Fernando Cajas
Indigenous groups have defended our fragile democracy with everything. But democracy, if it exists, is ours, not just that of indigenous groups. It belongs to everyone. Although the leadership of the resistance, of the real resistance, is indigenous, all Guatemalans, if we want to live in democracy, we must express ourselves, defend it or say no, that we do not want democracy. The deepest silence, for or against democracy, or failing that, the coup d’état, is what I perceive from academics and professionals. I try to understand, to understand, why my university colleagues, particularly those from the National University of San Carlos, USAC, participate little politically. Whether those who are in academia or those who practice as professionals, in the state, in the private initiative, in their private practice.
In general, I perceive academics and professionals, men and women, as silent and I would like to think that they are not silenced. It is not a reflection to judge, to accuse, no. I try not to use qualifying adjectives but my real intention is to understand why, what has happened to the academics and professionals who do not speak out about the coup d’état in particular, but did not speak out about the imposition of a rector either, this contrasts with the academy of the 70s and 80s of the last century. What happened?
I believe that the professors of the National University, USAC, and other universities, particularly Landívar, experienced closely the bloody war that left 200,000 dead, two hundred thousand lost hopes. This experience of a group of young people who lived through the counter-revolution and the first years of war, many of them involved in the guerrilla, urban or in the mountains, trained with a curriculum structured around Marxism marked a type of social consciousness that explains the participation from then. For Marx, society could be explained in terms of class struggle. These were mainly the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the proletariat on the other. I believe that those of us who were students at San Carlos in the 70s and also at Landívar in the 80s, were guided by a Utopia, that of a more just society.
Then, in the 70s and early 80s, the social humanistic courses in all university courses in San Carlos had the objective of building social consciousness, class consciousness. We perceived ourselves as proletarians and many of our teachers and classmates were guerrillas. The national university, USAC, as a whole, was a space for the urban guerrilla to such an extent that in the early 1980s it was invaded by the military. With another dynamic and another theoretical basis, liberation theology, the Rafael Landívar University, a Guatemalan Jesuit university, was also a center of political activism for the rebellious left.
Day and night we live the terror of war. Day after day the sociological reflection on a new society permeated our student minds. So, little by little we graduated and several international phenomena happened, some, and national, others, that influenced student and teaching life at that time, mid-1980s, early 1990s. On an international level it was the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 80s, Guatemalan universities were clearly delimited. San Carlos was popular, really. The Landívar, although private, had social functions and was the territory of religious utopia for a more just society. The Francisco Marroquín University had just been born, the anti-communist university that, upon realizing that there were no communists in the world, decided to be neoliberal.
Thus we arrived at the 21st century with universities that were transformed from being educational centers for critical thinking to being centers of school reproduction for the training of professionals with a business, neoliberal vision. Admission exams changed the demographics of new students at the national university. The middle class was restructured both ideologically and demographically. There was a brief expansion of the middle class and then a new contraction began. Poverty increased. In the second decade of the 21st century we have a social pyramid that, despite the discussion among specialists, has approximately 10% upper class, 30% middle class and 60% lower class. I insist, here social class is an income indicator.
A country with 60% poverty is a failure. A country that has 10% of people who own the majority of the means of production is also a failure, it is an unequal country. 30% of the population, where academics and professionals are found, do not have really high incomes, but they have enough to have settled in an unequal, unfair country, not so much because it is not their turn, but because it is not their turn as much. Here, academics and professionals trained at the National University form an important segment of the silent population, for different reasons.
I want to appeal to that group, professionals and academics, at this key moment in our democratic history. The middle class has a historic role in the fight for democracy. To these state employees who may perceive a certain stability in bureaucratic jobs that will be lost if democracy is lost, to those professionals, who practice now that there is a certain freedom, but whose jobs will be put in danger if democracy is lost. To those university professors who can still make their professorship a space for reflection and struggle for a more just society, to them. I want to appeal to the middle class, which has managed to have a relatively decent life in this country where authoritarianism and corruption will increasingly tear away that stability. The trend is that the middle class is shrinking and poverty is increasing.
The short-term scenario is dark, after the ridiculous presentation of the investigations by the public ministry on December 8, it now continues to send the file of the annulment of the elections to the electoral court. Then, whether the supreme electoral court says no, that there is no evidence of electoral fraud or whether it says yes, that, if there is evidence of fraud, the file will finally reach the constitutionality court. At this crucial moment in Guatemalan democratic life, the Guatemalan academics, the professionals of this country of ours still have an opportunity to defend our democracy, to join the indigenous movements, the 48 Cantons, the Sololá groups , who have supported the resistance movement. Either it is now or it will never be Guatemala.
