THROWBACKTHISDAY, JAN 14; Jorge Serrano El¡as sworn in as president of Guatemala

                           

Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías  was sworn in as President of Guatemala on January 14, 1991. Serrano became the presidential candidate for the Solidarity Action Movement (MAS) in the 1990 presidential elections.

He lost the first round on 11 November with 24.1% of the vote, and won the second round against Jorge Carpio on 6 January 1991 with 68.1% of the vote. Carpio unsuccessfully tried to use Serrano's fundamentalist beliefs against him as a campaign issue.

On January 14, Serrano replaced Vinicio Cerezo as President of Guatemala. He was the second non-Catholic to gain power in Latin America, after Ríos Montt. The transfer of power marked the first time in decades that an incumbent president had peacefully surrendered power to an elected opposition victor. As his party gained only 18 of 116 seats in Congress, Serrano entered into a tenuous alliance with the Christian Democrats and Carpio's National Union of the Center (UCN).

The Serrano administration's record was mixed. It had some success in consolidating civilian control over the army, replacing a number of senior officers and persuading the military to participate in peace talks with the URNG. He took the politically unpopular step of recognizing the sovereignty of Belize. The Serrano administration reversed the economic slide it inherited, reducing inflation and boosting real growth.

On 25 May 1993, Serrano sparked the 1993 Guatemalan constitutional crisis when he illegally suspended the constitution, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court, imposed censorship and tried to restrict civil freedoms, allegedly to fight corruption. The attempted self-coup was similar to the one carried out by Alberto Fujimori. However, Serrano's action met with strong protests by most elements of Guatemalan society, at the forefront of which was the Siglo Veintiuno newspaper under the leadership of José Rubén Zamora. This was combined with international pressure, and the army's enforcement of the decisions of the Constitutional Court, which ruled against the attempted takeover. In the face of this pressure, Serrano resigned as president on 1 June and fled the country. He was replaced on an interim basis by his vice president, Gustavo Espina. However, Espina was involved in the coup as well, and Congress replaced him with Human Rights Ombudsman Ramiro de León.

THROWBACKTHISDAY; makes it 25 years and TBT Blog remembers.