The pre-election polls were not wrong with Sandra Julieta Torres Casanova. The former first lady won with 15.78% of the votes the first electoral round in Guatemala and on August 20 she will face Bernardo Arévalo in a second final round, a "tapado" who obtained almost 12%, four times more than what the polls predicted.
Torres, who went from social democracy to a more conservative stance, by his third attempt. In the two previous elections, he reached the second round and lost to Jimmy Morales and Alejandro Giammattei.
She defines herself as a village woman, who was born in Melchor de Mencos, a small town in the department of Petén, in northern Guatemala, bordering Belize. Known by Guatemalans for having been first lady during the government of Álvaro Colom – who died this year – those who have worked with her say that this 67-year-old communicator has a strong and demanding character.
The candidate of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) gives few interviews to the press and, when she agrees, assumes a confrontational position before any questioning. She does not like criticism so much that in 2019 she denounced six editors of elPeriódico for violence against women to try to prevent the media from publishing anything that had to do with her.
One of the main shadows of his career was the complaint for allegedly hiding electoral financing during the 2015 campaign, when his main fundraiser was Gustavo Alejos, the private secretary of former President Álvaro Colom. An audio that was leaked to the press recreates a conversation between Torres and Alejos: he assures her that a builder offered him 5 million dollars, a case carried out by the prosecution in charge of Juan Francisco Sandoval. The conversation existed but the candidate assures that she did not receive that money.
For that case, Torres was imprisoned for four months until she regained her freedom during the management of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, the controversial head of the Public Ministry accused of hindering the fight against corruption. The former prosecutor in the case, now in exile, singled out his boss for "changing and misrepresenting" the accusation against Torres.
As Colom's wife, Torres assumed power beyond the social figure of the first lady, an office from where she promoted assistance programs such as the Bolsa Solidaria, a package of food for the population in poverty, which she promises will return if she becomes president, now as the "improved bag." The memory of those aids that reached areas traditionally forgotten by the Guatemalan State makes Torres have great support in the countryside.
"The vast majority of people in rural areas vote for support for social programs," says Aura Cumes, a Maya-Kaqchikel researcher and teacher from the town of Chilmantenango. "Indeed, it did allocate a large part of the state budget to it. And while it did reach the people, it has a lot of captive votes in rural areas. It also did so in the urban area, in those places called marginal areas." However, Cumes acknowledges that the candidate also has a "great anti-vote," something that he blames in part on machismo and classism on the part of the non-indigenous urban population that rejects what she represents.
In the book Rendition of Accounts, the former Minister of Finance Juan Alberto Fuentes, relates that, during the Government of Colom, it was Torres who exercised real and absolute power. The former first lady, who was installed in the social democratic party UNE with which her husband presided over the country, has shown an ideological shift to the right in her positions, but avoids talking about her ideology. In a recent interview, when asked how he identified, Torres downplayed his turns and finished with the phrase: "My ideology is Guatemala." In these elections integrates binomial with the former evangelical pastor Romeo Guerra
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