News of interest from Latin America by David Morris
Vol. 1, No. 10. Monday, November 5, 2007
Guatemala: lesser evil
Centrist businessman Álvaro Colom has defeated rightist general Otto Pérez Molina in the runoff election for the presidency of Guatemala. Although he had fallen behind Pérez Molina in recent polls, Colom received about 52% of the vote in the November 4 election, which drew a relatively small number of participants. The murders of 59 candidates, campaign workers and their families, and injuries to another 89, made the election the most violent since the return of electoral democracy in 1996 and violence was a dominant theme in both candidates’ campaigns. With a population of 13 million, the country suffers more than 5,000 murders a year, very few of which result in punishment. Pérez Molina’s Partido Patriota (PP) offered a mano dura, a firm hand, to control violence, promising a 50% increase in military and police presence throughout the country and the reinstatement of the death penalty. Colom’s Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) favored prevention over punishment and argued for strengthening the economy and the country’s institutions.Although Guatemalans averted what many foresaw as a disaster by not electing Pérez, there is little reason to expect any relief for the country’s deep poverty from the Colom presidency. Guatemala has the lowest rating for the region on the United Nations Human Development Index, which takes into account factors like life expectancy, literacy and the supplying of basic needs. Forty-nine percent of Guatemalan children under five, and as many as 70% in some rural areas, are malnourished. Some 3.5 million Guatemalans have no access to medical care, infant mortality is 38 per 1,000 live births and the maternal death rate is 153 for every 100,000 births.
Neither Pérez nor Colom proposed agrarian reform or other structural change. Both support free trade and corporate globalization. Colom, a professional engineer and entrepreneur, wants to turn Guatemala into an exporter of goods and services, to develop the tourist industry and to make the country more attractive to foreign and domestic investors. He says that by promoting industrialization in rural areas and by encouraging small and medium-sized industry, his government can create 700,000 new jobs.
Colom at one time founded and ran a maquiladora which assembled clothing and was later president of a national association of maquiladora operators. He was on the board of an organization of exporters of non-traditional products. He began his political career in 1991 as vice-minister for the economy in the administration of rightist President Jorge Serrano Elías and in 1999 was the unsuccessful presidential candidate for the leftist Alianza Nueva Nación, an involvement leftist critics charge was more opportunism than conviction. He then formed the UNE as a social-democratic party.
Colom’s claim to human rights activism rests partly on his directorship of the Fondo Nacional para la Paz, an International Monetary Fund project to facilitate private investment in infrastructure in the eastern part of the country, where the rural Mayan population suffered most heavily during the repression of 1960 to 1996. He also aided in the repatriation of thousands of Guatemalans who had fled to Mexico during the repression. His association with President Serrano Elías detracts from his record, Serrano Elías having close ties with Efrain Ríos Montt, the most brutal ruler in Guatemalan history. During his presidency, Serrano Elías dissolved the legislature and suspended the constitution.
Pérez Molina also had a connection to the Serrano Elías administration, but as an opponent; he was one of several military officers who opposed Serrano Elías’s dissolving the legislature and suspending the constitution. Pérez claimed during the recent campaign that he was the real peace candidate, since as head of army intelligence he had participated in the negotiations of 1996 that ended the war. In reality, Guatemalan army intelligence under Pérez was notorious for its human-rights abuses and for drug trafficking. He was apparently in the pay of the CIA at the time. And Pérez, under the command of de facto President Ríos Montt, was head of the military in the Ixil area, where several massacres of Mayan residents are well documented.
A recent book by Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, describes how Pérez was involved in the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi two days after he released a report he had written finding the Guatemalan army responsible for most of the 200,000 deaths and disappearances that took place during the 36 years of war.
(Sources: Council on Hemispheric Affairs, US; Democracy Now, US; El Periódico, Guatemala; Prensa Latina, Cuba; Austin IndyMedia, US; Prensa Libre, Guatemala; La Hora, Guatemala)
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