The elections are a circus and Neto Bran is the clown: Affective publics in Guatemala

On 1 July 2023, a video of a semi-naked man lying on a couch luxuriously smoking a large cigar and getting three crucifixes tattooed on his neck appeared on Instagram and TikTok. Set to the song “Hoy cobré” (Today I got paid) by Puerto Rican reggaetonero Bad Bunny, it has a strong narco-aesthetic vibe. It produced substantial engagement on social media, generating thousands of likes, hundreds of shares, and dozens of supportive, critical, and mocking comments. Perhaps surprisingly, the man in the video is not a popular rapper or narcocorrido artist, but 44-year-old Ernest Steve Bran Montenegro, more commonly known as Neto Bran, who had just won a third term as the mayor of Guatemala’s second most populous city, Mixco. This article seeks to provide a critical semiological and conjunctural analysis of the political and campaigning activity of Neto Bran, focusing on the mediatisation of his work as mayor of Mixco and on the building of affective publics. Our analysis draws attention to how the different archetypes–entrepreneur, charro, narco, self-made man, saviour–Bran appropriates and performs centre his “macho-populist” body as a locus of power, and build a counter-public that these same mediatic gestures are designed to bury.