Carlos Figueroa
When I write these lines two facts have caught my attention. The first of these is the surprising rise in the polls of Carlos Pineda Sosa, presidential candidate for the Prosperidad Ciudadana party. The second of them, the message via Twitter from the leader of the Foundation against Terrorism announcing that a judge issued an arrest warrant against the “terrorist criminal” Gustavo Meoño Brenner. The two facts are linked, although Pineda Sosa was not linked to Ricardo Méndez Ruiz.
We are witnessing a reissue of the Jimmy Morales phenomenon from those 2015 elections. Apparently an outsider of politics like Morales, Pineda has actually been participating in politics for a while. He was associated with the children of Manuel Baldizón in one of his multiple partisan attempts. Baldizón in 2018 was imprisoned in the United States for money laundering and conspiracy. Pineda was considered as a vice-presidential candidate accompanying Mario Estrada. Estrada was also captured in 2019 in the United States for drug trafficking and conspiring to assassinate political opponents. Like Nayib Bukele, he is seasoned in managing social networks and shares with him an authoritarian vision to solve common crime. Pineda is the son of a person close to former President Carlos Arana Osorio, implicated in crimes against humanity in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also a successful businessman in plantain, African palm and rambutan.
In the event that Pineda was like Morales in 2015, the surprise winner in the presidential elections to be held in June 2023, would it mean a break with the dominant interests of criminal governance in Guatemala? That would hardly happen. Pineda concentrates in his person the anti-communist tradition that today appears as neo-fascism. He is also linked to corrupt and criminal characters and finally is closely linked to extractivism. He therefore shares some of the main features of the bloc in power that today is behind the nascent dictatorship that led to the peace signed in 1996.
In Guatemala, the message from Méndez Ruiz announcing the arrest warrant against Gustavo Meoño is an indication of how neo-fascism expresses the will of the majority of the dominant bloc in the country. Terror once again, this time of a judicial nature, expresses the political culture of the bloc in power made up of the rancid oligarchy and its recent additions, white-collar criminals enriched by the treasury, organized crime and the neo-fascist right. Terror has paid off: a conservative count indicates that approximately 53 former prosecutors, former judges, magistrates, journalists, former members of the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG), community communicators, and human rights activists have had to go into exile.
The reasons for the bitterness are clearly mentioned by Méndez Ruiz in his message: the former “subversives”, their allies and heirs will have to pay before the courts in the same way that “the war veterans of the Guatemalan army who fought with the law in the hand against those who tried to establish a communist regime through terror. The neo-fascist right wing thirsts for revenge as does all those who were prosecuted in the context of the CICIG’s work. The nascent dictatorship of criminal governance is aware of and wants revenge for what the human rights community and the CICIG have achieved in terms of transitional justice and the fight against corruption.
In Guatemala, a former head of state (Ríos Montt) was convicted of genocide and more than 60 soldiers, police officers, military commissioners and civil self-defense patrol members have been and continue to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Between 2008 and 2019, the CICIG identified more than 70 clandestine organized crime and corruption structures, more than 660 people were prosecuted, 120 high-impact cases were prosecuted, more than 100 pre-trial requests were filed against public officials, and 400 convictions were obtained. . A president, a vice president, several former presidents, former ministers, representatives, drug traffickers, businessmen, and mayors were prosecuted and convicted. The CICIG and the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) obtained 85% judicial efficiency. All of this ended with the arrival of Donald J. Trump to the White House, a context in which the expulsion of the CICIG was achieved in 2019. The far-right lobby with far-right Washington bore fruit that Biden has not wanted or has not been able to reverse.
The 1996 peace accords opened a political space in which organizations and activists for human rights, environmentalists, anti-extractivists, feminists, and sexual diversity flourished. Transitional justice and the fight against corruption also flourished. All of this is what the dictatorship that is being established in Guatemala wants to make disappear. For the reactionary bloc in power, the time for revenge has come.
Carlos Figueroa
PhD in Sociology. National Researcher Level II of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico. Research Professor of the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla. Professor Emeritus of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Guatemala headquarters. Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of San Carlos. Author of several books and specialized articles on political sociology, sociology of violence and Latin American political processes.
Source The Time
