference, on 21 August 2015, at which the commission and Attorney General Thelma Aldana presented evidence that the president and the former vice president were the leaders of the scheme. The former vice president, Roxana Baldetti, was arrested that day. Congress impeached the president on 1 September, and Otto Pérez Molina resigned on 2 September 2015. On 7 December 2022 he and Baldetti were convicted of illicit association and customs fraud.

The next government turned against the commission. By 2017 CICIG was investigating members of the family of President Jimmy Morales, and his son and brother were arrested on charges of money laundering and fraud. When Attorney General Aldana opened an investigation into the financing of his 2015 campaign and asked Congress to lift his immunity, Morales barred the commission's head, Iván Velásquez, from re-entering the country, an order the Constitutional Court overturned. In August 2018 he announced that the mandate would not be renewed, and it ended in September 2019. The BTI report describes the coalition behind the closure as private sector associations, politicians, members of Congress and the Supreme Court.

What followed fell on the people who had worked with it. Britannica records that judges, prosecutors and investigators associated with CICIG were arrested and investigated, and that more than two dozen fled into exile. The BTI 2026 report counts at least 91 lawyers, including judges and prosecutors, forced into exile since 2022, and puts the impunity rate above 97%.

How the presidential result was contested after the vote

The general election was held on 25 June 2023 and the presidential runoff on 20 August, with turnout of 60.7% in the first round and 45.2% in the second, according to the BTI report. Bernardo Arévalo of Movimiento Semilla, who campaigned against corruption, beat Sandra Torres in the runoff with 58% of the vote by Freedom House's figure and nearly 61% by the BTI's. Before the vote, roughly 10% of candidates had been prevented from standing on grounds Freedom House calls dubious, among them the presidential candidate Carlos Pineda, disqualified weeks before the first round.

The attempt to reverse the result ran through the institutions described above. In July 2023 the Public Prosecutor's Office, led by Attorney General María Consuelo Porras, requested the suspension of Semilla's legal status over alleged anomalies in its founding signatures, and the suspension was finalised in November. In September 2023 the ministry raided the headquarters of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and took sealed boxes of certified ballots. In December Congress stripped four of the tribunal's magistrates of their immunity, and prosecutors asked for the election to be annulled. Protests ran from June 2023 to January 2024, and in October Indigenous leaders launched a national strike demanding the attorney general's resignation. The inauguration took place on 15 January 2024.

The suspension of the party had a practical effect in the chamber: its 23 deputies sat as independents, barred from chairing committees or holding leadership posts. In November 2024 Congress passed a reform forbidding criminal court judges to suspend or cancel the registration of political parties, and before it came into force in December a judge ordered the party cancelled. By the end of 2024 the ministry had made at least six attempts to have the new president's immunity removed, by Freedom House's count, and the BTI report counts thirteen impeachment petitions, all blocked.

Where power sits below the national government

The 2018 census describes the country as 8 regions, 22 departments and 340 municipalities. Each is governed by a governor whom the president appoints, who must meet the qualifications of a minister and must have lived in the department for the five years before appointment, and each has a development council that brings in the mayors of its municipalities.

The municipalities are where voters choose their own local government. A council of the mayor, the síndicos and the councillors is elected directly for four years and may be re-elected, and Article 253 makes each municipality an autonomous institution that elects its authorities, raises and spends its resources and runs its local services. Article 257 obliges the executive to put 10% of the state's ordinary revenues in the budget for the municipalities each year, of which at least 90% must go to education, preventive health, infrastructure and public services.

The money behind those percentages is small. The IMF put Guatemala's tax revenue at 11.8% of GDP in 2024 and noted that it has hovered near 12% for decades. Around the 1999 elections it stood at about 10%, and the government of the day set itself a target of 12% for 2002.

Business has a place inside the state that the constitution writes down. Article 132 seats on the Monetary Board, which sets monetary, exchange and credit policy, one member elected by the business, industrial and agricultural associations, one elected by the private banks and one elected by the Superior Council of the University of San Carlos, beside the ministers and the central bank president. The BTI report counts direct business representation in at least 58 state institutions. The competition law enacted in November 2024 as Decree 32-2024 went the other way, and the board of its Superintendency of Competition was composed without private sector members.

Who Guatemala stands with abroad

The longest-running question of Guatemalan foreign policy is Belize. Guatemala inherited a Spanish claim to the territory, which neither Spain nor Guatemala ever occupied. Great Britain granted Belize independence in September 1981 over Guatemala's protest, and Guatemala recognised it on 6 September 1991, under the Serrano government. The claim was left unresolved, and negotiations moved under the auspices of the Organization of American States. Transitory Article 19 of the constitution authorises the executive to pursue Guatemala's rights over Belize and requires any definitive agreement to be put to the citizens in a popular consultation. This catalogue records the claim and takes no position on it.

The relationship with the United States runs through trade, aid and the courts. The free trade agreement with the United States and the other Central American states entered into force between Guatemala and the United States on 1 July 2006. Freedom House records that the United States has since sanctioned several former and serving Guatemalan officials for corruption, among them former President Alejandro Giammattei, Attorney General Porras and at least ten judges and prosecutors.

Guatemala belongs to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Central American Integration System and the Group of 77, and it joined the World Trade Organization on 21 July 1995. Regional diplomacy has carried domestic consequences before. Britannica records that Cerezo's part in the Esquipulas agreement put pressure on his own government and its successors to talk with the insurgents, and that road ended in the accord of 29 December 1996. Guatemala: history follows the war that the peace accords ended, and Guatemala: overview sets these institutions beside the rest of the country.