Insurgent candidate tells Guatemalans: Stay, don't go to the U.S. This time, they're listening скачать в хорошем качестве

Insurgent candidate tells Guatemalans: Stay, don't go to the U.S. This time, they're listening

CHIUL, Guatemala − Life in Bartolo Báten's village has been defined by corruption: A teacher who can't get a job at the school until she pays a bribe. A water project that runs out of money before the pipes reached town. Sick residents who can't afford the medicine that's available elsewhere. And so for as long as Báten can remember, they have survived thanks only to the relatives who leave Guatemala for the United States, and the dollars they send home. Báten's father worked in the U.S. for three years in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. His brother still labors in an Ohio factory, one of around 1.1 million Guatemalans working in the U.S. Even his friends who didn't go north had to leave their mountain village to find work in Guatemala City. From there, they began pinging on Facebook earlier this year about a man named Bernardo Arévalo. "Look, these are the things Arévalo is proposing," they told him. "You've got to spread this message at home.'""I want to stay and make a change," said Báten, 28. That idea – which can be heard among crowds flocking to Arévalo's campaign rallies – makes Arévalo not only the leading candidate in his own country's presidential race, but a consequential figure in another one 2,000 miles north. Arévalo, initially an outsider, surged to the front of the race, on a promise to end corruption that has turned generations of Guatemalans into U.S. immigrants. If Arévalo wins a runoff election Sunday, he stands poised to reshape the Biden administration's approach to one of its most intractable challenges: the endless flow of migrants to the southern border. Republican governors have responded with get-tough approaches, snaring border crossers with razor wire or shuffling them onto buses bound for Democratic cities. All that now plays out as the U.S. hurtles toward a possible election rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump – who ran on the phrase "build the wall."