The Awakening of Guatemalan Society: explaining the appearance of the social movement of 2015

The aim of the research is to analyze the relationship between institutional political actors and the emergence of the recent social movement in Guatemala that demanded the resignation of the presidential binomial. The existing literature has focused primarily on understanding the emergence of social movements in Europe and the US. These studies cannot explain the emergence of social movements in other countries with different levels of development; they may even overestimate the importance of resources (Theory of Resource Mobilization) for the process of mobilization. This explains the lack of research on social movements in Latin America, especially in Central America. This work aims to fill the academic vacuum by using the Theory of Political Process which remains within the mainstream approach. The aim is to use a mixed method, using a Snowball Sampling to conduct deep-in interviews, and social media monitoring to understand how the investigation conducted by the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) became the trigger that generate a favorable environment for the emergence of the social movement composed of grassroots activists. Another goal is to expand the scope of research by adding the role that social media, Facebook and Twitter, had in the mobilization process of the social movement, reducing the cost of organization and generate a unifying framing among its participants.