Jimmy Morales during his swearing-in ceremony, Jan. 14, 2016.JOSE CABEZAS/Reuters
TV comic and political neophyte Jimmy Morales was sworn in as Guatemala's president on Thursday amid uncertainty over how he plans to run the Central American nation beset by entrenched poverty, rampant corruption and violent criminal gangs.
Dressed in a dark suit and accompanied by wife, Mr. Morales received a hug from his mother and applause from friends and party members as he mounted the stage.
United States Vice-President Joe Biden met with Mr. Morales and the leaders of El Salvador and Honduras before the swearing in Thursday.
Mr. Morales petitioned Mr. Biden Thursday to add Guatemala to the list of countries granted temporary protected status, which provides its eligible citizens in the U.S. a degree of temporary protection from deportation and allows them to work and travel.
El Salvador and Honduras already have the status known as TPS. It is usually granted in cases in which the country is suffering from an armed conflict or natural disaster that makes it difficult to receive its citizens.
Guatemala has been beset by corruption scandals that forced President Otto Perez Molina and his vice-president from office.
Last year, the U.S. Congress approved $750-million (U.S.) in aid to the three countries contingent on their efforts to reduce migration to the United States and the factors driving it.
Mr. Morales has yet to say who will make up his cabinet, and he already suffered one political setback when prosecutors formally asked for the equivalent of impeachment proceedings against an allied lawmaker suspected of human rights violations dating to Guatemala's civil war.
"He is a president who takes office without a party, without well-qualified people he trusts and with a state apparatus that's really in financial and institutional ruin," said Edgar Gutierrez, an analyst at San Carlos University in Guatemala.
Mr. Morales won office in a runoff Oct. 25 after huge anti-corruption demonstrations. Mr. Perez Molina and his vice-president are behind bars and facing prosecution, and the outsider's triumph was seen as a punishment vote from an electorate that wanted a fresh break.
Prosecutors last week moved to lift the immunity of office for Edgar Justino Ovalle, a lawmaker and adviser to the president-elect. He and others are suspected of human-rights abuses during the 1960-1996 civil conflict when some 245,000 people were killed or disappeared, many of them indigenous Guatemalans slain in countryside massacres.
More than a dozen retired military figures were arrested in the same case. Many of them are members of a veterans' group that supports the National Convergence Front, the party Mr. Morales ran with during the campaign. Mr. Ovalle is a party founder.
Although Mr. Morales has denied links to the former military officials, some say the allegations amount to a black eye for his new administration.