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Guatemala

The contour of Guatemala’s new Congress? Very conservative.

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LIDER

Even before the final, official vote count is announced in Guatemala’s presidential election, we already know the results of the other major election that took place on September 6  — for the 158 members of the Guatemala Congreso.guatemala flag icon

Notwithstanding the triumph of comedian and anti-politician Jimmy Morales in the first round of the presidential election, if Morales wins the scheduled October 25 runoff, he will face an immediately hostile and divided Congress.

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RELATED: Torres edges Baldizón into Guatemalan runoff with Morales

RELATED: Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity six days before vote to replace him

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Though social democratic candidate and former first lady Sandra Torres appears to have bested conservative candidate Manuel Baldizón, a wealthy businessman and the 2011 presidential runner-up, it’s Baldizón’s party, Libertad Democrática Renovada (LIDER, Renewed Democratic Liberty), that won the greatest number of seats in the Congress.

Though LIDER won just 19% of the vote nationwide, it is entitled to 44 seats, making it the largest party in the next Guatemalan Congress. Moreover, despite the resignation and arrest of president Otto Pérez Molina just days before the election, his conservative Partido Patriota (PP, Patriotic Party), which has often partnered with LIDER over the Pérez Molina administration’s past four years, won about 9.5% of the vote and another 17 seats.

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The Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE, National Unity of Hope), a party founded by Torres’s husband — technically former husband –Álvaro Colom, who preceded Pérez Molina as president, won nearly 15% of the vote, entitling it to the second-largest bloc of seats with 36. Todos, a centrist splinter group from the UNE founded three years ago by Felipe Alejos, won 16 seats in the Congress.

Morales’s own movement, the nationalist Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN, National Convergence Front), won just 11 seats and, nationally, just 8.76% of the parliamentary vote.

No other party managed to win more than seven seats in the Congress, though the Encuentro por Guatemala, a leftist party formed by Rigoberta Menchú, the K’iche’ Mayan activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to defend the interests of Guatemala’s indigenous population (and sometimes, however baffling, a political ally of the hard-right followers of Efraín Ríos Montt, who is facing charges of genocide for his role in massacres against indigenous Mayans in the early 1980s) won seven seats.

Since the end of Guatemala’s civil war and the country’s return to democracy, despite its corruption and imperfections, political parties are organized more around personalities and patronage networks than ideologies.

Though both the Guatemalan and international press have focused on the photo-finish race for the presidency, there are two important lessons in the congressional election results.

First, with such a divided Congress, Guatemala’s next president will not command a majority. Pérez Molina benefited from a casual alliance with LIDER, a symbiotic arrangement that gave Pérez Molina a working congressional majority (including, until two weeks ago, a bulwark against stripping him of presidential immunity) and Baldizón a patina of ‘inevitability’ to succeed Pérez Molina (though that obviously backfired given the tens of thousands of Guatemalans protesting politics as usual).

But the winner of the runoff will have to build a multi-party coalition to govern effectively. That’s especially true if he or she hopes to enact campaign finance reforms to reduce the role of corruption in politics from illicit contributions by business interests and drug traffickers alike. Morales has so far refused to make any electoral deals with either the UNE and LIDER, and that’s probably good politics. But he will nevertheless need to build a majority if he wants to accomplish anything if he wins the October runoff.

The second lesson is that the old guard is alive and well in Guatemalan politics. The FCN’s fifth-place finish indicates that Morales may well have trouble mobilizing an effective national campaign in the runoff. That’s true if, as now seems likely, his opponent will be Torres, but it will be even more so if, somehow, Baldizón manages to claw his way into the second round. LIDER, the UNE and the Patriotic Party together hold 97 seats, a supermajority of entrenched political elites who could effectively block reform.

For now, with just over 99% of all votes counted, Torres leads Baldizón by a margin of 19.79% to 19.64% (Morales won 23.85%) — that amounts to just 5,958 votes. Baldizón  is already arguing that the vote is fraudulent, and there’s no sign that he will easily concede defeat. So it may be days, or even weeks, before it’s clear who Morales will face in the runoff. Even if he doesn’t make it to the runoff, Baldizón’s party will still be a force to be reckoned with in the years ahead.

Guatemala

Three days before elections, Pérez Molina resigns after arrest warrant issued

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OPMresign

Within 48 hours of the decision of Guatemala’s Congress to lift president Otto Pérez Molina’s immunity form prosecution, the former army general met with charges of bribery and tax evasion and was warned not to leave the country. Early Thursday morning, he resigned the presidency — the first time that judicial pressure against corruption has forced out a Guatemalan president.guatemala flag icon

It’s the second time that a judicial process has attempted to hold a top official accountable in recent years. In 2013, a tribunal convicted Efraín Ríos Montt, the country’s military leader from 1982 to 1983, of genocide and crimes of humanity for his role in the massacre of at least 10,000 Ixil Mayans. Though Guatemala’s constitutional court eventually overturned the conviction, the 89-year-old Ríos Montt will undergo a retrial, though his attorneys argue he is mentally unfit for any trial or sentence.

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RELATED: Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity
six days before vote to replace him

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The new acting president is Alejandro Maldonado, the 79-year-old who took over as vice president when Roxana Baldetti resigned (and she is now also facing trial for corruption charges). Maldonado is a former foreign minister, former ambassador to the United Nations and to Mexico, and he briefly served as the president of Guatemala’s constitutional court. It will be Maldonado who hands over power to the winner of Guatemala’s election this autumn.

Amid the high-stake drama, Guatemala’s presidential candidates are positioning for the general election set to take place this Sunday, September 6. After months of protests, Pérez Molina’s resignation seems most likely to benefit the independent candidacy of Jimmy Morales, a political neophyte and comedian who has run an anti-corruption campaign mixed with elements of social conservatism, populism and nationalism, though he has not been incredibly forthcoming about policy proposals. Some polls this week showed Morales overtaking frontrunner Manuel Baldizón. Like Pérez Molina, Baldizón is a longtime politician of the Guatemalan right, and Baldizón’s party, Libertad Democrática Renovada (LIDER, Renewed Democratic Liberty), is rumored to have financing ties to drug cartels and other corrupt elements within the country. Baldizón, the runner-up in the 2011 election, is running on the slogan, ‘Le toca,’ which translates to ‘His turn.’

Sandra Torres, the former first lady and Álvaro Colom’s ex-wife, is running as the candidate of the center-left Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE, National Unity of Hope). Zury Ríos, the daughter of the former military dictator, is running as the candidate of the right-wing Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG, Guatemalan Republican Front).

If, as expected, no candidate wins an outright majority, the top two candidate will compete in an October 25 runoff. Voters will also elect the 158 members of the Guatemalan Congress on Sunday, which could give LIDER a firm hold on the legislative branch — even if an anti-corruption wave pushes Baldizón into second or third place on the presidential ballot.

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Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity six days before vote to replace him

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gcityPhoto credit to Quetzalvision.

Six days before Guatemalans go to the polls to choose a successor to president Otto Pérez Molina, the country’s congress voted to strip the term-limited incumbent of his immunity, opening the way for what might become the first prosecution of a Guatemalan president on corruption charges in Guatemala.guatemala flag icon

The vote today in Guatemala’s Congress was historic, and it will make Sunday’s unpredictable general election even more difficult to forecast. But it wasn’t exactly a bombshell, even though it seems like a key turning point in the gradual maturation of Central American democracy and law.

When Pérez Molina, a retired army general, took office, he quickly found himself on Washington’s bad side when he argued for drug legalization as a solution to the decades-long failures of the US-led war on drugs. At home, however, he was regarded as a tough-on-crime conservative whose military background might help police efforts to reduce drug- and gang-related violence, despite murmurs about his role in various human rights abuses during Guatemala’s sprawling decades-long civil war that reached a gruesome nadir in the early 1980s.

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During his presidency, however, Guatemalans became increasingly angry over the corruption that, at best, took place on Pérez Molina’s watch and that, at worst, directly implicates Pérez Molina (pictured above). So far, 14 ministers have resigned as a result of a wide-ranging customs fraud scheme, referred to as La Línea, including seven ministers in August alone and finance minister Dorval Carías last week. Roxana Baldetti, Guatemala’s first female vice president, resigned in May and is now in prison pending trial on corruption charges. Pérez Molina continues to deny any wrongdoing on his part, and he defiantly refused to resign just last week in a press conference, buttressed perhaps with the support of Guatemala’s wealthiest businessman, telecom magnate Mario López Estrada.

Since a United Nations report first revealed the customs scandal in April, however, many Guatemalans have grown skeptical of Pérez Molina’s claims of innocence and, though he survived a congressional vote to remove his immunity last month, prosecutors later announced that they believed Pérez Molina is implicated in the customs scandal. Today’s congressional decision will allow prosecutors to move forward with tax evasion, money laundering or other corruption charges, and it makes it much less likely that Pérez Molina will survive in office until January, when Guatemala’s next president will assume power. Notably, even members of the conservative Partido Patriota (PP, Patriot Party) that Pérez Molina founded in 2001 supported the decision to lift his immunity, the recommendation of a congressional committee examining the scandal.

Corruption is rampant in the region, but voters are increasingly engaged and have started pushing back against the perception of widespread graft. Protesters in Honduras this summer are demanding accountability from officials, and in last year’s Costa Rican election, outgoing president Laura Chinchilla’s administration was seen as so scandal–plagued that her party’s candidate, San Jose mayor Johnny Araya, withdrew from a runoff rather than face a shellacking from his rival, the soft-spoken diplomat and political neophyte Luis Guillermo Solís.

So where does that leave the Guatemalan presidential election? Continue reading Guatemala lifts Pérez Molina’s immunity six days before vote to replace him →

Guatemala

Ríos Montt found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years

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GUATEMALA-HUMAN RIGTHS-RIOS MONTT-TRIAL

It’s hard to know exactly what to think, but I certainly didn’t expect former Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt to be treated so harshly by a tribunal in his own country.guatemala flag icon

Tonight brings word that Ríos Montt, at age 86, has been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, with a sentence of 80 years in total — it’s the first time a country has ever tried or convicted a former leader for genocide.

It’s a breathtaking victory for human rights — even by the grueling standards of the Cold War, the terror that Ríos Montt wreaked on the indigenous inhabitants of Guatemala’s highlands was inexcusable.  The death of up to 10,000 Guatemalans during a reign of 17 months is really quite something and, though justice has come 30 years after Ríos Montt left office, the fact of the matter is that justice has now come to a country that spend far too much of the Cold War impoverished and embattled in civil war.

It’s also a somber verdict for the United States and the administration of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, which horrifically supported Ríos Montt with vigor, in part because of his ties to evangelical Christians, and his ties to the Republican establishment in the United States continue to this day — his daughter, Zury Ríos Montt, is married to former Illinois Republican congressman Jerry Weller.  There are, of course, poor marks for every U.S. presidential administration, but the wanton disregard for human rights during the early 1980s sets the Reagan administration’s support for Ríos Montt aside as a particularly egregious oversight in an era of bipartisan disregard for sovereignty throughout Latin America.

Though I doubt it will make top headlines in the United States, any U.S. citizen on the left or the right should be horrified by what Ríos Montt and his administration perpetrated, and even more horrified that the United States so breezily facilitated it.

I don’t mean to be unduly partisan — you can lay any number of tragedies in foreign lands at the feet of many U.S. presidents, Democrat and Republican.  For Guatemala, though, the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in overthrowing the leftist, though duly elected, Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 was a catalyst for the civil war and turmoil that the country would face for the next four decades.  Though it happened on the watch of U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower and U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, the uprooting of developing nations during the Cold War, especially in Latin America, was a bipartisan venture.

But as I wrote in February, the Ríos Montt administration escalated what had already been by that point three decades of civil war: Continue reading Ríos Montt found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years →

Guatemala

Former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt to be tried for genocide

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huehuetenango

Central America was a rough neighborhood during the Cold War.guatemala flag icon

And Guatemala, with a civil war that essentially began with the overthrow of elected president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (with U.S. support) in 1954, and ended only with a peace treaty in 1996, was particularly rough.

Even in that context, however, the reign of Efraín Ríos Montt in the early 1980s, again backed by the United States, was a particularly brutal one.

Ríos Montt, however, this week became the first ever head of state to be tried for genocide in the Western Hemisphere, when a Guatemalan judge ruled that the trial will go forward — authorities charged Ríos Montt in early 2012 with genocide and crimes against humanity for, particularly, 1,771 deaths of indigenous Ixil Mayans during his 17-month reign, but really over 10,000 deaths in 1982 attributed to Ríos Montt’s regime — it’s a trial that could bring about a greater awareness of the atrocities committed not only in Guatemala, but throughout Central America during the Cold War, as well as the complicity of the United States in some of the most brutal events in Latin American history in the 20th century.

Ríos Montt, now aged 86, continues to argue for amnesty under the basis of a 1996 amnesty, but his lawyers have been accused of using legal tactics to bring about additional delays in the case.

Under international law, crimes against humanity and genocide have been considered to be exempt from national amnesty statutes, and indeed, even under Guatemala’s 1996 national conciliation law, genocide, torture and forced disappearances are expressly exempt from amnesty.

Today, the misty mountain air of Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands is best known for tourism rather than terror (pictured above).  Towns like Huehuetenango and Santiago Atitlán, in 2013, are better known as a source of fair-trade coffee than as a site of genocide.

But 30 years ago, the Guatemalan highlands saw some of the worst atrocities of the Guatemalan civil war.  Continue reading Former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt to be tried for genocide →