Two leading candidates in Guatemala’s presidential elections wrapped up their campaigns Thursday with pledges to tackle corruption and gang violence, ahead of polls opening on Sunday.
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Twenty-two candidates are in the running with three in a clear lead: a former first lady, a UN diplomat, and an ex-dictator’s daughter.

The elections have faced accusations of corruption after two popular candidates were disqualified, in decisions that critics condemned as flawed.

Several prosecutors and journalists remain detained or in exile following a government pushback on anti-corruption efforts.

Last year, Guatemala ranked 150 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Centrist candidate Edmond Mulet, a 72-year-old lawyer and former diplomat, pledged to fight corruption in the country.

“We are very concerned about the degradation process that Guatemala is going through,” Mulet said at his campaign closing ceremony on Thursday.

He also pledged to deploy the army to fight crime, saying he would transfer 5,000 of the most dangerous convicted prisoners to a high-security prison, under military supervision.

Mulet’s right-wing rival Zury Rios, daughter of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, said she would put God at the “center” of her political coalition should she win.

“Either we choose a political coalition that has God as its center, that has life as its center, that has the family as its center,” the 55-year-old candidate said during her campaign closing ceremony.

“The other option is the other political parties that only seek to continue living for their interests, to continue living with corruption.”

Her father Efrain Rios Montt died aged 91 in 2018 while on trial for the genocide of Mayan-Ixil Indigenous people during Guatemala’s bloody civil war in the 1960s.
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