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Foreign Policy magazine is trying to drum up foreign policy “victories” for Vice President Kamala Harris, trying to convince readers that she saved Guatemala's democracy while they weren't looking. But we both agree. Spoke at length He is scheduled to meet with the former president in 2022, but he will tell a very different story.
Far from helping Guatemala, the Biden-Harris administration has been terrible at treating this small but regionally important pro-American neighbor. The vice president was particularly bad, treating former President Alejandro Giammattei like a brat who needed to be scolded.
Even when President Giammattei proposed closing Guatemala's southern border to stem the flow to our open border, the current administration did not back down on him.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris attend the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 2, 2024. (Brendan Smiarowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Giammattei has repeatedly complained to us about how the Biden-Harris ambassador conspired with Native American leaders to pressure them not to appoint their choice for Attorney General, Consuelo Porras, and rejected their offers to help repair the border.
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“we [U.S. officials] “We have a large border with Mexico. We have a small border with Honduras and El Salvador. Help us close that border,” Giammattei said. The Biden administration has refused.
The border remained open, and millions of people, including Guatemalans, continued to stream into the U.S. Harris refused to even respond to the concerns raised by Giammattei, instead repeating her apparently scripted remarks.
After all, as the migration issue reached chaos, the Biden-Harris administration turned to the deeply corrupt Mexican government for help, undermining U.S. efforts to secure cooperation on other priorities, including the fentanyl crisis.
This action was part of a global pattern in which Biden and Harris' criteria for picking regional winners and losers have been based not on how much they support the United States and its values or whether they are willing to be good partners, but on a liberal ideological litmus test that consistently gives the upper hand to Marxists, even when conservative allies have offered material support for an open southern border, a major crisis for the United States' national security.
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So Biden and Harris welcomed Marxist presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Gabriel Boric of Chile, all with longstanding hostility towards the “Yanqui imperialists.” In contrast, they despised and condemned Argentine President Javier Milley, Paraguay's Santiago Peña and Guatemala's Giammattei.
Their crimes? Pro-life, pro-market, pro-Israel, and most importantly, pro-America.
If this doesn't sound like an approach that would protect American interests, that's because it isn't.
But as Juan Gonzalez, the Biden-Harris administration's top Latin American official on the National Security Council, said in a closed-door meeting, the Biden-Harris administration backed Lula over President Trump's ally Jai Bolsonaro in Brazil's 2022 election, even though it knew Lula would “create foreign policy problems” for the United States.
“This is political,” one conference attendee quoted Gonzalez as saying.
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Additionally, in 2023, the administration authorized the deployment of Democratic operatives Robert Gibbs (former press secretary for Barack Obama), Jessica Rice, and Dan Restrepo (a personal friend of Juan Gonzalez) to Buenos Aires in a vain attempt to help leftist candidate Sergio Massa defeat Millay in the elections.
And last month, Paraguay's pro-American government, led by President Peña, asked Washington to recall the U.S. ambassador from Asuncion, citing interference in the country's internal affairs.
In Guatemala, after three years of treating Giammattei like a vassal leader of a banana republic, Biden-Harris not only endorsed the extremist Bernardo Arevalo in last year's election, but after he won, the administration applied all sorts of pressure to ensure that an investigation by Attorney General Consuelo Porras into alleged irregularities in the legal registration of his political party did not bear fruit.
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Further siding with Arevalo, in December the State Department took the extraordinary step of imposing visa restrictions on 300 Guatemalans, a third of whom were members of Congress, for alleged “ongoing anti-democratic behavior,” just as the Biden-Harris administration was lifting sanctions against the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.
It is precisely this kind of interference in other countries' electoral systems that Foreign Policy writer Robbie Grammer celebrates. “President Bernardo Arevalo owes his presidency to U.S. diplomatic intervention,” he enthused. We should believe it's a good thing.
Arevalo has since become the new darling of the international left, with the Marxist website People's Dispatch calling him “Guatemala's most progressive president of the past 40 years.”
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Glamour portrayed the Arevalo investigation as an attempt by Giammattei to thwart Arevalo's transition. Only after Biden and Harris applied pressure (“Saving Democracy”) did Giammattei drop the investigation. What was actually happening was that Guatemala's system was sorting itself out, albeit slowly. It continues to do so to this day. Guatemala's Supreme Court last week rejected Arevalo's petition to strip Porras of his immunity.
What Grammar documents is the same legal war the regime is waging at home, but applied abroad, falsely claiming to be on the side of democracy against its authoritarian opponents.
In the United States, Special Counsel Jack Smith of the Department of Justice has just indicted Donald Trump again for questioning the results of the 2020 election, something the Democrats used to do routinely. Even Democratic strategist Mark Penn was forced to admit that “the attempt at this point to frame the challenge of the election as a criminal conspiracy is election interference by Jack Smith and the Department of Justice.”
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Glamour's article has all the hallmarks of being orchestrated by the Biden-Harris administration, and possibly by Harris' top national security adviser, Phil Gordon, himself.
Grammer said he had access to the letter Gordon brought to Arevalo last January when he left Guatemala City for the inauguration, and throughout the article cites “senior government officials” familiar with the hours-long meetings Gordon held in Guatemala.
Finally, Grammer writes, “Guatemala's democratic transition is one of the most tangible victories for President Joe Biden's policy of promoting democracy around the world, and it also represents a rare example of Vice President Kamala Harris' national security team playing a clear and direct role in guiding that transition.”
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A victory of some kind. This heavy-handed intervention by the vice president's staff will only strengthen the general impression that America is ignoring its neighbors without regard for the consequences.
And in the real world, the best way to promote democracy in the region is to respect the process and the actors, not to try to use it to remake Latin America in the Biden-Harris administration's extreme ideological image.
To read more articles by Victoria Coates click here
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Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the organizational position of Heritage or its Board of Trustees.
