The most important phase of the Guatemalan elections has come and gone, but the campaign period and first round of voting have only left a dark cloud hanging over the prospects for the next four years. 

While a second round of voting on November 4 will decide between presidential frontrunners Alvaro Colom and General Otto Perez Molina, the political and financial deal-brokering that define Guatemalan politics has already set the course of the next administration.  The right wing, represented equally by both presidential contenders, also held strongly onto the control of congressional representatives and municipal mayors, showing very little room for contesting the economic policies and social inaction that are dragging post-war Guatemala every day further along a downward spiral of violence and poverty.

 

On the surface, Colom and Perez Molina appear to propose governments that, while not radically different, would vary significantly in their approach to Guatemala‘s fundamental social, economic, and political problems.  The rhetorical divide has been one of a market-oriented social democracy from Colom’s Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) versus the “heavy hand / mano dura” response to crime and violence proposed by Perez Molina and the Partido Patriota (PP).

 

General Otto Perez Molina has built his presidential campaign on a tough-on-crime platform backed by his lengthy career with the Guatemalan armed forces and intelligence units.  A member of the “reformist” branch of the military during the early 1980s, Perez Molina promoted the return to electoral democracy in 1985, opposed the “Serranazo” coup attempt in 1993, and played a major role in peace accord negotiation in the mid-1990s.  His return to politics in 2000 as the founder of the PP and as an elected congressional representative in 2004 has allowed the General to trumpet both sides of his military career, as a politician that is tough on crime while hailing from the camp of peace-promoting officers. 

 

No Guatemalan military officer can claim to have his hands clean of blood, however.  Perez Molina, for his part, headed up two of the most feared military death-squad units during their final days (G2, 1991-1993; EMP, 1993-1995).  The General has also been implicated in the state conspiracy that led to the killing of Archbishop Juan Jose Gerardi in 1998, one of the most public crimes intended to protect military impunity as the armed conflict came to an end.

 

In contrast to Perez Molina’s military background and security-focused platform, Alvaro Colom appears to come from an entirely different camp.  His background is in commercial production, and his most recent non-congressional government position was with the National Peace Foundation (Fonapaz).  Colom’s campaign, while including proposals to curb violence similar to those of Otto Perez Molina, emphasizes social investment in health and education.

 

Problems plague the parties behind both presidential candidates, however, and a closer look at their structure and financing reveals that little difference actually exists between the two proposed administrations.  Under differing circumstances, both the UNE and the PP have left themselves open to the influence of powerful external actors. 

 

Having already failed in two presidential bids in 1999 and 2003, Alvaro Colom began to lose control of the UNE during the last four years.  This is most openly seen in a series of revolts by UNE congressional representatives, who ignored Colom’s orders in two key recent votes, supporting the CAFTA free trade agreement that Colom sought to defeat and voting against the CICIG international commission to investigate illegal armed groups in Guatemala.

 

In contrast to Colom’s loss of control, Perez Molina has experienced a swinging pendulum of external support while maintaining central control of his party.  After joining the pan-rightist GANA effort to defeat General Rios Montt’s presidential bid in 2003, Perez Molina broke the PP from the alliance and clashed strongly with the most powerful elements of Guatemala‘s traditional economic elite.  His support has also been low historically within the military and its retired officers turned politicians and crime lords. 

 

Colom’s recent lack of leadership and Perez Molina’s political blank slate left both the UNE and PP open to the ideologically-compromising support of powerful Guatemalan actors during this year’s campaign period.  The most significant result has been identical for both parties: the same elements of the economic elite have provided equal financial backing for the two candidates.

 

The powerful empire controlled by Dionisio Gutierrez and Juan Luis Bosch (“los Gutierrez-Bosch”), as the strongest economic force to reckon with in today’s Guatemala and the largest contributor to both the UNE and PP campaigns, has thus emerged as the true winner of the Guatemalan elections.  Known most publicly for their ownership of the fantastically popular Pollo Campero transnational fast-food chain, the Gutierrez-Bosch pull most of their economic weight from their monopolistic control of the chicken and cement markets in Guatemala.  This is no small holding: the two monopolies combined mean the virtual control of public and private housing and infrastructure as well as the staple meat of millions of Guatemalans.  In the scramble to benefit from the recently-signed free trade agreement between the United States, Central America, and the Dominican Republic, the Gutierrez-Bosch have emerged as the clear winners, defining a new era in Guatemala’s conflictive intra-elite politics.

 

The Gutierrez-Bosch primary control of the UNE and PP campaigns, then, means the guaranteed continuation of the economics of privatization, the further concentration of resources in a country where 2% of the population already controls 78% of the land, and the persistence of political strategies that refuse to address at any substantial level the fundamental causes of poverty and inequality in Guatemala.  The trends that have defined the last four years will doubtlessly continue: the concentration of wealth, the increased presence of transnational companies, the acceleration of internal and external migration for economic reasons, and the ballooning figures for poverty and extreme poverty across the country despite a steadily growing gross national product.

 

Despite this desperate situation, however, Guatemala does not count with a rebirth of the political left as seen across much of Latin America.  In fact, the opposite was demonstrated in these elections: the multiple parties of the excessively divided left were either co-opted, voted into congressional irrelevance, or dissolved.  Of the four political parties presenting leftist platforms of varying degrees, two have been forced to disband following their low support in the September 9 elections. 

 

The Alianza Nueva Nacion (ANN), which, according to Guatemalan law must cease to exist after failing to elect a single congressional representative, had presented a mixture of Guatemalan and Venezuelan revolutionary language, with Pablo Monsanto, the former commander of all guerrilla forces in Guatemala, proposing a “constitutional revolution.”  Likewise, the formerly rightist Democracia Cristiana Guatemalteca (DCG) party will no longer function after attempting a comeback through the intellectualist anti-neoliberal discourse of Marco Vinicio Cerezo.

 

The progressive party that made the strongest advance in congress, the recently-formed Encuentro por Guatemala (EG), while running the indigenous activist and 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu as presidential candidate and having elected strong, progressive congressional representatives, unfortunately counts with the same right-wing backing given to the UNE and PP. 

 

In addition to being funded by the Gutierrez-Bosch, the EG vice-presidential candidate, Fernando Montenegro, hails from the traditional landholding elite, serving as head of the coffee farmers’ association during the coffee crisis that left thousands of rural Guatemalans without work, and more recently as president of the formidable multi-sectoral economic cooperation board, CACIF.  It is no surprise, then, that the EG’s platform, while excellent in terms of the protection of indigenous and human rights, severely lacks any socially-oriented economic policies.

 

Only the URNG, guerrilla forces turned political party following the peace accords, continue to function as a genuinely leftist party, but the party has no room for maneuvering with its two congressional representatives and seven mayorships.  The URNG’s well-defined opposition to current economic policies and articulated proposed alternatives have made the transition from the revolution into the neoliberal era, but will continue to fall on deaf ears in the Guatemalan congress.

 

It was in the camp of municipal mayors, elected on the same day as the president and congress, that progressive parties had hoped to assert their relevance and local influence, but even there the left failed to make an impact.  Of 332 mayors elected across the country, a total of just eleven candidates were elected from left-wing parties: two from the ANN, one from the DCG (all three of which will now have to change political affiliation), one from Menchu’s EG, and seven from the URNG.  Nineteen mayors were also elected from locally-based “civic committees” and no doubt many of the 104 UNE mayors elected will have progressive approaches to municipal governance, but this is not enough to suggest that the left was anything but obliterated at the local level.

 

Political violence also hit the left hard during the campaign period, as many of the record forty-four assassinations of candidates and activists targeted these four parties.  In many cases, the murders caused the parties to withdraw candidates from local and congressional races.

 

The forecast, then, is dim.  In addition to the horrendous economic situation described above, Guatemala is living a period of violence rivaling that of its civil war, with an average of sixteen murders daily, unrestrained street gangs, horrific sexual crimes against women, violent organized crime, and “social cleansing” and political death squads.  Impunity and a lack of institutional response tie these categories of violence together, as only 2% of all murders, political or otherwise, reach sentencing in Guatemala.  Only a profound revision of government policies, state institutions, and the national distribution of wealth can begin to reverse these trends, but all signs point to yet another four-year period of neglect and the acceleration of Guatemala‘s downward spiral.

 

The only ray of hope in these dark Guatemalan days, and it is a very bright light indeed, comes from the enormously numerous and infinitely organized social movements based across the country.  From community-based consultation processes responding to the illegal incursion of transnational mining companies into indigenous territories, to the articulated alternatives to land conflicts proposed by campesino groups, to national-level human rights monitoring by non-governmental organizations, Guatemalan society continuously responds to the onslaught of violations it is presented with. 

 

Any hope that this momentum would be carried over into electoral politics, however, was resolutely extinguished at the polls last week. Guatemalans can only brace themselves for four more years of the violent erosion of their rights in the face of official neglect.

 

 

Guatemala, September 11, 2007

 

Sources: Incidencia Democratica, El Poder Politico al Servicio de la Disputa de la Hegemonia de Fracciones Oligarquicas; CNOC, Los Financistas; elPeriodico, “Anatomia de los Candidatos”; elPeriodico, “Los Duenos de America Central”; Author’s interviews with ANN and EG activists; Guatemalan newspapers: elPeriodico, Prensa Libre, Nuestro Diario.

 

Simon Granovsky-Larsen is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University, and has worked with human rights and campesino organizations in Guatemala since 2003.  He spent the three weeks leading up to the elections as a human rights accompanier with the San Lucas Toliman, Solola contingent of the left-wing ANN political party.  Granovsky-Larsen’s recent book on human rights defenders in Guatemala can be found online at http://gam.org.gt/public/publi/pdf/ciciacs.pdf.

 

 

 

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