Fernando Cajas
How can we build democracy in a country with 60% poverty? How do you build democracy in a country with 50% child malnutrition? So; to build democracy in a country where the justice system was completely co-opted by a dictator: Consuelo Porras. An individual who is specially designed for Hitler or Mussolini or Ubico, who only those who finance him have the right to stay as attorney general. It is unbelievable that in the 21st century we are once again co-opted by the far right through puppets who run the public ministry and who dictate who will investigate and who will not investigate, who who should be imprisoned and who should not be imprisoned. They are not doing this because of the evidence, no. There is no theory of law with these! The only thing is a short-term view that allows them to serve the interests of the Corrupt Alliance regardless of the great inequalities that exist in a country that cannot build a democracy. Non-country in the beautiful and deep letters of our Carolina Escobar Tailors.
We have made great efforts to change this situation, with tangible but hidden achievements. The army became millionaires in the revolution, 1960-1980. These allowed the monopolies that rule us to consolidate. Accepting nominal democracy in 1986 was accepting international pressures and not building a more equitable society, with access to the basic rights of modern democracy. We do not have these rights. The elite monopoly has received military support. Corrupt people lost control with the International Commission Against Freedom, CICIG, which began to demonstrate with theory and evidence the co-election of the Guatemalan State. But no, the owners of the farm took the leap and told the CICIG outside. For that they hired their puppet Jimmy Morales.
Of the possible situations when we left the CICIG, we had the worst. We fell into the hands of a compulsive manipulator, narcissist, thief and corrupt who, together with the love of his life, Miguel Martínez, had dedicated themselves directly to looting the State. This homosexual, which was not said lightly, declared himself as the defender of the traditional family and connected himself to the fast church of the country, with its narco ministers and the narco agents. They stole left and right. We couldn’t get up because they were cornering us with our COVID masks. But the fault is not with Jimmy Morales or Alejandro Giammatei but with our political indifference that was able to allow them to enter the executive team. This is a complex dilemma. It is not easy for a society that has been put under fear, under terror, to ask him to free himself. From? Our leaders will be in exile and there are hardly any left. The work to build democracy follows the path we took when we were defending Arévalo for the presidency. That was a social movement that broke the classic dichotomies that separate us.
Giammatei stole everything he could and left the State in rags. No one criticized him, not even CACIF, the most important business chamber in Guatemala, because these fake businessmen live from corruption as clearly documented in the report called Paraíso Desigual. The political movement was impossible for Arévalo, it was the people, it was the rural and indigenous communities that took the leadership of the defense. Urban communities, some, defended the election. The High Electoral Tribunal was raided in the most scurrilous way possible.
Before the general election, Giammatei is making sure that the high courts are on his side. For that, it was necessary to have a corrupt rector. It was not an easy task to find a candidate for the rhetoric without real leadership, with a terrible inferiority complex, a compulsive manipulator, almost psychotic so that he could steal from everything and everyone. Thus appeared the figure of Walter Mazariegos, the dean of Humanities with a dark history in his manipulative political life. The only thing that was clear to him was that he had been a pig butcher somewhere in eastern Guatemala, an honest job I must say. He was good at butchering. The Corruption Pact made this little man ruler. To get to the press they broke everything, the Constitution, the laws of the university, everything. But because they had the support of a co-opted, unprotected justice system, no complaints went before the supreme council and even less before the co-opted courts.
After Arévalo went to the second round, the right Guatemalan, led obviously by Méndez Ruin, came with everything. He took advantage of the fact that he had servants in the public ministry who were paid to plan and execute a coup d’état. A rickety coup d’état. That’s why they did everything, they kicked, they cried, they threw food, they created false cases, a dozen, of everything, but they could not face a crowd that finally broke the old dichotomies who sold them to keep us. united: Indian-Ladino, white-black, rich poor, right-handed. Dichotomies, that way of seeing the world polarized, white or black without the intermediate tones and without the true colors that actually exist. To eliminate Arévalo on social networks, another dichotomy appears: Cairo-facho, a way of delegating without arguments.
Looking at the past in the face of our conflicts, looking at our struggles and achievements, it seems that we have a path to democracy: Participation without false dichotomies is essential at this time. While we got a democratic president sworn in, that doesn’t seem to be enough. The high courts are still co-elected and the new High Court of Justice was chosen with the same tricks as the past. Yes, that means we remain at the mercy of corruption. But the way out of that labyrinth is in our hands. However, we do not see the result because it is not there. We need to build a consensus solution, the one we built in 1944 we need to reconsider. We must realize the words of Article 141, which confirms that jurisdiction lies in the people who delegate it, for its use, to the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Bodies. Subordination between them is prohibited. We can no longer accept the subordination of the Government to the judicial power of Gerona, we can no longer accept the subordination of Congress to the threats of co-opted judicial power. Let us Guatemalans fight, because we fought that month of October 1944. If it is not now, it will never be Guatemala.
