Guatemala President Bernardo Arévalo said Thursday that after the United States' removal of Venezuela’s president, his country, which has also felt the sting of U.S. intervention, is focused on maintaining what he described as a “good” relationship with the U.S., while working to support international law and peaceful dispute resolution.
“The world in general is experiencing a phase of disorder, disorder in the sense that the norms of the old order are breaking,” Arévalo said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The problem is how do we recover that sense of order to get the world to fit together again."
Arévalo was born in Uruguay, where his father, former Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo, was in exile four years after the CIA precipitated a 1954 coup that forced out Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Military dictatorships and decades of civil war followed.
Before taking office two years ago, Arévalo worked in international dispute resolution. Like Guatemala’s neighbor Mexico, Arévalo is walking a fine line of eagerly cooperating with the United States on shared interests like combating drug trafficking while trying to preserve its sovereignty at a moment that the Trump administration is threatening more interventions.
“We have right now a level of relations so strong and strategic that we don’t even consider that scenario,” he said.
