Recipe for honesty in Guatemala

Across Latin America in recent years, citizens have tossed out one government after another in search of honesty and accountability. Yet reformers have mostly failed to break entrenched cultures of graft and impunity. A novel approach in Guatemala might break that trend.

The Central American country’s recently installed new president, Bernardo Arévalo, on Monday submitted a bill he hopes will strengthen judicial independence by making the attorney general’s office more accountable to the public and less vulnerable to political influence. It coincides with a raft of additional measures opening government procurement to scrutiny and shielding anonymous whistleblowers from prosecution.

On the surface, such reforms make as much sense as jousting with windmills. The president’s party has too few legislators to enact his agenda on its own. The current top prosecutor, meanwhile, is a fierce opponent of corruption reform, with powerful allies on the courts and in Congress. Delay is costly. The constitution bars reelection, which gives Mr. Arévalo just four years to change Guatemala’s governing norms.

The strategy, however, has a hidden strength. Unable to dominate his country’s democratic institutions – in Guatemala, presidents neither appoint nor nominate the attorney general – Mr. Arévalo seeks to challenge them to function more faithfully. The reform bill, he said in a televised address Sunday night, is meant to ensure that public offices are not used again “as a political weapon by any government.”

The aim of renewing democracy by reforming its institutions is to, Santiago Palomo, a Harvard-educated lawyer recently appointed head of a new National Anti-Corruption Commission, told Americas Quarterly, “strengthen integrity and transparency.”

The approach underscores how societies embed equality before the law. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky wrote in a 2020 study published in The Economic Journal, laws and governing norms are interdependent. In addition to improving economic opportunity, they noted, honesty in office sets a higher civic tone for everyone. By “stripping elites of their privileges, equality before the law ... encourages [citizens] to exert greater effort, which can benefit everyone in society, including elites.”

It also emphasizes public good over personal enmity and grievance. The attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, faces European and U.S. sanctions for corruption. She tried repeatedly to overturn Mr. Arévalo’s election and has charged several election officials for upholding the results. Those attempts require “an exit ramp in Guatemalan legislation,” the president told the Central American news outlet El Far. That amplified a point he made in January prior to taking office: “I have no personal conflict with the prosecutor, she ... simply refuses to comply with the law.”

Uprooting corruption is a labor of patience. Success, Guatemala may show, rests on individual integrity and equality before the law.