Jorge Serrano Elías

Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías is a Guatemalan engineer and politician born in Guatemala City in 1945 who served as the country's president from January 1991 to June 1993. The son of a Protestant evangelical family, he studied industrial engineering at the Universidad de San Carlos and earned advanced degrees in education planning at Stanford University in California.

He entered politics in the late 1970s and served as president of the Council of State during the de facto government of General Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982 and 1983. He ran for president in 1985 as the candidate of the Christian-democratic-leaning PDCN, finishing third, and ran again in 1990 at the head of the Solidarity Action Movement, defeating the newspaper publisher Jorge Carpio Nicolle in a runoff. He took office on 14 January 1991 as the first elected evangelical Christian head of state in Latin America.

His government negotiated initial framework agreements with the URNG guerrilla coalition, signed accords with Belize on the long-running border dispute, and pushed neoliberal economic reforms. Faced with strikes, congressional investigations, and accusations of corruption, on 25 May 1993 Serrano dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and suspended parts of the constitution in what became known as the autogolpe, or self-coup.

The army, business leaders, churches, and the international community refused to back him; within a week he was forced to resign and fled to Panama, where he received political asylum. Guatemalan courts later convicted him in absentia of embezzlement and other charges, and he has remained in exile ever since.

The name Jorge is the Spanish and Portuguese form of George, from the Greek Georgios meaning farmer or earth-worker. The cult of Saint George the dragon-slayer carried it across the Iberian world and into colonial Central America. He bore it as the official name of a presidency cut short by his own hand.