Can Thelma Aldana, Guatemala’s corruption fighter, win the presidency?

THELMA ALDANA’S elevation to the status of heroine was sudden. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed body that helps prosecutors with corruption cases, described as “unsuitable” her appointment to the supreme court in 2009. When she became attorney-general in 2014, many Guatemalans worried that she was too close to the government. Those doubts dissolved in 2015, when she worked with CICIG to uncover a scandal that led to the resignation of the president, Otto Pérez Molina. Ms Aldana jailed some 250 people before leaving office in 2018. She launched an investigation of the current president, Jimmy Morales, for campaign-finance violations in 2015, and of members of his family on other charges. (They deny wrongdoing.)

That record has made Ms Aldana the de facto leader of a movement composed of activists, judges and friendly foreigners, which seeks to establish the rule of law in a country whose leading lights often have criminal connections. It has grown in confidence. Ms Aldana is a candidate in the presidential election, whose first round is scheduled for June 16th. Although she is second in the polls, she could win a run-off in August. She “would be the first president that [Guatemala’s oligarchs] can’t control,” says Edgar Ortíz Romero of the Liberty and Development Foundation, a think-tank.