How the Biden administration helped avoid a coup in Guatemala

After a reform-minded professor won the presidency of Guatemala — one of the Western Hemisphere’s most notoriously corrupt countries — governments around the world watched the fallout with alarm.

Guatemalan authorities seized ballot boxes on dubious claims of fraud. They tried to dissolve the party of the winner, Bernardo Arévalo, and investigate him criminally. With months to go before he took office, the beleaguered president-elect warned of a “slow-motion coup.”