Comedian Jimmy Morales Wins Guatemala’s Presidential Election

A former TV comedian with no experience in government has won the run-off vote in Guatemala’s presidential election.

Morales’ center-left opponent Torres, 60, has vowed to extend welfare programs that were once a hallmark of the presidency of Alvaro Colom, when she was first lady.

Helen Mack, a human-rights activist in Guatemala, said right-wing military members of Morales’s party have been accused of corruption themselves.

These things, plus a drought and a coffee blight that are badly impacting Guatemala’s small farmers, have caused a sharp increase in the number of poor Guatemalans who migrate to the United States to find work.

People mark their ballots during the presidential runoff election at a polling station in Mixco, Guatemala, Sunday, October 25, 2015. Morales was criticized during the campaign for his lack of policy proposals, putting out just six pages on outlining his ideas.

Morales wants to strengthen not just the economy, but the security situation in his nation.

“The new government will have a year before the people fill the plazas, streets, avenues and highways in social protest”, Alejandro Maldonado, who took over as interim president after Otto Perez Molina was jailed on corruption charges, said during a recent speech to business executives. “It is not easy, but if we do not start today, much time will pass by without a solution to the migration phenomena”. His primary platform (and campaign slogan) was simple- he wasn’t a thief.

Morales and Torres have jockeyed to position themselves as the anti-corruption candidate.

“I have been asked if we have the capacity to govern, and we have been emphatic in saying that alone – no – but with the blessing of God, and the support of the people, we are sure that yes, we can”. On the Democratic side, outsider Sen. In the United States, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is enjoying campaign success few would have predicted was possible.

The election is a wake-up call to the impoverished Central American country’s established parties, which have been shaken by investigations led by the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the U.N.-backed anti-corruption body.

After casting her vote in Guatemala City, Torres sought to tap into the discontent surrounding the country’s political status quo by questioning Morales’ links to the army and Perez.

Do you think that Morales can reverse the tide of corruption in his country? According to CNN, she said, “Guatemala has serious problems”.

Still, he has given little detail on his plans to overcome entrenched corruption besides promising to put more money into justice, make government spending transparent and audit institutions. “Without the need to fight with our brothers and neighbors and with the pleasure and the wish, we should not let go to waste and despise a centimeter of our land, a centimeter of our sea, a centimeter of our sea, a centimeter of that that unites us by history and heritage”.