TWO leading candidates in Guatemala’s presidential elections wrapped up their campaigns yesterday with pledges to tackle corruption and gang violence, ahead of polls opening on Sunday.

Twenty-two candidates are in the running with three in a clear lead: a former first lady, a United Nations diplomat, and an ex-dictator’s daughter.

The elections have faced accusations of corruption after two popular candidates were disqualified, in decisions critics condemned as flawed.

Several prosecutors and journalists remain detained or in exile following a government pushback on anti-corruption efforts.

Last year, Guatemala ranked 150 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Centrist candidate Edmond Mulet, a 72-year-old lawyer and former diplomat, pledged to fight corruption in the country.

“We are very concerned about the degradation process Guatemala is going through,” Mulet said at his campaign closing ceremony yesterday.

He pledged to deploy the army to fight crime, saying he would transfer 5,000 of the most dangerous convicted prisoners to a high-security prison, under military supervision.

Mulet’s right-wing rival Zury Rios, daughter of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, said she would put God at the “centre” of her political coalition should she win.

“Either we choose a political coalition that has God as its centre, that has life as its centre, that has the family as its centre,” the 55-year-old candidate said during her campaign closing ceremony.

“The other option is the other political parties that only seek to continue living for their interests, to continue living with corruption.”

Her father Efrain Rios Montt died aged 91 in 2018 while on trial for the genocide of Mayan-Ixil indigenous people during Guatemala’s bloody civil war in the 1960s.

Rios has said she would copy the “war on gangs” waged by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and reactivate the death penalty as a way to reduce gang-related violence in Guatemala, which has a homicide rate triple the world average.

Former social democrat first lady Sandra Torres has been leading the polls, and closes her campaign today, just before curbs on campaigning kick in.

The polls indicate a high possibility the election will go to a runoff on August 20, with no single candidate likely to obtain the 50% minimum share of votes required to win in the first round. – AFP, June 23, 2023.