The drift to authoritarianism accelerates in Central America

For more than 30 years José Rubén Zamora’s newspaper has crusaded against corruption in Guatemala, making many enemies along the way. On July 29th police raided Mr Zamora’s home and arrested him. This week he appeared in court on charges including money laundering and blackmail. According to Rafael Curruchiche, the anti-corruption prosecutor, the publisher was not arrested for his journalism but for his “business activity”, for allegedly trying to swap some $40,000 in cash for a cheque from a former banker accused of corruption who is now collaborating with the authorities. Mr Zamora says he is a victim of “political persecution”. Many Guatemalans believe him. His arrest is another milestone in the country’s seeming return to authoritarian rule.

For much of Mr Zamora’s career Guatemala, with 17m people, saw halting democratic progress. A long civil war between leftist guerrillas and military dictatorships, which caused some 200,000 deaths, ended with a peace agreement in 1996. The economy has grown steadily. But roughly half of Guatemalans, many of them indigenous, live on less than $5.50 a day (adjusted for local purchasing power), and the country has the world’s fourth-highest incidence of child malnutrition. Its biggest export is people: the 1.5m or more Guatemalans who live in the United States sent back remittances equal to 15% of gdp in 2020.