Senator Chris Murphy tweeted this earlier today:
The story of how VP Harris worked to diffuse a transition of power crisis in Guatemala – while Trump undermined the U.S. by supporting the loser of the election – is both incredible and a sign of how ready she is to lead.
Inside the White House Effort to Prevent a Coup in Guatemala Kamala Harris’s team helped deliver an overlooked foreign-policy win.https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/28/guatemala-coup-kamala-harris-biden-administration-arevalo/
Here’s the short story.
Biden gave Harris the job of reducing migration from Central America and by late 2023 her effort was showing remarkable success. Rates had come down 50%.
But a political crisis in Guatemala risked throwing that key country in chaos, potentially erasing many of her gains. President Alejandro Giammattei had just lost the election handily, but supported by Trump surrogates, he signaled he would refuse to give up power.
The inauguration of the winner, Bernardo Arévalo de León, was at risk. A Trump-backed Central American coup was at hand.
Harris did not hesitate. She led an effort to quickly sanction hundreds of Giammattei backers, sending a clear signal that there would be a huge price to pay for anyone who joined the coup attempt.
She sent her top foreign policy advisor to Guatemala to directly engage.
On the eve of Inauguration Day, the situation was still uncertain. Trump’s envoys were there, trying to stop the inauguration.
Along with @PowerUSAID, Harris’s team went back to work. They worked with Colombian President @petrogustavo to rally regional support for Arévalo.
Harris’s intervention worked. Arévalo was sworn in shortly after midnight on January 15.
Yes it’s scary how openly Trump now works to undermine democracy not just in the U.S., but around the world.
But in this case and this November, Kamala Harris is there to stop him.
That sounds like a success to me…
I knew Trump was actively undermining American foreign policy and national security but I didn’t realize that Trump and his henchmen were backing right wing coups all over the world. But it figures. In refusing to accept the 2020 loss, they continued to operate as a shadow government, doing whatever they choose to advance their own causes.
Will we be able to put this genie back in the bottle? I truly wonder. When you have “leaders” like Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio fully bought in, where is the pushback going to come from?