A court in Taiwan’s diplomatic ally Guatemala on Friday provisionally suspended the presidential candidacy of businessman Carlos Pineda, a leading contender for the country’s top job in elections slated for next month.
Three magistrates in an extraordinary session ruled that Pineda’s participation was “on hold” after they accepted a challenge presented by leaders of the Cambio party, a political group to which the candidate previously belonged.
Pineda pledged to appeal the ruling to the country’s Constitutional Court, the top judicial authority in Central America’s most populous country, with only about a week before official ballots are set to be printed.
Photo: AP
“We’re in a dictatorship,” Pineda said in a video posted to Twitter.
He accused the court of kicking him off the ballot because he refused to be an “ally of corruption.”
The complaint says that Citizen Prosperity, Pineda’s current party, committed a series of infractions during a candidate proclamation assembly in November last year.
The court ruled that the 50-year-old Pineda could not participate in the elections due to noncompliance with rules governing the nomination process, such as the failure to collect signatures from party delegates and file a required financial report.
As a result, “by mandate of the law [the ruling] will cause the nullity of the assembly,” the decision said, meaning that other candidacies announced at the event were also suspended.
The ruling follows several other candidate suspensions, as critics say that outgoing conservative Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and his allies are seeking to impose their own preferences on the race.
Pineda was in the lead with 23 percent, followed by social democrat and former first lady Sandra Torres with 20 percent, a poll released at the beginning of the month by Prensa Libre, one of the country’s main newspapers, showed.
Guatemala is to hold elections on June 25 to pick a successor to Giammattei, as well as 160 members of Congress, 20 members of the Central American Parliament and 340 mayors for a four-year term.
The election process has come under fire since a refusal by the electoral court to register indigenous activist Thelma Cabrera and political scion Roberto Arzu — son of the late former president Alvaro Arzu — who were projected to be strong candidates for the presidency.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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