At a time when all seemed lost, Guatemalans placed a social democrat with a clean record in the runoff for president. On August 20, 2023, Bernardo Arévalo went from being a major polling blind spot to the country’s new president-elect. He has now become the latest target of a slow coup d’état — one that began when the leading antiestablishment candidate, Maya Mam leader and indigenous rights defender Thelma Cabrera, was barred from the race.

Arévalo is a rare figure in Guatemalan politics. A composed intellectual and the son of a revolutionary head of state, his upcoming presidency is one of the biggest threats to the status quo since the UN-backed Commission Against Impunity was forced out of the country in 2019.

If Arévalo and his Semilla party can withstand political persecution and succeed in taking office, Arévalo will take over an autocracy whose last democratic bastion was the ballot that elected him. He has promised to end the era of corruption. The Semilla party has called his election “the return of spring,” a reference to the “democratic spring” inaugurated by Arévalo’s father, Juan José Arévalo, in 1945, and then developed by Jacobo Árbenz and indigenous and peasant movements until the CIA-led coup d’état in 1954. But laying the groundwork for democracy to flourish will not be an easy feat.