Alejandro Giammattei

Alejandro Eduardo Giammattei Falla (born 9 March 1956) is a Guatemalan politician who served as the 51st president of Guatemala from 2020 to 2024.

Giammattei was the general coordinator of the electoral processes in 1985, 1988, and 1990.

He gained recognition at both national and international level.

He has been a consultant to several companies since 2000.

After losing the mayoral elections, he was appointed director of the Guatemalan Penitentiary System in 2006.

He is a former director of the Guatemalan penitentiary system and participated in Guatemala's presidential elections in 2007, 2011, and 2015.

The first was in 2007, with the then-official party, the Great National Alliance (GANA), with strong participation.

He ceased to be director of the Penitentiary System in 2008.

He had several conflicts and accusations about the Pavorreal case, leading to his incarceration for a short time.

Giammattei has had three appearances in the general elections for President of Guatemala.

The second was in 2011 with the Social Action Center Party, but it was dissolved due to not reaching the minimum percentage of votes required by the TSE.

In the elections of 2015, he joined the presidency with the FUERZA party.

Giammattei became the presidential candidate for the Vamos party in the 2019 presidential elections.

He placed second in the first round behind Sandra Torres on 16 June 2019, with 13.95% of the vote, but won the second round against the latter on 11 August 2019, with 57.96% of the vote.

He won in the 2019 election, and assumed office on 14 January 2020.

On 14 January 2020, Giammattei assumed office as president of the Republic of Guatemala, succeeding Jimmy Morales.

Guatemala experienced a political crisis in November 2020 following the adoption of a controversial budget.

Most of the funds are earmarked for privately managed infrastructure and neglect the fight against poverty and child malnutrition, which affects nearly half of all children under five while generating an increase in public debt.

Congress was set on fire following the repression of a demonstration by the police.

At the same time, the Vice President, Guillermo Castillo Reyes, called on Alejandro Giammattei to resign for "the good of the country."

This crisis came at a time when the government was also facing criticism for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, as hospitals quickly became saturated and the Ministry of Health was accused of withholding information about the pandemic.

At the end of July 2022, the police arrested journalist José Rubén Zamora, founder of the daily El Periódico.

They searched the newspaper's headquarters, which had accused President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Consuelo Porras of corruption.

In the countryside, indigenous communities defending their territories and peasant movements were repressed.

Selective assassinations of social leaders (peasants, environmentalists, trade unionists) continued year after year, with no reaction from the justice system.

A new law on NGOs allowed the president to ban any association they suspected of "disturbing public order" and provided mechanisms to stifle them financially.

The International Federation for Human Rights, the World Organisation Against Torture, and other NGOs warned in 2022 about the "strengthening of authoritarian rule" in Guatemala and declared that the country is "experiencing an alarming phenomenon of capture and control of public institutions by economic and political elites."

In 2022, the Guatemalan congress passed a bill that would increase prison sentences for abortion, ban sex education in schools, and declare homosexuals "minority groups incompatible with Christian morality."

While initially supportive, Giammattei would later reverse his position on the bill on 11 March 2022, announcing that he would veto the bill unless Congress pulled it back, citing that it violated two international conventions that Guatemala was a signatory to as well as the Guatemalan constitution.

On 15 March, Congress indefinitely suspended consideration of the bill.

On July 30, 2022, while Gianmattei was visiting some places in the Huehuetenango Department, one of them not far from the Mexican border, there was an incident between security forces and armed people in a vehicle.

While initial reports presumed the incident was an assassination attempt, later reports indicated that Giammattei was never at risk, neither targeted by the attack nor even close to it.

In July 2021, Alejandro Giammattei's Attorney General, María Consuelo Porras, dismissed the head of the Special Prosecutor's Office against Impunity, Juan Francisco Sandoval, since he intended to investigate corruption cases linked to the president.

He left the country shortly afterward to 'protect [his] life and integrity.' This controversial decision was followed by demonstrations calling on the president to resign.

The Attorney General subsequently stepped up her crackdown on judges, lawyers, and prosecutors linked to the fight against corruption; several former investigators of the Special Prosecutor's Office against Impunity (FECI) and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) were arrested in 2022, and others forced into exile or else continually harassed.

A link to these juridical persecutions appeared in February 2022, when the Salvadoran investigative website El Faro revealed that Giammattei was accused of "financing his [2019] campaign with bribes from a construction company."

The Guatemalan president is said to have negotiated with José Luis Benito, a minister in Jimmy Morales' government, 'a contribution of $2.6 million to his electoral campaign...In exchange for this money Giammattei promised the minister...to keep him in office for a year so that he could continue to implement a multi-million dollar bribery scheme in road construction and maintenance contracts."

There have been five Interior ministers in the presidency of Giammattei: Edgar Godoy, Oliverio Garcia, Gendri Reyes, Napoleón Barrientos, and Byron Bor.

Except the last, they all resigned.

A sharp increase in violent crime and a punishingly high cost of living made Alejandro Giammattei deeply unpopular.