Bernardo Arevalo wins Guatemala presidential election on corruption crackdown pledge

Aug. 21 (UPI) -- Bernardo Arevalo, a candidate of Guatemala's center-left Movimiento Semilla party running on an anti-corruption ticket, won a surprise victory in the presidential election in central America's most populous country.

With more than 98% of votes cast in Sunday's runoff ballot counted, Arevalo appeared to have prevailed over the National Unity of Hope party's Sandra Torres, a former first lady pledging medicine price and sales tax cuts, following a strong first-round performance in June.

With full results expected in the next few days, Uruguayan-born Arevalo garnered 58% of the vote, according to electoral authorities, against Torres' 37% in a country with a historically conservative political culture.

Arevalo was congratulated by sitting President Alejandro Giammattei, whose ruling Vamos party shared blame for a delay in certifying the result of the first round due to unsubstantiated fraud allegations that it was involved in promoting.

"I congratulate all Guatemalans for a peaceful election with only a few isolated incidents," he wrote in a Twitter post Monday.

"I also congratulate Bernardo Arevalo and extend an invitation to start an orderly transition the day after the results are made official."

Arevelo put fighting corruption at the center of his campaign, highlighting the danger to the country's democracy from consecutive scandal-plagued administrations and reverting from groundbreaking anti-corruption efforts to a situation in which prosecutors and judges have been forced to flee abroad.

The president-elect said tackling "political persecution against different types of government employees and people focusing on corruption, human rights and the environment," would be a priority for his administration.

Arevalo's victory is seen as significant for Washington with Guatemala, while among its most loyal allies in Central America, serving as a major contributor to migration into the United States.

The Guatemala-origin population of the United States jumped 336% over the past two decades to 1.8 million in 2021, up from 410,000 in 2000, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center of the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.