The wobbly transition in Guatemala almost certainly represents the most significant threat to democracy in Latin America during my adult life.
In the half century after WWII there were many examples of coups across the region, but these almost always required the involvement of the military, in other words force that the people on the streets could not easily resist.
Since then, anti-constitutional moves have tended to manifest as more partial, typically designed to bypass term-limitations or suppress to the separation of powers.
The Peace Accords in Guatemala involved specific provisions limiting the size and role of the armed forces, crafted to avoid the possibility of any further direct political interventions from the men in uniform.
Yet if a relatively small cabal of entrenched rogues and degenerates in the justice system and incumbent regime, seemingly without bombers, tanks or armoured vehicles, can carry out a putsch just as effectively and shamelessly as any general, then all those legal protections will turn out to have been useless and the wrong kind of message will have been sent out across Latin America announcing the possibility of a new way of dispensing with the even the box-ticking necessity of popular sovereignty.
The threat posed by this Guatemalan mafia is all the more pernicious, because the underlying political irritant is not a clash between radical and reactionary doctrines, but between common decency and the compulsion to administer the country on all levels as a barely-disguised criminal enterprise.
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