Thelma Cabrera wraps her tiny body around a large mango tree. It is a warm embrace between old acquaintances: as a girl, she walked past this tree every day on her way to the coffee plantation where she worked with her mother and siblings. On good days, she recalls, they could pick ripe mangoes off the ground.
Today, dressed in flip-flops, a colourful checked skirt and a floral top, the 53-year-old may well be Guatemala’s most surprising politician – even without her penchant for hugging trees.
A Maya woman from the Mam people, Cabrera has run for president twice – in 2019 and 2023 – on behalf of the socialist Movement for the Liberation of Peoples (MLP) party, with a manifesto promising a new plurinational constitution and advocating for the Indigenous philosophy of el buen vivir: a sustainable and organic “good life” instead of the large-scale agriculture that dominates the Guatemalan countryside.
However, amid the increasing political turbulence that has rocked democracy in the country since last year’s elections, Cabrera has no reason to believe the radical change she calls for will happen in Guatemala under the new social-democratic administration of Bernardo Arévalo.
In the first round of the 2019 election she unexpectedly came in fourth with almost half a million votes, an extraordinary feat for a woman from a marginalised Indigenous background. In May last year the electoral tribunal upheld a decision to bar her candidacy just three months before the public vote, in a move many in Guatemala considered politically motivated.
Along with Cabrera, other opposition candidates – including Carlos Pineda, a frontrunner in the race – were excluded on technicalities ranging from alleged errors in documentation to violations of electoral law.
But both election campaigns showed that Cabrera has great political potential. She believes that is why last year she was prevented from testing her popularity again. “We would have won in the first round,” she says.
The only opposition candidate with a pro-democracy message allowed to remain on the ballot was Arévalo – the son of the former president and democracy champion Juan José Arévalo – who surprised everyone by making the runoff against the former first lady Sandra Torres, winning with a landslide of 60.9% of the vote.
After decades of corruption and growing repression – especially in recent years under the conservative presidents Jimmy Morales and Alejandro Giammattei – it seemed the democratic spring had finally arrived in the Central American country.
Cabrera does not share this enthusiasm. In her view, she has no reason to believe in radical change will happen in Guatemala under Arévalo’s administration
“He deserves the benefit of the doubt”, Cabrera says. But as an Indigenous woman and lifelong activist her expectations are low. “When have we ever had democracy in Guatemala? Never.”
Cabrera says she has seen the same pattern with every new government. “They co-opt the image of the Indigenous and the peasant. But nothing changes,” she says.
Cabrera grew up in Guatemala’s Sierra Madre, in the rural town of El Asintal, home to about 40,000 inhabitants, mostly Indigenous. The fertile land is divided into large privately owned plots on which intensive crops grow: oil palms, rubber trees, coffee and sugar cane. “We often don’t even know who the owners are any more,” says Cabrera. “They are hidden behind limited liability companies.”
In the late 1970s, 14% of the land in El Asintal was in the hands of small farmers. Now, they own just 5%. The rest belongs to about 10 large agricultural companies, which employ most of El Asintal’s residents.
In the early 1990s, Cabrera and her husband were among the first Indigenous activists to join the fight for land reforms, which sparked the formation of the Committee for Rural Development (Codeca). Today, the organisation has about 35,000 active members. Many of the movement’s social and environmental activists have been the target of intimidation and violence. Between 2012 and 2021, 80 environmental defenders were killed in Guatemala. Among those are the 21 Codeca members the organisation says have been murdered since 2018. Most of the deaths remain unsolved.
This febrile political atmosphere is one of the reasons Cabrera has security cameras outside her modest one-storey house. Her connection to Codeca and status as leader of linked political party, MLP, have made her highly visible.
Cabrera has mostly remained silent since she was barred from the 2023 election.
Other Indigenous movements, such as the K’iche governing body called the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán, have openly supported the incoming president and expressed their hopes for his future government. Yet Arévalo immediately came up short when he unveiled a cabinet of 14 ministers with only one Indigenous member.
As almost half of Guatemala’s population of 17 million identify as Indigenous, the president has missed a historic chance, say representatives of the 48 Cantons.
Cabrera was not surprised. “Let the people find out by themselves with what class of person they aligned,” she says.
She believes most of Arévalo’s voters will face disappointment over the next four years. He promised to rid Guatemala’s severely weakened democratic institutions of corruption, but his room to manoeuvre is limited. In this one-chamber parliament, his Semilla party won just 23 of the 160 seats, and the judiciary remains in the hands of those he promised to get rid of.
Attorney general María Consuelo Porras, whose ministry has led unsuccessful attempts to ban Semilla, has refused to resign and remains in post.
According to Cabrera, Arévalo has already been effectively blocked by business and conservative elites. “They wouldn’t let him assume the presidency just like that. First, they had to tie his hands very well,” she says.
A spokesperson for President Arévalo said that at the time of forming the cabinet, efforts were made to include indigenous representatives and that the government’s aim is to build “a government of national unity”. They added: “We hope to include more indigenous professionals in government institutions in the future.”
Cabrera remains an activist but her political future is uncertain. She asked her followers to cast a null vote in last year’s elections. As a result, the MLP lost its only member of parliament. Without representation, the party was recently dissolved by the electoral tribunal.
Gone is the name, as well as its striking volcano logo. It is a big blow for the Codeca movement. The grassroots organisation will have to build a party from scratch again in the coming years.
On top of that, Cabrera, its most influential leader, hesitates to put her famous face on the ballot again. The campaigns were physically and mentally draining, she says.
But as in 2019 and 2023, the party’s assembly might call on her again. For Cabrera refusal is not an option. “If they ask you, you have to do it,” she says. “We are fighting for the long term.”
