Guatemala court permanently blocks suspension of Seed Movement party ahead of Sunday’s election

GUATEMALA CITY — Two days before Guatemala’s presidential runoff election, the Supreme Court of Justice granted a permanent injunction Friday to the party of progressive candidate Bernardo Arévalo, blocking a lower court’s order suspending the party’s legal status.

Court spokesman Rudy Esquivel said it ordered the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to disregard the lower court’s ruling, which came last month at the request of prosecutors who said they were investigating how the party had gathered the necessary signatures to register years earlier.

The high court had earlier blocked the suspension with a temporary injunction at the request of Arévalo’s Seed Movement.

The new ruling can be appealed to Guatemala’s highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court.

Guatemalan electoral law forbids the suspension of a party during the electoral process. The original suspension was granted after the first round of voting June 25 in which Arévalo won a spot in Sunday’s runoff against former first lady Sandra Torres.

The Attorney General’s Office investigation of the Seed Movement was announced just before the first round results were certified in July. Federal agents have raided the offices of electoral authorities and the political party, carting off boxes of documents and issuing arrest orders.

Prosecutors allege that some of the signatures submitted by the party were fictitious or belonged to dead people.

Arévalo has dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and aimed at keeping him out of the competition.

Recent opinion polls have given him a wide lead over the conservative Torres, who is making her third bid for the presidency.

Torres has used the investigation to attack Arévalo. On Friday at her campaign’s closing event in the capital she told supporters that the Seed Movement was trying to steal the election.