Sergio Ramirez
Bernardo Arévalo, an academic with a calm disposition who graduated as a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and obtained his doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Utrecht, was elected president of Guatemala on Sunday, August 20 of this year, and must take the oath of office. his position on Sunday, January 14 of next year. A long and unusual period of more than four months, conducive to the conspiracy of which he is being a victim, since there are dark forces concerted to prevent him from assuming the position that the voters entrusted to him by an overwhelming majority of votes.
That an academic who speaks in front of the microphones as if he were in a classroom and not in a public square, far from demagogy and the usual acts of corruption, is the new president of Guatemala, if the coup d’état continues. that they have put together ends up failing, it will seem strange. The opposite is common. The best background of the current ruler, Alejandro Giammattei, himself implicated in the conspiracy to thwart Arévalo’s presidency, is having been head of the penitentiary system, successor to Jimmy Morales, a bad television comedian; not to mention the bloodthirsty generals who, like Efraín Ríos Montt, prophet of the Christian Church of the Word, were tried for genocide.
The mark of the exercise of power in Guatemala has been the constant violation of the rule of law, the spurious control of institutions, the imprisonment of journalists, such as the case of Rubén Zamora, director of The newspaperthe persecution against judges, prosecutors and human rights attorneys determined to fulfill their legal role, many forced into exile.
And that power is managed from the shadows by a feudal lodge united by what is known as “the pact of the corrupt,” and behind which hide old oligarchs of gallows and knife, bosses of organized crime, retired soldiers who participate in repression. in previous decades.
To prevent Arévalo from assuming the presidency, they have tried all kinds of scandalously crude tricks, using as instruments the prosecutors Consuelo Porras and Rafael Curruchiche, and the criminal judge Fredy Orellana, sanctioned by the United States government. Their actions have been aimed at annulling the legal status of the Semilla party, which led Arévalo as presidential candidate; to annul the electoral results, ordering ballot boxes to be seized and the electoral power to intervene, while the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Justice hesitate in the face of these maneuvers or lend themselves to them, a collusion of which the leadership of the National Congress is also a part.
Under these conditions, the president-elect’s chances of taking the oath would be null and void if it were not for the fact that the other Guatemala, subjected and forgotten, has come to the rescue of democracy: the indigenous peoples of Mayan descent, Quiché and Cachiquel, who represent 60 percent of the population, secular victims of oppression and discrimination, and of extermination campaigns such as the one carried out in the 1980s by General Ríos Montt, when entire villages were erased from the map with all their inhabitants buried in mass graves.
“The 48 cantons and the ancestral authorities of the native peoples and their 22 representatives”, constituted in the “Assembly of Authorities of the Peoples in Resistance for the Defense of Democracy”, with their “principals” at the head, mayors of vara, councils of elders and sheriffs, have descended from their distant communities to Guatemala City, have closed the roads, have taken the streets peacefully and have organized sit-ins in front of the prosecutor’s office and the courts demanding that the country’s Constitution be respected; and they have managed to join students, unions, market traders, and large sectors of the middle class in their protest.
In recent years they have been protagonists of resistance campaigns against laws that attack the environment, or that seek to exempt the military responsible for genocide. And now they have risen up in defense of democracy, demanding that the triumph of the elected president be recognized, and that judicial officials who play the game of the “pact of the corrupt” be dismissed.
“Hordes of wild Indians who have come down to take the capital,” say the spokespersons for the extreme right organizations, part of the “pact of the corrupt.” The mayor of the Juchanep community, who represents the 48 indigenous cantons, wields the command staff that represents his authority, and does not hesitate to respond: “We are here out of a moral obligation, we do not represent power, we represent authority… and we will not allow that Guatemala falls into a de facto government, into an imposition.”
If on January 14 the elected president Bernardo Arévalo manages to assume the power that the people gave him at the polls, as we must trust that he will, it will be because the other Guatemala, that of the indigenous cantons, has resisted, without power, but with authority.
The Conference
