If history is any guide, there is little reason to assume that the incoming administration, in which some of the most conservative sectors of the business community have been awarded key ministries, will behave any differently. Rather than tackle the hunger, paucity of farmland, lack of formal job opportunities and miserly wages that drive migration, their instincts will be to do what they have always done. They will resist paying their fair share of taxes and denounce even modest social and economic reforms as Communist inspired.

The president-elect has said he will combat gang violence with harsh repressive measures that include labeling gangs as terrorist organizations and pledging to reintroduce the death penalty. While this is a policy approach consistent with his tenure as director of the penitentiary system in the mid 2000s, during which an extrajudicial death squad conducted social cleansing operations within Guatemalan prisons, it is a recipe for more rather than less gang violence .

Time and again iron-fisted approaches have been shown to intensify rather than diminish gang violence. El Salvador is a prime example of where an alternative approach appears to be bearing fruit. In 2017, USAID invested considerable resources in promising regional initiatives aimed at offering poor and alienated youth alternatives to gang recruitment and assisting with the reintegration and rehabilitation of gang members . As a result, homicide rates and migration flows have declined sharply.

Organized crime networks control Guatemala’s vast border regions, transforming the country into an ever more fully-fledged narco-state. Mr. Giammattei’s party is known to have close ties to Cofradía, one of the most notorious organized crime syndicates formed by military officials during Guatemala’s three-decade-long civil war. Organized crime’s ever entrenched power is no accident. Having waged and won a full-frontal war against the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or Cicig, a United Nations-appointed body charged with investigating and dismantling organized criminal structures and having installed a compliant attorney general, they are now able to operate unfettered.