Fernando Cajas
They have already given their coup d’état. They didn’t have time to put together something coherent and they put together stupidity after stupidity to conclude with a stupidity: A coup d’état carried out by legal idiots, incapable of loving a single sentence, let alone a logical argument supported by evidence. The prosecutors of the Public Ministry of Guatemala today, December 8, 2023, gave a lesson on the mental and ethical deterioration of the Guatemalan justice system because they not only spoke nonsense, ridiculousness, nonsense, we say in Guatemala, but they reconstructed the electoral right in light of the usurpation of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. For them there is no logic, there is no evidence, there is no law, there is only one slogan: We cannot let Arévalo take office as president because we have a divine call.
This has a first and last name, it is called Coup and it has the last name of State, it is a Coup d’état. It is the product of the absence of constructive leadership, not due to neglect, but by design. After the October 1944 revolution, the counter-revolution was fatal. Although Guatemalan academics were trained at the National University, when they led, they were either murdered or had to go into exile. The civil war, the armed uprising resulting from the pendulum reaction of 1954, when the United States facilitated another coup d’état, this time due to the anti-communist paranoia that then dominated Washington. Ordinary Guatemalans had to pay for that mistake because while the owners of the farm strengthened their companies, death stalked all Guatemalan families.
We are historical beings and even if we wanted to forget the past, it is capable of leaving a deep mark and of course, the lesson was that participating politically meant death, murder, terror for those who participated and for their families. How many mothers, fathers, brothers, aunts, had to tour the morgues to recognize their sons and daughters, nieces, relatives not only murdered but tortured or missing to leave the lesson clear: Do not participate. The goal of murders, kidnappings and genocide was submission, not democracy, not participation. That explains, partially, like any explanation; why the Guatemalan population has experienced a relatively modest democratic transformation.
Until recently we had had transparent elections and there was a certain independence between the powers, that is, between the Legislative, the Judicial and the Executive. The electoral court was supreme. The change with the electoral court seems to have occurred since the Supreme Electoral Court took on the task of eliminating pre-candidates, such as Thelma Aldana in the previous election and Thelma Cabrera, Carlos Pineda, Roberto Arzú in the present one, obeying superior orders. Those powers, the Pact of Corrupts, did not see Bernardo Arévalo coming, if the same electoral court that is now bathing itself in purity had not eliminated him.
The institutional decay, not only of the electoral court, but of Guatemalan institutions in general, is the product of internal politics, which was captured by politicians and by a law on political parties that ensures that those who have arrangements with dark groups remain. Judicial power is also ensured through the same institutions that chair the nomination committees for the high courts, the universities, particularly the public university. Along with that, the last decade has been the decade of the decline of democracy worldwide. With leaders who are reflected like Trump and Milei’s recent victory, in the face of an economic system totally dominated by neoliberal discourse and practice in the context of political participation that occurs from social networks, that pretend, that pretend, that leave the illusion of participating, without really doing anything in the social life of flesh and blood.
The absence of constructive leadership is sown, it is done in authoritarian families, schools, from kindergarten to university, repetitive, which do not allow genuine participation. In other words, not only do we already have a long pre-Columbian, colonial, liberal, democratic but authoritarian, guerrilla, but authoritarian authoritarian history, not to mention our military history. The school, generic, that is, all school systems have been authoritarian, repetitive and reproducers of a false social history, written by power. Until now we are beginning to free ourselves from that repetitive, authoritarian school and the new sciences of learning take us out of the medieval obscurantism in which the family and the school have kept us for centuries.
Democracy comes first as discourse and now as practice. Are we Guatemalans ready to have a truly democratic society? Today, with all the cynicism in the world, a small group of coup plotters called prosecutors decided not to accept the results of our election, ours, the one that belongs to us, erasing everything, everything. Are we going to allow it? Are we going to go out and defend our democracy? I am sure that there are, that there are Guatemalan men and women who fight, who work, who will die for a better country. Let’s go Guatemala or it is now or it will never be.
