Marta Maroto
Thelma Cabrera was seven years old when she began working alongside her mother in the coffee field in southern Guatemala. On miserable wages, everyone had to help support the family. When her parents suggested that she go as an intern to do domestic work and get her away from the hard life in the countryside, she flatly refused: she knew about the mistreatment of housewives in a terribly macho society, and she preferred the sun on her face to “submitting to humiliation,” he recalls.
So he spent his adolescence working in the milpas (a traditional Central American agricultural system in which several complementary crops are grown on the same plot), planting beans and helping his father harvest the corn crop. Now, at the age of 53, the memory of her childhood makes her smile with a smile that cannot be photographed: Cabrera is a Mayan woman from the Mam nation, and the ornaments she wears on some of her teeth are part of her strictest privacy, he does not teach them, he explains to CTXT in an interview in Plaza Santa Ana in Madrid, under the watchful eye of García Lorca.
He reached sixth grade at school, where he also saw discrimination and inequality up close – “the children laughed at those who couldn’t wear shoes,” he recalls. It was already as a mother, selling from house to house the vegetables that she grew with her husband and four children, when she came into contact with what would be her “fight and her school”: Codeca, which corresponds to the acronym Comité de Desarrollo Campesino, a indigenous organization that advocates for equitable policies of distribution and work of the land. Her political arm, the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP), ran for the first time in the elections in 2019 with Cabrera as a candidate for the presidency of Guatemala.
The candidacy headed by Cabrera received 10% of the votes
The proposal obtained fourth place, receiving 10% of the votes. The current president, Alejandro Giammattei, achieved 15% in the first round. The number achieved by Cabrera is a remarkable figure when compared to the first attempt by an indigenous woman to occupy the presidency: the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú, obtained 3% support in 2007, in a country where practically half of its population comes from an original town.
Already at that time, the MLP denounced the obstacles that Cabrera’s candidacy encountered in the campaign –unjustified delays in credentials and authorizations, a lower budget and the impossibility of opening a bank account to receive donations–, which led it to label it as fraudulent. “From 2018 to now, 26 Codeca brothers and sisters have been murdered. This is all part of the fraud,” says Cabrera, who ensures that the cases remain unpunished.
Now, the Superior Electoral Court has prevented the registration of the MLP candidacy for the next elections, which will be held at the end of June. The reason is an alleged complaint against Cabrera’s deputy, Jordán Rodas, former Human Rights attorney. While in office (2017-2022), Rodas tried to stop the departure of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig), the United Nations mission that brought 120 cases to justice and investigated the president at the time, Jimmy Morales, and his entourage for illegal practices.
“At the time, 18 criminal complaints and up to eight requests to remove me from office were filed against me. They were all rejected, ”explains Rodas, in Madrid with Cabrera, to make us understand the context of persecution that he has suffered in recent years.
This new complaint for which the Guatemalan justice invalidates him from running for vice presidency has been filed by his successor at the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, although Rodas does not know its content because he has not been notified. The lawyer cites the regulations of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the first international organization that has ruled on his caseand alleges that without a firm ruling, political rights cannot be limited.
“Electoral observation is not just putting on a vest weeks before, going sightseeing and seeing how votes are counted. The process has already begun in Guatemala and it is being flawed from the beginning by blocking our right to be elected and the Guatemalan population to choose freely,” says Rodas, who has been living in self-exile in the Basque Country for a few months, waiting for the the legal mess is cleared up, for fear of reprisals.
The ex-prosecutor speaks of the recent democratic deterioration in Guatemala and even points to a “failed” system that he compares to a “dictatorship”, where the Government “has co-opted all the institutions of the State, the Courts, the Human Rights Comptroller… the entire State is at the service of organized crime”.
According to him Capacity to Fight Corruption Index (CCC) prepared by the Society and Council for the Americas, Guatemala is ranked 13 out of 15, experiencing the largest decline in the last two years. After the departure of the United Nations Commission in 2019 and the government of the current president, Alejandro Giammattei, democracy in Guatemala “hangs by a thread,” according to organizations such as Human Rights Watchwith exile of judges, criminalization of human rights activists, targeting the press or the LGTBI collective.
“They are afraid of our national project and the reform of a new Plurinational Constitution that we are proposing from the MLP. We have followed its laws and within the system we have built a political instrument for the peoples. It is from this place that we denounce a failed, corrupted state, co-opted by criminals who do not even respect their own laws,” says Cabrera, referring to the admission of Zuly Ríos Sosa, daughter of the dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who leads the polls but who in 2019 was not allowed to appear due to the article of the Guatemalan Constitution that prohibits the participation of relatives of coup plotters.
“After all the pain and deaths, especially of indigenous people, that this family has caused, we neither forget nor forgive… but they have already agreed and the daughter of a dictator is going to present herself,” says Cabrera, annoyed. This is what the MLP and related sectors call the ‘Corrupt Pact’, criminal structures that permeate the layers of the Administration, led by business groups, which favor the status quo in Guatemala: a strongly unequal and racist one.
It is against this giant that the MLP is up against, says Cabrera, who is satisfied with the grassroots work it has done in recent years. “We are not just another party, we are another policy, an instrument that wants to serve beyond the time of the vote,” says the activist. And she smiles again: “The angels came tb’anil teky’ wen”, he says in Mam, the language of his people, his motto and the reason why he does politics; “El buen vivir”, he translates into Spanish.
Source CTXT.es Magazine
