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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://resumen-english.org/2023/10/guatemala-coup-and-assassination-plans-against-president-elect-arevalo/">resumen-english.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Guatemala: Coup and Assassination Plans against President-Elect Arévalo</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits"></div>By Cindy Forster on October 2, 2023</div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-wrapper2">
<p><em><img src="https://i0.wp.com/resumen-english.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-2.jpg?resize=300%2C170&ssl=1" alt="" width="300" height="170"><br></em></p><p><em>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.</em><span id="gmail-more-24768"></span></p>
<p>Few dare predict the future in Guatemala in the months leading up to the presidential inauguration on January 14<sup>th</sup>
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 25<sup>th</sup> and from that point, has denounced that elites were plotting to destroy him.</p>
<p>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 20<sup>th</sup>. Arévalo won the second
round against Torres with an astounding 60.9%. Torres claimed the August
elections were stolen from her and filed suit.</p>
<p>Elections befitting a mafia-run republic</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_24770" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-24770" src="https://i0.wp.com/resumen-english.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10-4-guatemala.jpg?resize=300%2C157&ssl=1" alt="" width="300" height="157" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-24770" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><font size="1">President-elect Bernardo Arévalo</font></p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 24<sup>th</sup>. Members of the
president-elect’s party, named Semilla or Seed, receive constant threats
and a number of them have fled the country.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Dark Horse Candidate</p>
<p><strong> </strong>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A Sea of Indigenous Organizing</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 25<sup>th</sup>. “We have seen one attack after another. They have not respected the decisions of the people of Guatemala.”</p>
<p><strong> </strong>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.</p>
<p>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. <a href="https://www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/una-plaza-llena-respalda-bernardo-arevalo-y-clama-por-la-destitucion-de-consuelo-porras">https://www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/una-plaza-llena-respalda-bernardo-arevalo-y-clama-por-la-destitucion-de-consuelo-porras</a>
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.</p>
<p>Otto Pérez Molina, the genocidal general whose fall from the presidency launched Semilla’s fame</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The geopolitics of U.S. support for Arévalo</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Social democrats in the modern era</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A coup in progress</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A radical majority among voters?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>MLP promised to achieve “a Plurinational state” and “<em>el buen vivir</em>”
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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Cindy Forster</strong></em> is a Latin American and
Caribbean Studies professor, a writer of 3 books on Compesinos and
Revolutionary histories who travel frequently to Guatemala.</p>
<p>Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English</p>
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