Fernando Cajas
Resistance is the ability of certain materials, people and communities to resist efforts, forces, pressures, disasters, wars and remain without deformation. Resilience is the ability to adapt to adverse situations with positive results. The Guatemalan people are resistant and resilient. These have been months of struggle, months of uncertainty. The Pact of Corrupts sows fear in all their actions, they want to reap terror, indifference to political participation, but they will not achieve it. They have invented a narrative so stupid that it already falls into ridiculousness.
The narrative of the corrupt pact comes to an end. They could not construct a coherent line that justified the judicialization of the electoral process, they simply violated, time and again, the Constitution. They were left with feints, with raids, with pretenses of authoritarianism. Every case they invented, that he was Uruguayan, that there were false signatures, that there were dead people signing, that Arévalo was a communist, that the TREP carried out the fraud, that the electoral boards were the ones responsible for the fraud, that Arévalo does not have an accent, none of that convinced the population. But Miguelito is convinced that he can get rid of Arévalo, so he asked Walter Mazariegos, the head of the National University, USAC, to write him a script about the genocide committed by the students in the takeover of the USAC.
The script for USAC: Political Loot was made just as the guiding usurper is, a clumsy script, a liar, a manipulator and an inventor of the worst crimes. It seems that the Mazariegos boy did not finish primary school and would have had a brighter future as a pig butcher in Barberena than as an imposter rector. That story can only be bought by an illiterate person like the illiterate judge Cruz, the coup leader, who listened ecstatically to the brilliant presentation of the MP’s fiscal copies. These prosecutors see crimes against humanity in addition to: Continuous depredation of cultural heritage, continuous sedition, illicit association and aggravated usurpation. At which university did these eminences study law?
Continued predation because the boys ruined, ruined, the gardens of the central campus, there was no longer grass in the Igloo, they did not cut the grass, they did not sweep and they did not wash the bathrooms, their takeover did not include gardeners to prune the facilities, they let them accumulate garbage in garbage cans. Virgin Mary! Sedition: here the boys in resistance made an uprising against authority, against the Barberena pig butcher, against public order. See, the boys, but especially Bernardito, incited rebellion and said how they should get rid of the impostor of the rector. Look what a jerk. Illicit association, of course, they associated, some asking to bring them food and others asking to bring them jackets because of the cold. And there was no way, they had to ask for help to take it. But they didn’t know that this was an illicit association, otherwise they didn’t ask for anything. Aggravated usurpation: Well, yes, they attacked the campus and didn’t let anyone in, not even the rector. The university workers wanted to enter to earn the sacred food, they were dying to enter the campus and they were not allowed. The students wanted classes and they wouldn’t let them. The traffickers wanted to go sell their products and they wouldn’t let them. What injustice!
The USAC case: Political Loot sets jurisprudence. It is an emblematic case of the academic quality of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who for some reason plagiarized her doctoral thesis. The case is funny if it were not for the fact that the Corrupt Pact hastily brought forward the renewal of the Supreme Court of Justice, CSJ. They did that expressly. That raises many doubts. The first is, could it not be that the condition that Miguelito set for being a member of the new supreme court was that they give the green light to the pretrial against Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera? The new Supreme Court of Justice will decide if this pretrial was presented for spurious, political or illegitimate reasons. As seen in all the statements of the prosecutors in the USAC: Political Loot case, it is clear that this trial is illegal, the trial cannot be taken away from the president and the vice president-elect. The only viable decision for Guatemalan democracy is for the Supreme Court to declare that this pretrial does not proceed, the rest is a coup d’état.
This attack that they have given us, the people, which first was a tragedy and now is almost a comedy, is a terrifying blow to the depths of Guatemalan society. The capture of the San Carlos teachers, the capture of Javier, a physics major with class consciousness, with the essence of a town, a student whose thesis focuses on the use of partial differential equations for the movement of fluids and who participated in the protest, the protest in which not six, not twelve, but thousands of students from San Carlos participated. The fact that a traitor, manipulator, ignorant, thief rector comes and takes over our institution and now uses it, not only to extract resources but as a weapon, as a tool of attack, as a system of repression that in collusion with the Giammatei’s government now wants to use the USAC to deal a lethal blow to democracy, to such an extent that it asked to be a plaintiff in the process against students and teachers, whom they falsely accuse of sedition for shaking their fists, that fact does not It means that we do not realize the seriousness of the situation.
The social movement against corruption of the decade 2013-2023 is part of a broader process for the construction of a more just society, with more freedoms, a process in which we have been since the conquest when the Guatemalan resistance was inaugurated. Then with the pseudo independence that consolidated racism, classism, and slavery as a legal method of the new State. The indigenous groups saved, took care of their culture and took refuge from the massive, constant attacks of the post-independence governments, but in general they could not withstand the attacks in such a way that by 1830 the separatist movements of the State of Los Altos emerged, whose epicenter was Quezaltenango. . However, said separatist movement was permeated by the existential racism of the time, it failed for the same reason, leaving the space open for the liberal revolution of 1872, which consolidated the predation, inequality, inequity and exploitation of indigenous peoples as method of building a republic. That is to say, from 1528 to 1800 the conquest took place boldly, a country was then invented, 1821, and immediately afterwards the separatist movement of the Altos began, 1830, which also failed, giving way to the liberal revolution of 1872, all of this to consolidate slavery and dispossession.
There have been centuries of fighting. The Ladino communities, called mestizo by some researchers, were always peripheral to these struggles, except for the 1944 revolution, the first failed attempt to create a modern, proto-capitalist, democratic state. Since then we realized that racism, exclusion, poverty, malnutrition were the norm in some groups. Despite this, the revolution is proposed timidly, as an attempt to create purchasing power, more consumers, more industries. Some of this was achieved along with a social program to improve the quality of life of Guatemalans. The October revolution transformed and improved social living conditions with the founding of institutions that have been key to our existence as a country, but the war came, the same ones as usual came, the same ones from now, the same ones who took out the CICIG, the same ones, those who want the country at their disposal, as an estate, those we are fighting against now.
To the thirty years of war we must add the birth of a new social class, the politicians who capture the state, together with the military, drug traffickers and hitmen, have taken total control of the State. We have been in this fight against corruption since 2015, with the State Reform Platform, then directed by the Rector of the USAC, but we clearly understand that this is only part of the comprehensive fight to build a real country. , one that is not only folklore, that of the photo of Atitlán, but one that finally respects the diverse cultures, all languages, that provides opportunities to grow in peace, one that eradicates malnutrition, extreme poverty and uses all the relevant scientific and technological knowledge to get us out of this abyss called corruption. Will we go out? Don’t know. We must unite, we must not let them carry out a coup d’état, that will allow us to create a new country. Let’s go Guatemala. Either it is now or it will never be.
