By Marcelo Colussi on July 30, 2021
photo: Bill Hackwell
For some time now, American social science has been talking about failed states. A misleading concept, by the way. States do not fail. If in any case there are societies that live in the greatest poverty, or rather with enormous asymmetries due to an inequitable distribution of wealth among classes, this is a product of their own history, of their economic-social and political dynamics. States are the mechanism that ends up legalizing this situation.
In this sense: they do not fail! The States, contrary to the “naive” scholastic vision that shows them as neutral social arbiters, as organizers of civil life, in reality represent the institutionalized violence of the ruling class. Capitalist states defend the private ownership of the means of production. Period. If they can also provide public services (health, education, basic infrastructure, security), fine (as happens in the First World). If they do not provide them (the harsh reality of the global South), “let the population put up with it”. In poor countries, States do not fail: they do not offer good services, but they control the security of capital to the millimeter. In the North, where there are more resources, their function is the same: they allow themselves to provide better public services, but basically they are there to assist capital (remember the endless amount of bailouts they carry out in the face of major bankruptcies).
Now in Guatemala we are in the year of the Bicentenary, what is being celebrated? Independence from what? The great majorities, native peoples and poor mestizos, have nothing to celebrate. The same evils as always continue, aggravated exponentially by the health crisis that has been going on since last year. In other words: Guatemala is still prostrate. If anyone has something to celebrate, it is the privileged groups, heirs in many cases of the masters during the Colony, the same ones that now continue to hold the property of the State-finca that is the country. And it will remain prostrate as long as it continues to be a country with the current characteristics: poor, dependent, agro-exporting capitalism, always looking to its imperial master in the United States, racist and patriarchal.
The State, already 200 years old, works only to maintain the privileges of the dominant elite. Moreover, today it is won by mafias that manage it with the greatest corruption and impunity. The end of the internal war 25 years ago, although it opened some expectations, did not change the basic situation. Guatemala continues to be an impoverished country. Make no mistake: it is not a poor country; it just happens that the national wealth is very poorly distributed, very asymmetrically distributed. This is the real underlying problem, the country’s “original sin”. The State, which does not fail, “sanctifies” this reality.
Corruption is an added evil to the structural situation, the icing on the cake. If the politicians who run the State agencies were honest and did not keep their money or do their good business in the shadows, as it usually happens, the situation would not improve for the great popular majorities. It is a mirage, which is getting deeper and deeper, to think that the ultimate cause of the ills of the population lies in the corrupt acts of the rulers. In this way, the economic structure is naturalized, taking for granted that it is a blatant robbery that a politician, after having been in the public administration, has a mansion and luxury vehicles, but it is “natural” that a businessman or a landowner can own them. The problem of the generalized poverty of 70% of the population does not lie in the corruption of venal officials but in the way in which wealth is distributed.
Finally, the administrators of the day – political parties that come to power thanks to the financing of these privileged groups – are mere “employees” of big capital. Their rapacity is nothing compared to the permanent rapacity of the landowning landowners, the bankers, the industrialists. The minimum wage, which is paid to barely half of the entire working mass -urban or rural, while housewives are paid nothing- covers barely a third of the basic food basket. That says it all. For this reason, 200 people migrate daily in irregular conditions in search of the “American dream”, risking their lives and their dignity.
Guatemala has a robust economy in macro terms. It is the largest in the Central American area, and number ten in Latin America. But here there are disastrous socio-economic indices. A country where a lot of food is produced, has half of the child population with chronic malnutrition. A country where every natural phenomenon that arrives – hurricane, earthquake, volcanic eruption – becomes a disaster of gigantic proportions. The rainy season begins and hundreds of thousands of people are affected. Why? Because the economic-social structure does not allow for an equitable distribution of wealth, much less for the prevention of what is known to happen. The State, managed by any administration -of course always right wing, very conservative- does not vary in its function. And it does not fail! When it has to repress social protest, it acts perfectly.
Last year came the pandemic of COVID-19. It was a new tragedy. It showed that the national health system is collapsed and that the subsequent organization of vaccination was also a disaster. Why? Because the welfare of the population is not prioritized at all, but the State is simply a manager of the interests of the elite, ignoring in an olympic way the popular needs.
The chronic poverty that defines Guatemala 70% of the population is not only a product of the corruption of the political class: it is a consequence of the very structure of society, where a tiny group takes practically everything, and the State is managed by a Pact of Corruption that only steals with four hands, favoring the big businesses of that elite and of new sectors on the rise, which boomed after the internal war (always linked to not very saintly businesses). This is important to point out: there is a culture of impunity that allows the most shameless exploitation, the theft of public goods, the repression of social protest, but all this -including corruption- is a consequence of the current economic model, of a poor and dependent capitalism.
Is all this known? Yes, it is known. Every child who dies of hunger, or whose future is mortgaged due to the chronic malnutrition that accompanies him/her with the work he/she has to do as a child, every house that is carried away by the flooding of a river during the rainy season, every woman raped by any “macho” exponent of the prevailing patriarchal culture, every member of the native peoples who is humiliated once again by racist practices that inundate daily life, all this is known and could be prevented. It is the chronicle of a disaster foretold, a disaster that the dominant elite has not the slightest intention of transforming. The State, managed by dangerous mafias, sanctifies all this.
It seems that the succession of presidents every four years elected “democratically” does not end up solving the problems. This is evidence, not, as it is sometimes said, that people do not know how to choose, but that this formal democracy is not enough. Will we have to look for another form of democracy then?
The popular mobilizations mark a state of mind of the population. People can no longer stand the misery, the abandonment, the crisis aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rampant corruption in the State. The dismissal of a member of the Public Ministry such as Juan Francisco Sandoval -one of the few non-corrupt members of the governing cast- by the Attorney General, in an act that shows to what extent the Pact of Corrupts (politicians, businessmen, military, organized crime) is present in the state structure, an act that produced popular reactions, great indignation, a lot of anger.
This opened a new chapter in the social struggles. However, the structural causes that set the war in motion 60 years ago have not changed substantially. The number of dead, wounded, pain and suffering of more than three decades of internal armed conflict are a reminder of the injustices that mark the country’s history. Now there are no immediate fires in sight, but any spark can reignite it. Mobilizations, from what has been seen in other parts of Latin America, produce political effects (the Constituent Assembly in Chile, for example). How will the story continue in Guatemala?
Source: Alainet translation Resumen Latinoamericano