Jorge Santos
There is no doubt that Guatemala is in the process of reestablishing an authoritarian regime, where an economic elite concentrates power and, through the use of the political and military elite and organized crime, has erased all democratic counterweights and has ready to abuse power and deepen arbitrariness as a form of government. In this process, both the substance and the form coincide particularly in making politics the art of the ridiculous, the corrupt and the vulgar. The closer the other groups are to this economic elite, the more fallacious, more cynical and vulgar the exercise becomes.
The greatest expression of this condition is represented by the current electoral process, which already in its campaign phase of the political parties shows us that disgusting face of the vulgarization of politics. Thus, today Guatemalan society is witnessing a series of actions of manipulation, impudence, lies and mediocrity of the existing electoral offer in the country. Nor do we have the slightest doubt that this vulgarization is caused by the institutional framework that allows it, encourages it, and considers it useful for its purposes.
The Guatemalan political spectrum, dominated mainly by political instruments of the right and the extreme right, therefore means that the electoral offer is mostly mediocre, deeply lying and vulgar. Since last March 27, political parties have been authorized to carry out an electoral campaign and with this we have woken up with a flood of propaganda, one uglier and more mediocre than others.
Cheap phrases such as “now yes, the people rule”, “two women, one path”, “with eggs and without straws”, “order and transformation” or using little pencils, flags and pins, the politicians of the right they appeal to the emotionality more than to the rationality that should prevail in this campaign, where the People can know proposals and realities and not pre-established phrases without any type of content. It seems that the great objective of this political elite and its financiers is to make the population believe that it is okay to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated, as the intellectual Noam Chomsky put it in his 10 strategies for media manipulation.
But another way to demonstrate this absolute vulgarization of political activity is in the simple fact of demonstrating, from who or who directs the Supreme Electoral Tribunal -TSE- with false doctorates, to candidates sentenced for acts of corruption and impunity, drug trafficking, looting from public coffers and in some cases even murderers. The vast majority of political parties are plagued by this type of person. Citizenship will correspond to us, to give a resounding NO to the daughter of a Genocide, to the son of a privatizer, to the mafia and demagogue candidate, to the lawyer who traffics in children and to give way to the candidacies that are born from the organization of the Peoples and the social and popular movements.
Jorge Santos / [email protected]
Defender of human rights, lover of life, hopes and utopias, which has led me to work for another Guatemala, in student and peasant organizations, victims of the Internal Armed Conflict and the protection of human rights defenders. I faithfully believe, like Otto René Castillo, that those who build it beautiful find life beautiful.
Source The Time
