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In their search for a foreign policy “win” for Vice President Kamala Harris, Foreign Policy magazine wants you to believe that she saved democracy in Guatemala while you weren’t looking. But the two of us have spoken at length with its former president in 2022, and he tells a very different story.
Far from saving Guatemala, the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of this small but regionally important pro-American neighbor has been appalling. The vice president has been particularly bad, treating former President Alejandro Giammattei like a miscreant child she wanted to reprimand.
Even when Giammattei offered to close Guatemala’s southern border, thereby stemming the flow to our open border, this administration gave him the back of the hand.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 2, 2024. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Giammattei complained to us repeatedly how the Biden-Harris ambassador plotted with indigenous leaders, exerted pressure on him not to appoint the attorney general of his choosing, Consuelo Porras, and refused his offer of helping to fix the border.
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“We said to [U.S. officials] ‘You have a large border with Mexico. We have a small border with Honduras and El Salvador. Help us close that one,’” Giammattei said. The Biden administration declined.
The border remained open, and millions, including Guatemalans, continued to pour into the U.S. Harris refused to even respond to the concerns Giammattei raised, instead repeating apparently scripted statements.
Eventually, as migration reached chaotic proportions, the Biden-Harris administration turned instead to the highly corrupt Mexican government for help, undermining U.S. efforts to secure cooperation on other priorities, including the fentanyl crisis.
This behavior was part of a global pattern in which Biden and Harris chose regional winners and losers not on how much they support America and her values, or on whether they were willing to be good partners, but on a liberal ideological litmus test that consistently elevated Marxists even if a more conservative ally was offering material assistance on a major U.S. national security crisis: the wide-open southern border.
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Thus, Biden and Harris have embraced Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Chile’s Gabriel Boric, all Marxist presidents who harbor a long-standing animus against the “Yanki imperialists.” By contrast, they have disdained and rebuked Argentina’s Javier Milei, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña and Guatemala’s Giammattei.
Their sin? Being pro-life, pro-market, and pro-Israel, but most importantly, pro-American.
If this doesn’t sound like an approach that protects American interests, it’s because it’s not.
But as the Biden-Harris top Latin American expert at the National Security Council, Juan Gonzalez, told a closed-door meeting, the Biden-Harris administration backed Lula over President Trump ally Jai Bolsonaro in Brazil’s 2022 election even though they knew “he’ll cause foreign policy problems” for the United States.
“It’s political,” someone at the meeting quoted Gonzalez as saying.
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In addition, in 2023, the administration greenlighted sending Democrat Party fixers Robert Gibbs (Barack Obama’s former spokesman), Jessica Reiss and Dan Restrepo (a personal friend of Juan Gonzalez) to Buenos Aires in a vain attempt to help the leftist candidate, Sergio Massa, defeat Milei during elections.
And just last month, the pro-U.S. government of President Peña in Paraguay asked Washington to recall our ambassador in Asuncion for interfering in domestic affairs.
In Guatemala, after spending three years treating Giammattei like the vassal leader of a banana republic, Biden-Harris didn’t just back a radical, Bernardo Arevalo, in last year’s election. After he won, the administration applied all manner of pressure to make sure that an investigation of his party for alleged irregularities in its legal registration by the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, did not bear fruit.
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In December, the State Department took the extraordinary step of hitting 300 Guatemalans, one-third of them members of Congress, with visa restrictions for alleged “ongoing anti-democratic actions” to further tip the scale toward Arevalo. This came just as the Biden-Harris administration was removing sanctions on the antagonistic Maduro regime in Venezuela.
It is these very interferences in another country’s electoral system that Foreign Policy’s writer, Robbie Gramer, celebrates. Bernardo Arevalo, Gramer gushed, “very likely owed his presidency to U.S. diplomatic intervention.” That, we are supposed to believe, is a good thing.
Arevalo has since become the new darling of the international left; the Marxist website Peoples Dispatch calls him “the most progressive president Guatemala has had in the last 40 years.”
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Gramer paints the investigation of Arevalo as an attempt by Giammattei to block Arevalo’s transition. Only after Biden and Harris applied the screws (“saved democracy”) did Giammattei desist. What was in fact happening was the Guatemalan system sorting itself out, albeit slowly. That continues to this day: the Guatemalan Supreme Court just last week rejected Arevalo’s bid to strip Porras of her immunity.
What Gramer does document is the same lawfare the administration wages at home, but applied abroad, while spuriously insisting that it is on the side of democracy against autocratic opponents.
In the U.S., too, the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, has just re-indicted Donald Trump for questioning the results of the 2020 election – something Democrats used to do routinely. Even Democrat strategist Mark Penn had to admit that “the attempt to turn the election challenges into a criminal conspiracy at this point is Jack Smith and the Justice Department interfering in the election.”
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Gramer’s article has all the hallmarks of being planted by the Biden-Harris administration, likely Harris’ top national security consigliere Phil Gordon himself.
Gramer tells us he was given access to a letter that Gordon took to Arevalo last January when he went down to Guatemala City for the inauguration, and quotes throughout the piece “a senior administration official familiar” with hours of meetings that Gordon held in Guatemala.
Finally, Gramer writes, “The democratic transition in Guatemala represents one of the clearest victories of U.S. President Joe Biden’s agenda to promote democracy worldwide, as well as a rare example of Vice President Kamala Harris’ national security team playing a distinct and direct role in shepherding it through.”
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Some victory. This heavy-handed intervention by the vice president’s staff will only cement the general impression that America rides roughshod over our neighbors regardless of the consequences.
And in the real world, the best way to promote regional democracy is to respect its process and officials, not try to exploit it to remake Latin America in the extreme ideological image of the Biden-Harris administration.
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Mike Gonzalez is Heritage’s Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.
