Fernando Cajas
This is a coup d’état, slow, soft, or whatever you want to call it, but it is a coup d’état. It’s not that they had it scheduled before Arévalo went to the second round, no. It was born, grows and develops when Arévalo is the virtual president. The extreme right-wing businessmen, not many, but powerful oligarchs and fearful of communism, listen to the voice of old soldiers, also from the extreme right, who trust in Miguel Martínez’s plan, inspired by his partner, the same representative of national unity, Alejandro Giammatei, a sinister character since his murderous stay in Pavón prison. They use the attorney general, who was hired to remove the Commission Against Impunity, CICIG, another attack on democracy about which the people of Guatemala did not say a word. We did not defend ourselves from that attack and the attorney general gave the victory to the Corrupt Pact.
Now we don’t defend democracy much either. Indigenous groups such as the 48 Cantons and Sololá and other urban groups do it, but we are not defending this fragile democracy, our defense is not perceived beyond the defense on social networks, we are not organized in structured communities that can have a coordinated response, no. If you perceive the enormous international defense which is explained because in principle the United States and the good Venezuelans missed Venezuela for two basic reasons: The authoritarian and undemocratic government of Chávez slowly co-opted all the democratic institutions of the country and in North America it does not They perceived it. Instead of defending their democracy, Venezuelan citizens began to leave the country, abandoning the fight, five million emigrated, who did not fight for their homeland and left it abandoned. Nor could Washington do much because of the enormous power of Venezuelan oil and its alliances with the Chinese and the Russians with Cuban “support,” which was very expensive, by the way. Neither the United States nor Europe are willing for what happened in Venezuela and Nicaragua to happen in Guatemala.
One or another representative without a visa to the United States is now saying that this is not a coup d’état, that everything is normal, that removing the immunity of the judges of the electoral court is normal for a purchase, that there is nothing to fear, Yeah? It will be necessary to clarify that a Coup d’état is a change in power resulting from disobeying the will of the people, it is an imposition, an interference carried out by groups within a society that act against the Constitution with the aim of taking or maintaining the power that the people have not delegated to them. It is not only removing the president of a country, a democratic president who has arrived through a democratic election, it is also not allowing a democratically elected president to take office or for him to govern because the corrupt tie his hands.
They tie his hands in one way and another, with corrupt processes, with inventing a dozen false, ridiculous, pathetic cases, the most notable being the one related to the takeover of the National University, the University of San Carlos, USAC: A Political Loot. This is the paradigmatic case of the brilliant public ministry, MP, which dares to denounce Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera of sedition, illicit association, etc. because Arévalo wrote and published a Twitter in which he says that university autonomy must be defended, yes. , that is the brilliant case of the mp, for God’s sake!
The other invention is the so-called TREP, related to the data transmission system, it is not electoral fraud, it is simply a custom-made accusation, without even having an audit by the comptroller of accounts, they had nothing, not even a way To compare prices of a similar system, they only used the purchase to remove the immunity of the electoral court magistrates. But here greed came together with ambition. The first proposal of the value of the vote in favor of removing immunity was denied. The coup deputies waited until the last minute for the offer to increase and then gave their coup vote. It is very clear that it has nothing to do with the alleged overvaluation of the TREP system, but simply to remove immunity and change the magistrates of the electoral court.
Now the attack continues, because Curruchiche accused Judge Alfaro that she gave him a bad look, that this and that, that the minutes 8 do not coincide with what the TREP says. Already tired, Judge Alfaro responds: «I receive this preliminary ruling with great gratitude because it is my support that I have done the right thing. The votes were counted by the vote collecting boards. The minutes 4 were filled out by the vote receiving boards and the minutes 8 were filled out by the departmental boards and those minutes 8, as they have said in their conference, do not have to coincide, they must be given a class on electoral rights. Those will never coincide with the TREP, gentlemen, because there are the revisions proposed by the political organizations and when minute 8 is filled out, it can vary in the legitimate count made by the departmental boards. So, gentlemen, we can say that we give you the guarantee of the legitimation of an anti-fraud electoral law for political parties, that is, there cannot be fraud in Guatemala because here the ballots are only paper. The TREP only contains preliminary data. A rooster doesn’t crow any clearer.
In this soap opera, the best judge gave Curru a Grinch, out of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s desire to make us have a bitter Christmas. With Guatemalans entangled, on the one hand, with a group of corrupt people who do not want to give up power or who want to give it to other corrupt people and a country that does not seem to fight for its democracy, we find ourselves facing a coup Christmas, that is, a celebration that should give us peace and not bitterness as perceived with the constant actions of the public ministry and the indifference of a people who do not seem to appreciate democracy. Of course, the fight is being made by the indigenous groups who well deserve a plurinational, pluricultural, multiethnic state that not only recognizes this enormous effort to defend the republic, but also recognizes the abandonment to which they have been subjected by a paper democracy.
The fight must belong to all of us who want democracy. We must get out of our comfort zone. We must speak out by all possible means and participate in the defense of the democracy we have to build a better democracy. Either it is now or it will never be Guatemala.
