skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Russia puts Ukraine’s internet in its sights as attacks on Kyiv infrastructure intensify in ~society
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Russia puts Ukraine’s internet in its sights as attacks on Kyiv infrastructure intensify
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Comment on Locals flee occupied south Ukraine as hunger deepens in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Oleshky is located close to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, which since Ukraine's liberation of the city of Kherson in the fall of 2022 has formed the frontline between Ukrainian and Russian forces in the southern theater.
Recent weeks have seen voices from the city and its surrounding rural communities emerge anew as Ukrainian officials and humanitarian organizations seek to bring attention to the deteriorating situation on the Dnipro's left bank, in view of the Ukrainian forces holding their positions only a few miles away along the right bank.
Tetiana Hasanenko, a Ukrainian official serving from the western side of the Dnipro as the head of the Oleshky Military Administration, told ABC News that the area's prewar population of around 40,000 people has fallen to as low as 6,000, with only around 2,000 in Oleshky city.
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Messages sent by residents in Oleshky and shared with ABC News tell of careful rationing of remaining food supplies, a chronic shortage of medication and having to move from one abandoned house to the next to escape drone attacks and marauding Russian troops.
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Prices for basic goods were sky-high, and few people even had money to buy things with, she said. But they survived the summer.
On Sept. 1, though, a food-supply convoy heading to the city was attacked. Russian officials blamed the Ukrainian armed forces for the attack, while Kyiv blamed Moscow's troops.
"They were blown up. And then they were shot," Arkhipova said of the incident. "Then the drones flew in and attacked so that the drivers remained alive, just hit the motors so that the oil leaked out. Drivers then walked back by foot for 100 kilometers."
After that, she said, more locals began to leave the only way they could -- on foot. "Because there is simply nothing to eat. While there was something to eat, people just stayed in their homes," Arkhipova said.
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To escape, residents must first reach the village of Radensk, some 14 miles east of Oleshky deeper into Russian-held territory, Arkhipova said. Hasanenko described the route as the "road of death," citing the mines and drones that cover the entire area.
In Radensk, those fleeing may be able to get food and a night's accommodation. The roads in that area are still mined and dangerous, Arkhipova added, but those fleeing may be able to catch a lift in a local's car or tractor to get further into occupied Kherson and closer to the Black Sea coast, from where they may be able to arrange -- usually at high cost -- a circuitous route to Ukrainian-held territory, often through Belarus.
Some are even helped by Russian volunteers, Arkhipova said, who buy them train tickets and accompany them on their route.
It can cost as much as $500 per person to flee, the money going toward the costs of food, accommodation and payment for whatever driver is willing to take them, Arkhipova said, adding that she has so far helped 47 people out.
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While fierce combat has been ongoing along the banks of the Dnipro for years, Arkhipova said there is little organization behind the Russian lines.
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"There's no leadership there," she said. "There are only [Russian] soldiers who openly say they don't care, 'We came here to earn money.'"
Russian forces reach the area through village roads, ever wary of Ukrainian drones and artillery. They bring in ammunition and weapons, using them to attack the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson on the right bank of the river, according to Ukrainian military officials.
"They don't let people go on these village roads that are not mined," Arkhipova said, for fear of residents seeing "where the trenches are, where the ammunition, cannons, self-propelled artillery mounts and everything else are." Anyone suspected of being in contact with Ukrainian authorities or armed forces faces immediate execution, Ukrainian officials say.
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All of occupied Kherson remains an active war zone. For the Ukrainian military, responsibility for the Oleshky area falls to the 30th Marine Corps.
Its spokesperson, Pavlo Drogal, told ABC News that the unit's drones carefully track developments on the left bank. "There is a huge deficit of drinking water, electricity, food products," he said. "We observe this picture every day ... The situation from the drone looks really depressing."
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Locals flee occupied south Ukraine as hunger deepens
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Comment on Donald Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for US seniors in disastrous experiment in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.
Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program “a disgrace to the human race” and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.
Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.
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WISeR, which stands for Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction, aims to use AI and machine learning to ensure “appropriate Medicare payment” for select services while benefiting taxpayers “by decreasing fraud, waste and abuse.” It was rolled out in January in six states—New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington—and intends to run until the end of 2031.
So far, the program requires prior authorization for around a dozen medical services, including nerve stimulation, epidural steroid injections for pain, cervical fusions (permanently connecting bones in the neck), skin substitutes for wounds, and treatments for incontinence and impotence.
According to the documents released by the EFF, the program’s implementation was rushed, and the technology wasn’t ready. One vendor, Innovaccer, was so unprepared that it asked the government to delay the rollout, and when it didn’t, the vendor set up its program to automatically approve all requests temporarily.
“[A]uto-affirming is the only path available that avoids creating a backlog of unprocessed prior authorizations and claims while we finalize, validate, and deploy the full rules-based solution,” Innovaccer wrote, according to a letter it sent to government officials.
But others carried on. One vendor, Zyter, had data discrepancies for months because it apparently didn’t understand the difference between Medicare Part A, which covers inpatient/hospital care, and Part B, which covers outpatient services. Zyter’s CEO, Sundar Subramanian, told Ars Technica in a written statement that the company is now “fully functional across Medicare Part A and Part B claims.” The company is working closely with federal partners and the healthcare providers to “enhance the experience,” Subramanian said.
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In addition to a questionable number of denials, decisions from the various contracted companies often took too long. WISeR is intended to provide authorization decisions within 72 hours, but many have taken weeks, some even months. The documents from EFF reveal at least one request was still pending after 83 days. In a survey, one healthcare provider said it “had a surgery pushed back almost two months due to zero communication.”
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Donald Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for US seniors in disastrous experiment
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian Link‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us (The Guardian)‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us (The Guardian)
What’s AI? It’s just a thing the kids are saying now: “That’s AI!” or “That’s so AI!”
But what is? Something inauthentic, unbelievable or rubbish.
Which was made by AI? No. Artificial intelligence has very little to do with this.
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Comment on Amazon plans drone expansion as top exec projects one million deliveries in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article, which was published last August: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article, which was published last August:
Amazon said Wednesday it plans to offer drone deliveries in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year, a sign of momentum for a project that's been slow to develop since founder Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for the service almost 13 years ago.
The planned expansion for Prime Air would represent a sixfold increase from its current footprint, the company said in a blog post.
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Carbon projected at the time that Prime Air will make 1 million deliveries this year, and said Amazon has the "highest demand drone delivery service in the industry." The company said Wednesday it made hundreds of thousands of deliveries so far this year, and makes thousands daily.
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Amazon in 2024 received a critical greenlight from regulators to conduct long-range drone deliveries, and over the past year has expanded beyond initial markets near Dallas and Phoenix to 11 metro areas, with six other locations coming online soon. Residents in some of those markets continue to raise concerns about drone noise and privacy and how those issues could hurt property values.
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It's a nascent space, but one where Amazon faces competition. Alphabet's Wing crossed 1 million commercial drone deliveries earlier this year, and it operates in 20 U.S. markets through partners like Walmart and DoorDash. Drone delivery startup Zipline operates on four continents and has made 2 million deliveries so far.
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Amazon's drones are capable of delivering packages that are up to 5 pounds and within a 7.5-mile radius of its facilities. The company has recently expanded the number of items eligible for drone delivery by integrating its drone operations into some robotic sort centers, which are larger and store more products than the same-day delivery hubs where drones have historically been housed.
Prime Air is currently testing a new drone delivery mechanism that could enable it to carry a wider assortment of products, like fragile cartons of eggs or other perishables, Carbon said.
It's trialing a "gentle delivery option" with some customers that uses a retractable tether to lower packages to the ground, Carbon said. The current method involves releasing packages from a 13-foot drop. Wing and Zipline also use tethered delivery.
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Amazon plans drone expansion as top exec projects one million deliveries
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIt’s not that they can’t be held responsible, it’s that the punishment should fit the crime. Penalties should have something to do with the seriousness of the crime and that has something to do...It’s not that they can’t be held responsible, it’s that the punishment should fit the crime. Penalties should have something to do with the seriousness of the crime and that has something to do with intent and what was damaged.
Do the advocates for putting people in jail even know what damage was done?
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Comment on The plunging price of AI in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don’t know what you mean? It doesn’t seem to be for me.I don’t know what you mean? It doesn’t seem to be for me.
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentThe major downside that is that it did that without being asked. A tool that’s not controllable, even by the company that’s built it, doesn’t sound good! Pulling off weird stunts like that might...The major downside that is that it did that without being asked. A tool that’s not controllable, even by the company that’s built it, doesn’t sound good!
Pulling off weird stunts like that might make some kind of sense for a company that’s unknown. But OpenAI has the most popular product and had no trouble staying in the news. They were already getting plenty of publicity for being good at finding security bugs. They could get still more positive attention just by demoing how good their AI is at finding security bugs in an ordinary way. Surely they would want more of that kind of positive publicity if they had the choice?
There is a saying that “any publicity is good publicity” but it’s not really true. Some kinds of publicity are better than others and the AI backlash will result in major problems for these firms.
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWell, let’s think through who benefits and what the costs are. Regarding copyright: when someone pirates a movie or a song then they benefit and the copyright holders lose from lost sales (maybe)....Well, let’s think through who benefits and what the costs are.
Regarding copyright: when someone pirates a movie or a song then they benefit and the copyright holders lose from lost sales (maybe). If the they bought the pirated copy then whoever sold it to them benefits from getting the money. Similarly, users win and copyright holders lose when people use archive websites and public libraries. The lost sales are opportunity costs, estimated depending on what you think would have happened without the piracy, and as such the numbers are speculative. Artists and artists being angry about it is definitely understandable, but I’m not sure that’s directly related to lost sales? AI-generated sings and novels exist; there’s a lot of slop, but the slop doesn’t seem to be very popular? Not yet, anyway.
Similarly, to the extent that copyright violations made LLMs better, the users get the benefit and the AI labs get money from users.
Regarding the HuggingFace incident and similar break-ins: it’s a dramatic warning shot for the industry, but nobody seems too concerned about the actual damage? The felonybench website is a count of incidents. They don’t try to estimate damages.
I don’t think the benefit to AI firms from negative publicity can be quantified and I’m doubtful that it’s positive. The idea that AI firms benefit from negative publicity seems like 4D-chess reasoning where people use convoluted logic to show that they benefit somehow.
Quantifying this stuff seems rather difficult, though.
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentChatGPT alone allegedly has a billion weekly active users and there are rough estimates between 1.5 and 2.5 billion users of LLMs. It seems like those people would benefit the most from whatever...ChatGPT alone allegedly has a billion weekly active users and there are rough estimates between 1.5 and 2.5 billion users of LLMs. It seems like those people would benefit the most from whatever conversations they had?
It's like how the person who benefits the most from a cell phone is usually the owner of the cell phone, and the people who benefit the most from a car are usually the people who ride in it. But like with cars, there could be very large harmful secondary effects, fortunes to be made selling them, etc.
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Comment on Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels in ~books
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] From Wikipedia:From the article:
About a decade ago, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about an aside from “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner’s seminal history of modern economics. The book noted that one of the pioneers of the field had been friends with a woman named Maria Edgeworth.
“The daughter of an economist, she was perhaps the first woman to express opinions about the workings of the economy,” Heilbroner wrote.
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I looked up Edgeworth. She had been a famous Irish novelist at the turn of the 19th century, one so well-regarded that she drastically out-earned her contemporary Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott was her pen pal and protégé. Lord Byron envied her. Ricardo and Malthus called her a close friend. This was all surprising. I was both a sucker for Regency novels and an economics correspondent, and yet I had never even come across Edgeworth’s name. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of this lady?
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I wondered if anyone else had noticed. A search through academic journals showed that a specialized few had clocked Edgeworth’s contribution. The economic historian William Henderson once called “Castle Rackrent” a “literary extension” of Smith’s work, arguing that it had “extended the influence” of early economics by inspiring other writers to apply its theories to the social sphere. Other academics, including Susan Manly at the University of St. Andrews, had also written about Edgeworth’s heavy use of economics.
I ordered and read other Edgeworth books, many of which featured barely concealed lessons in early political economy. “Letters for Literary Ladies,” Edgeworth’s first full-length work, published in 1795, makes a case for including women in the intellectual sphere. In it, she applies Smith’s criticisms of monopoly to the gendered labor market. Edgeworth draws parallels to examples from “The Wealth of Nations” to argue that men were holding back the economy of ideas by locking women out of literature and academics — a kind of protectionism.
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“Ennui,” Edgeworth’s 1809 book about a hapless English-Irish landlord, further built on Smith’s and Malthus’s ideas to argue for broad education and free trade, and to riff on the conditions needed for lasting economic development. Edgeworth’s writing for children were full of tales about gains from trade and the division of labor.
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I had dedicated that day to an unpublished essay on education, one that Edgeworth and her father seemed to have written together around 1800. As I worked my way through the hand-sewn notebook, I had a realization. This wasn’t just a piece of persuasive writing. It was a manifesto. It explained exactly what Edgeworth was trying to do, and why she was doing it.
The essay pushes for educating the poor and middle classes as a way to promote upward mobility and to make their members better voting citizens. These were big concerns at the time, when modern representative democracy was young and factories were just beginning to spring up. Edgeworth wrote, “The most certain and safe method of relieving the wretchedness of the poor & of increasing their share of the pleasures of life is to educate them.”
In particular, the essay makes the case for teaching the lower classes the basic principles of political economy, which have broad application to daily life and which might guide people toward pursuing their own interests while serving the greater good. Roughly a quarter century after the publication of Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” economics was the rage in the Enlightenment circles in which Edgeworth and her father, an inventor, traveled.
There was, however, an obvious barrier to bringing avant-garde philosophical and scientific ideas to the masses. They could be complicated and difficult to understand. The Edgeworth pair noted that it could be useful “to mix some political & commercial knowledge with fictions that amuse the fancy.” In fact, this was something Edgeworth had already begun to do.
Edgeworth was embarking on a project that was larger than her own oeuvre. She began to coach other literary women on how to include economics in their work. She struck up a close friendship with Jane Marcet, a London socialite who had already written a primer on chemistry, and the two women corresponded about economic topics. When Marcet wrote what could be considered the first textbook on economics, Edgeworth gave her extensive notes on the rough draft.
Edgeworth was as skilled an editor as she was a writer. She told Marcet that Adam Smith ought to be abridged, because he “needs it much,” whereas the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was “absolutely impossible” to put in fewer words, because what he needed was “to be diluted.”
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Edgeworth’s project — to spread economics beyond elite circles in Edinburgh and London — worked.
Her books and stories were read by the literate classes around the world, in English and in French. King George III reportedly said “I know something now of my Irish subjects” after reading “Castle Rackrent.” Generations of children, including Queen Victoria, would be reared on the educational texts that Edgeworth wrote with her father. (At age 10, Victoria even wrote a story mimicking Edgeworth, titled “Sophia and Adolphus: In the Style of Miss Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy.”) As an empire’s worth of readers imbibed her stories, they also drank of the lessons they contained.
“Owing to the great popularity” of her work, Edgeworth had exerted “considerable influence on the attitude of thought in England regarding economic questions,” wrote Clara Elizabeth Collet in one of the earliest histories of economics, published in the 1890s. (Collet was a friend of Karl Marx’s family who was among the first women to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in England.)
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Political economics was seen as an extremely male pursuit, and cloaking it in stories made it both more digestible and more socially acceptable. Yet even the disguise of fiction was not enough to save those early female economic writers from eventual censure.
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As the field professionalized, the second- and third-generation economists distanced themselves from the women and the fiction that had once helped to popularize and explain their ideas. Serious science, after all, could not possibly be for everyone. The economist Alfred Marshall referred to the women who tried to simplify economic doctrine as “parasites” in a footnote to his hugely influential textbook, “Principles of Economics,” first published in 1890 and popular throughout the 1900s.
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In that derision lies the answer, at least in part, to my second mystery. Edgeworth did not go missing from our histories by accident. Her literature was lost partly because of its clunkiness — its economics lessons made it harder to digest as lighter and more naturalistic stories became the style.
Her economics was lost for a different reason. Subsequent influential academics disparaged the ways that the early women of economics had presented the field. They bristled at being simplified, and they dismissed the idea that the women could have contributed something meaningful.
From Wikipedia:
Castle Rackrent is sometimes regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel, and the first saga novel. William Butler Yeats pronounced Castle Rackrent "one of the most inspired chronicles written in English". Sir Walter Scott, who met and carried on a correspondence with Edgeworth, credited her novel for inspiring him to write his Waverley series of novels[.]
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Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels
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Comment on The plunging price of AI in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkFor coding, currently I talk to Astra to make a plan and tell it to use a Luna subagent to implement each commit. Luna is extremely cheap and I don't worry that using Luna alone will ever exhaust...For coding, currently I talk to Astra to make a plan and tell it to use a Luna subagent to implement each commit. Luna is extremely cheap and I don't worry that using Luna alone will ever exhaust my $20/month plan. Astra is too expensive for coding use unless you're using it professionally, but I think the planning goes better.
And I haven't even switched to the latest version of Luna yet, which will be half the price.1 It doesn't seem to be available via a ChatGPT subscription yet.
1 Yeah, it's an "introductory" price but I think that's OpenAI hedging their bets in case there's a capacity crunch. These price drops have a tendency to become permanent due to competition.
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Comment on The plunging price of AI in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
- AI has gotten cheaper more quickly than any other transformative technology in history. The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. That price drop is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity.
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The next chart shows some examples. On January 31, 2025, OpenAI released a new iteration in its series of “reasoning” models, called o3. We estimate that for an average cost of 30 cents per question, it could achieve a 75% score on GPQA Diamond, a multiple-choice exam covering PhD-level physics, chemistry, and biology.1 Just under 18 months later, OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Luna. It scored just as well — for four hundredths of a penny per question ($0.0004). That is a 725-fold drop in the price of thought in under 18 months. It is like the sticker price on a new car falling from $50,000 to $69. No other general-purpose technology in history appears to have gotten so cheap so fast.
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Our analysis comes with major caveats. AI companies may be expressly training their models for some benchmarks (“benchmaxxing”), so that improvement on the benchmarks outstrips improvement for real-world tasks. Even if they are not, doing well on a benchmark is not synonymous with useful work. Because we focus on the frontier — the absolute cheapest model capable of any given level of performance — we implicitly posit an AI user who relentlessly searches for the most cost-effective model for each task, when real users do not switch models so often, and therefore do not reap quite the same savings. Our data are incomplete and noisy: the timeframe is barely three years, and we do not include all combinations of AI model and benchmark. Prices drop differently for different models, benchmarks, time periods, and performance ranges, and there are many reasonable ways to average over this variegated experience. Overall, while we believe that our bottom-line numbers are reasonably representative of reality, they should not be read as exact.
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The plunging price of AI
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Comment on Guatemala’s democracy dilemma in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/x4Z9f From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Arévalo’s personal integrity is undisputed. But some of the reformers who helped elect him now argue that he may be too scrupulously rules-respecting to deal effectively with the “pact of the corrupt” and the institutions it captured—too much of a liberal democrat to save democracy. When he leaves office in 2028, they fear that the pact will quickly retake control of the few institutions it has lost, or that voters will choose an autocrat who promises to crush crime without concern for legality.
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In a way, both Arévalo and his critics are right. Guatemala has avoided a democratic breakdown. But the president’s rules-bound approach has also left many Guatemalans feeling that he has not fought for them forcefully enough. The question now is whether Arévalo has preserved democracy as an ideal that Guatemalans believe in and, if necessary, will defend.
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When I met Arévalo a few days later, he justified the delay by explaining that his government had arrived “with an enormous level of public legitimacy, but without control of the Congress, and with the justice system positioned against us.”
Legally, he had no authority to simply eject the attorney general. He sent a bill to Congress to grant him that power, but the opposition blocked it. “If, in that scenario, I make a political miscalculation, the result isn’t that I go with a hundred people to pull Consuelo Porras out of that building and that this is sustainable and produces results,” he said. It was that “I go to prison or into exile, and someone else comes in, one of them, to take power.”
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“We are in a process of recovery,” he said. “Democracy doesn’t develop in a linear, unidirectional way; it has leaps and twists, not only here, but everywhere in the world.” For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Guatemala had been twisting its way toward democracy, but corruption networks and drug traffickers had insinuated themselves into the country’s institutions. “Part of what we set out to do is to recognize the serious damage this had caused the country—this corrosion, this penetration of political-criminal networks” that served no “ideological interest,” Arévalo said, but rather “the highest bidder: whoever could pay for impunity.”
Dislodging these forces from the machinery of the state has been neither swift nor straightforward, and even those most anxious for change are hard-pressed to offer practical solutions. The president told me that some supporters had asked him to use the military to remove Porras. He found the suggestion unsettling: “Are you really asking us to go back to the years of military dictatorships of the 1970s, when armies were the only solution?”
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Arévalo can point to some successes. Young lawyers have worked to clean up corruption in the judicial selection process. Appointed in March, the new bench of the Constitutional Court, which rules on the constitutionality of laws and policies, is more favorable to reformers than the one it replaced, as is the new electoral tribunal, which oversees elections. I spoke with the new attorney general a few days after he assumed his post: He was so busy firing Porras’s apparatchiks and preparing for the institution to resume serious criminal investigations that he was sleeping only four or five hours a night. An anti-corruption commission that Arévalo formed early on has already filed more than 200 criminal complaints against former officials.
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Still, much else that Guatemalans had hoped for has failed to materialize. Congress, which remains dominated by the old-guard pact forces, has blocked or stalled bills aimed at curbing corruption—for example, bills to modernize public-works contracting, require shell companies to disclose who owns them, and protect whistleblowers. Partly because the contracting system remains dysfunctional, the government has made little visible progress toward repairing the country’s crumbling highways. And, unwilling to buy votes in Congress outright, as his predecessors did, Arévalo has resorted to pork-barrel spending and raising congressional salaries to win legislative support. Such tactics are deeply unpopular with the public.
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Arévalo, too, has found his convictions under pressure—not only from former allies who worry that his reforms have gone too slowly, but also from constituents and conservative politicians who want a government that will ignore constitutional limits in cracking down on crime. In this they compare him unfavorably with the autocrat next door: Many Guatemalans who live in daily fear of extortion and kidnapping see gangs, not illiberal state capture, as the biggest threat to their basic freedoms, and they see President Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador as a beacon of safety.
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Guatemala’s next presidential election is just nine months away. Right-wing candidates are beginning to emerge, some imitating Bukele, and many sure to court the White House, in the hope that Trump will try to tip the scales. Arévalo’s and Pérez’s reformists claim that they will join forces behind a unity candidate, but such a figure has not yet surfaced. Democracy is twisting its way forward, in Arévalo’s words. No one thinks it is leaping.
From the article:
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