Torres - four strikes and she's out!

Plaza Publica

As you probably already know, the Constitutional Court in Guatemala upheld prior Citizens Registry (RC), Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), and Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) decisions barring Sandra Torres de Colom Casanova from participating in September's presidential election.

The justices' 7-0 decision was based on the fact that even though she was divorced from the president, it was still too close of a relationship for her to avoid Article 186 that bars close relatives of the president from running for office. You don't have to be a blood relative. Spouses and former spouses fall within Article 186. The justices didn't agree, however, that Sandra Torres had committed fraud by divorcing her husband in order to run for president.




I hope that Boz is right and that the court's unanimous ruling is evidence that the "the Guatemalan election and judicial institutions held their ground on this issue." Maybe this is a key juncture in the country's institutional development and that it is a sign of good things to come. However, like the massacre in Peten or the murder of Cabral, I don't think we should read too much into a single event.

Broadly speaking, these are the courts that recently found Alfonso Portillo not guilty. In May, they released  Alejandro Giammattei because of a lack of evidence. Giammattei is now running for president on the CASA ticket. While it was important for the CC to support the earlier courts' decisions, I can't get too excited about the courts' overall performance these last few months.

On the political side, the Guatemalan people are left with voting for an alleged war criminal or wasting their vote on another candidate. UNE, one of the country's largest parties, has a questionable future. And, really, the only people to blame are the former first couple.