By Cindy Forster on October 2, 2023
In recent weeks, Mayan campesinos set up twenty roadblocks across Guatemala and Indigenous authorities declared themselves on permanent alert. They demand that president-elect Bernardo Arévalo be allowed to take office. Guatemala is Central America’s most populous nation and home to the largest proportion of Indigenous of any country in the hemisphere. It is also the linchpin in the U.S. State Department’s so-called “Northern Triangle” strategy that polices drugs and migration in the “triangle” of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Washington’s support of Arévalo is one measure of the decline of U.S. power in the hemisphere.
Few dare predict the future in Guatemala in the months leading up to the presidential inauguration on January 14th of president-elect Bernardo Arévalo. A social democrat, Arévalo has survived the right’s strategy of lawfare and alleged assassination plots. He achieved a surprise second place in the elections of June 25th and from that point, has denounced that elites were plotting to destroy him.
Five different state agencies warned Arévalo, anonymously, of assassination plots targeting him and his running mate ─ biology professor Karin Herrera. Election results were stalled for weeks in the first round until just after Arévalo´s party was accused of alleged illegalities in its party membership rolls. His contender in the second round of elections was Sandra Torres, head of the Party of National Unity and Hope (UNE in the Spanish acronym). UNE’s diehard voters, living in the poorest rural regions, appreciate “Sandra’s” bag of free groceries. She belongs to the political status quo – the Pact of the Corrupt as it’s called. Guatemala’s elite pulled out all the stops to ensure her victory on August 20th. Arévalo won the second round against Torres with an astounding 60.9%. Torres claimed the August elections were stolen from her and filed suit.
Elections befitting a mafia-run republic
president-elect Bernardo Arévalo
Guatemala’s government is a morass of corruption, commonly called obscure forces or hidden powers in reference to the alliance between rightwing politicians and the “structures of gangs” or narcotraffickers. Arévalo vows to wage war against corruption. Attorney General Consuelo Porras presides over a reign of judicial terror, with her right-hand collaborator Rafael Curruchiche –he runs the Special Court against Impunity– and the judge Fredy Orellana who has played a major role in jailing anti-corruption journalists and attorneys. A slew of lawsuits against the Attorney General’s office has not slowed their pace. Demonstrations that demand the resignations of Porras, Curruchiche and Orellana have been constant since long before these elections.
At least one of the assassination plots against Arévalo is alleged to have originated from within the government. President Alejandro Giammattei was informed and did nothing, which triggered formal protection for Arévalo and Herrera from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, on August 24th. Members of the president-elect’s party, named Semilla or Seed, receive constant threats and a number of them have fled the country.
Consuelo Porras filed eleven new legal actions against Arévalo after his second-round victory. Judges in the highest electoral court are in the target sights of Porras. So are those who labored entering vote tallies into computers, together with 100,000 other election day volunteers. She demands to know their names. Her collaborator Curruchiche is opening 160 boxes of voting tallies to challenge the victory of the president-elect. Attorney General Porras slapped charges on thousands of protestors who are in the streets and on social media demanding her resignation. Current President Giammattei appointed Porras and he has defended her fiercely, but she even filed charges against Giammattei, whose curious statements include that he will give his life to ensure Arévalo is inaugurated.
Left legislators say that congress plans to elect an interim president to replace Arévalo. Guatemala’s parliament –dominated by the right– joined the attacks on Arévalo in early September when it nullified congressional recognition of Semilla’s status as a party, undermining the power of Semilla’s contingent of 23 parliamentarians (over one-eighth of the Congress). That exclusion could allow the right majority in parliament to refuse to instate Arévalo in January. On a temporary basis, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal reversed the congressional decision until the formal end of election season, that closes on the last day of October.
The Dark Horse Candidate
Semilla grew out of a circle of intellectuals in the first decade of this century who met to chart ways out of the country’s nightmare. Its leader is the son of a progressive president who governed during the country’s single decade of democracy, Juan José Arévalo (1944-1950). The “Ten Years of Spring” from 1944 to 1954 ended with the U.S. coup against President Jacobo Árbenz and over one thousand deaths. More radical than Arévalo, Árbenz presided over a vast agrarian reform. Semilla’s campaign slogan is “Guatemala Will Blossom.”
Bernardo Arévalo did not really venture into the Mayan countryside until after he came in second on June 25th with about 12% of the vote. His victory in the capital –a place described as middle-class and mestizo but in fact significantly Indigenous– was dramatic.
Most press coverage says the main players in Guatemala’s elections are middle-class, urban mestizos. A variety of apartheid still reigns in the country. A driving force in the dark horse candidacy of Arévalo were urban youth, who may have pushed Arévalo over the cusp and into the second round of elections. Some convinced their “Christian” parents to vote with them for Semilla, I was told by one such evangelical father. Evangelicals form a pillar of fundamentalism in Guatemala and number 40% of the population. Many predict the country will turn into hell, literally, should Arévalo enter office. They find queer rights abhorrent, and more broadly, fear women free of male control. Soon after the June election, Arévalo went to Mexico City to celebrate his daughter’s marriage to a woman.
A Sea of Indigenous Organizing
With or without Arévalo, the strongest, most principled challenge to the rightwing comes from people who live in Indigenous Guatemala. Attacks on human rights defenders more than tripled in 2022. Most of those killed were campesinos who were engaged in anti-capitalist struggles. Rights “defenders in Guatemala are facing more repression, with fewer protections, than at any point since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996,” according to the Guatemala Human Rights Commission based in Washington, DC.
The war of 1960 to 1996 was fought mainly by Mayans, many of whose families were displaced to the urban belts of poverty. Indigenous campesinos and their urban relatives are a critical force mobilizing to protect Arévalo. Alida Vicente, an authority of the Indigenous government of Palín near the capital ─interviewed by Prensa Comunitaria─ said “the [Indigenous] territories of Guatemala are extremely angry” following the elections of June 25th. “We have seen one attack after another. They have not respected the decisions of the people of Guatemala.”
Elected Indigenous governments have moved to the forefront among critics of Guatemala’s elite. The system of Mayan authorities is free of mestizo interference, as opposed to the politics dominated by non-Indigenous actors. The Indigenous Mayorship of the 48 districts of Totonicapán started an avalanche – they are a territory of K’iche’ people admired for their protection of the watersheds of southern Mexico and Northern Central America, that originate from springs within their forests. Defense of the forest was met with the first massacre of the post-peace treaty era. Former general Otto Pérez Molina, an architect of Guatemala’s genocide during the twentieth century, at that point held the presidency and he unleashed the same formula against Totonicapán’s “forest defenders” that he had used during the war to kill tens of thousands of Indigenous campesinos. Figures vary. About 7 protesters were killed and 40 injured in 2012 from the 48 districts of Totonicapán. Many of the injured fled, fearing they would be turned over to the government – as routinely happened during the genocide.
Soon after the August vote, the grassroots news agency Prensa Comunitaria reported “Indigenous authorities of San Pedro La Laguna, Santiago Atitlán and Santa Lucía Utatlán filed a lawsuit” against Porras, Curruchiche and judge Fredy Orellana. Mayan elected governments in regions bordering the capital –Sacatepequez and Chimaltenango– followed suit. An original people in the center of the country distinct from the Maya –the Xinka– have added their voices in formal protest. https://www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/una-plaza-llena-respalda-bernardo-arevalo-y-clama-por-la-destitucion-de-consuelo-porras The Indigenous Mayorship of the Ixil-speaking nation –a center of Mayan resistance where Pérez Molina personally conducted massacres– demanded legal action against the Attorney General’s office, as did the Indigenous government of Nahualá, denouncing the far right’s judicial machinations.
Otto Pérez Molina, the genocidal general whose fall from the presidency launched Semilla’s fame
In 2015, retired general and sitting president Pérez Molina was driven out of office by mass urban protests, and later sentenced to prison on charges of corruption. It has been nearly impossible to sentence those responsible for the civilian deaths during the war. Pérez Molina moved from conducting massacres in many of the above-named Indigenous communities to running the intelligence division that decided on tortures, disappearances and murders in the capital. He is identified as the intellectual author of the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan José Gerardi, who oversaw the country’s most extensive human rights documentation. The United States trained the Guatemalan military and maintained the generals in power for decades, long enough to kill 200,000 civilians, over eighty percent of whom were Indigenous according to the United Nations.
Mestizo Guatemala takes the credit for Pérez Molina’s incarceration. They convoked the huge mobilizations in 2015 in Guatemala City with conspicuous middle-class leadership and participation. Semilla came of age in those urban demonstrations, that were a far less deadly location for protest than the countryside.
A United Nations-backed anti-corruption initiative called CICIG, the Spanish acronym for the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, uncovered the evidence that convicted Pérez Molina. The lead prosecutor of CICIG who oversaw that case, Juan Francisco Sandoval, was forced by threats to flee the country, a fate he shares with over thirty of his colleagues. Before the elites shut it down, CICIG discovered dozens of “criminal structures” imbedded in the state.
The genealogy is clear that leads from those responsible for the genocide, to the people in power today who are charged with corruption and narcotrafficking. The U.S. Embassy –that bears prime responsibility for creating the monster– is now a firm supporter of the anti-corruption initiative.
The geopolitics of U.S. support for Arévalo
Arévalo’s candidacy challenges the grip of the right in one of the bastions of U.S. power in the hemisphere, but he does not actually challenge the State Department’s plans for the region. His thinking coincides neatly with the U.S. analysis of the war in Europe, anti-China trade relations, and the designation of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as dictatorships. Semilla’s platform is mainly dedicated to anti-corruption. It also urges an end to child malnutrition that afflicts almost half of the nation’s children, and Arévalo hopes to achieve quality universal education.
For its part, the United States is desperate to dictate the future of the “Northern Triangle” where rampant corruption has driven millions of people to migrate, and the logics of narco-capitalism have escaped Washington’s control. One U.S. president after another has attempted to heal the fractured body politic of the region with everything short of serious social remedies.
Where social remedies have been carefully implemented –in Nicaragua– the people stubbornly vote for the Sandinistas, unimpressed by U.S. attempts to brand their government as a pariah.
In the recent past, El Salvador elected a revolutionary left that emerged out of a grueling class war. El Salvador’s left lost its mandate to a turncoat from within its ranks –Nayib Bukele– who advocates mass incarceration of the poor without due process. Wildly popular with conservatives, Bukele is viewed by Washington as uncontrollable.
Last year, Honduras slipped out of the grip of the State Department, which had executed a coup in 2009 to squash social democracy (Hillary Clinton counts that coup among her accomplishments). The same social democrats who were ousted in 2009 recuperated the country through the vote twelve years later. Honduras has a new generation of organizers, battle-hardened by over a decade of resistance to assassins in the halls of power.
Whatever their actual intentions, the U.S. government since June has been a very public player favoring Arévalo. Brian Nichols, chief of Latin American diplomacy for the United States, made this known. Fernando del Rincón of CNN en Español –a media outlet that despises leftist Latin American governments– was doing the State Department’s work when he warned Curruchiche and Porras that “they’re playing with fire,” what they’re doing is “incredible, unbelievable, unheard of,” he said. Del Rincón was in high form. “You’re going to get burned.” Addressing the two members of Semilla’s legal team who he was interviewing, he said, “you could be the next two victims of lawfare”. They nodded yes. He said, “Thank you for your bravery.”
Central American geopolitics undergirds the support for Bernardo Arévalo from many U.S. congresspeople, the State Department, and none other than the highest levels of the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS has been responsible in recent years for promoting a string of coup d’etats, violent protests, and ensuing assassinations across the hemisphere. Now in Guatemala, the United States and the OAS have taken a seat at the table in transition talks between Arévalo and the sitting government. Curruchiche has called this interventionism. OAS leadership insists –to the rightwing political players in Guatemala– that the transition must proceed according to the will of the voters. Thinking about the past, some Guatemalan analysts on the left believe that the U.S. state and its underlings may be playing a different game behind closed doors.
Social democrats in the modern era
Many claim Bernardo Arévalo could be the first progressive president since Árbenz, but they are wrong. That distinction goes to Álvaro Colom, a businessman, and the ex-husband of Sandra Torres who just lost in the second round against Arévalo. Colom, elected in 2007, said he admired Brazil’s Ignacio “Lula” da Silva who came to the aid of Venezuela in 2002 with a tanker full of oil, to loosen the right’s economic stranglehold meant to destroy President Hugo Chávez. Even Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas supported Colom in the 1990s. Colom’s thinking was more leftist than that of Bernardo Arévalo, and his time in office was besieged by the right. In an interview with Frontline in April, 2008, Colom said of the era of revolutionary war that spanned his early adult life, “seven of my friends from university were assassinated,” as were “two uncles” –one of them a progressive mayor of the capital– “and a cousin.”
Colom invited CICIG, the international body investigating corruption, to Guatemala, then he found himself caught in its net and was eventually imprisoned. This year he passed away under house arrest. More than a few politicians have served time in prison for corruption, but most of them are not social democrats. UNE, the party of Sandra Torres that received the most votes in the first round (15.4%), is now part of the Pact of the Corrupt. When UNE emerged years ago, it attempted to paint itself as a social-democrat alternative but then moved into the embrace of narcotrafficking governments, while building a majority in parliament. Because Torres was married to Álvaro Colom, in theory that prevented her from running for the office of president. To the horror of strict Catholics, Torres divorced Colom and became an evangelical minister. Like Colom, Torres was convicted and jailed on corruption charges. She served her sentence, and claims innocence.
A coup in progress
Since June, Arévalo has called the illegal maneuvers against him proof of political persecution. One month before the second round of elections, the offices of Semilla were subjected to search and seizure of documents. As he campaigned at that point in the plantation belt of Retalhuleu, the heartland of the leftist Indigenous candidate Thelma Cabrera (she was barred from running on false grounds), Arévalo accused the Attorney General’s office of actions that are “absolutely illegal” and “aim to overthrow democracy.” By early September, he described the ongoing attacks as a “coup in progress.”
President Giammattei was charged with corruption but he made sure the case did not prosper. He has gutted most branches of government since he came to power in 2020. The few remaining entities of government that resist the Pact of the Corrupt include the Supreme Electoral Court, the national registry of individuals that determines who is eligible to vote, and the Constitutional Court. Functionaries who stand up to the judicial reign of repression are routinely jailed.
Semilla has stated that “anything” can happen under the rule of those who now hold power. The party is prepared for the worst, which in the context of Guatemala would mean assassinations.
A radical majority among voters?
Among the thousands of protestors are people fed up with both rightwing and moderate alternatives. They can be counted: The Latin American and Caribbean news outlet teleSUR reported the day after the June vote, “Beyond any doubt, the winner of this first round was the null vote. As much as 17.4 % of the ballots cast in Guatemala were null, and another 7 % were left blank.” In the universe of registered voters, “over half either did not go to the polling places, or they went and nullified their ballots or turned in blank ballots.” In the final round in August, 55% did not vote.
Those who refused to vote for anyone listed on the ballot include members of the Political Instrument that went by the name of the Movement for the Liberation of the People (MLP), a socialist formation largely made up of people who work the land. It makes decisions collectively. Of its organizers, at least 26 have been murdered for their work.
MLP created a platform to challenge capitalism – and to end corruption through structural reforms. Their numbers and national presence grew dramatically. This year their campesino candidate, the Mam-Maya Thelma Cabrera, was disqualified on the basis of a lie, so the MLP called for a null vote. Cabrera is unapologetically leftist. She came in fourth in the last presidential race though she had no financing and her publicity consisted of hand-drawn posters. Many thought she would win this time – and perhaps she did with the null vote.
MLP promised to achieve “a Plurinational state” and “el buen vivir” or a life of dignity and happiness for all. Because Cabrera was barred from running and no congress people were elected, the MLP lost its standing as an official party. In July it held assemblies that decided to return to their work as a social movement and plan for the long haul. They are called CODECA, the Committee for Campesino Development. In recent days they mounted twenty road blockades across the country in support of a legal presidential transition from Giammattei to Arévalo and brought the country to a standstill. Their battle cry is “The land exists to be defended, not sold.” Their posters read, “Mafias of the Attorney General’s Office, Get Out!” and “We Demand a Plurinational State.” They call for a constituent assembly. The elite’s days are numbered, one way or another.
Cindy Forster is a Latin American and Caribbean Studies professor, a writer of 3 books on Compesinos and Revolutionary histories who travel frequently to Guatemala.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English