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Guatemala President Faces Arrest as Business Interests and US Scramble to Contain Uprising
Guatemala President Faces Arrest as Business Interests and US Scramble to Contain Uprising
AMY GOODMAN: In Guatemala, a judge has ordered former Vice President Roxana Baldetti must remain in prison while her corruption trial takes place. The ruling comes on the heels of the Guatemalan Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to lift the immunity from prosecution for President Otto Pérez Molina, clearing the way for his impeachment. The court passed the impeachment recommendation along to Congress. Miguel Pineda is a spokesperson for the Guatemalan Supreme Court.
MIGUEL PINEDA: <translated> Today, all Supreme Court judges met for an extraordinary session regarding a request for the impeachment of President Otto Pérez Molina. Because of this, they met with the head magistrate of the Second Chamber of the Criminal Court of Appeals, Magistrate Gustavo Dubón. They then studied the case, and after their respective analysis, they established that there exists the possibility of transferring the case to the republic's Congress. Consequently, the request has been passed on to the republic's Congress for its resolution.
AMY GOODMAN: A general strike has been called in Guatemala for today. Well, for more, we're joined by Allan Nairn, longtime journalist who has covered Guatemala since the 1980s.
Allan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what is engulfing Guatemala today, the significance of what's happening to the president, the general strike that's called for today?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it's an uprising, and it could lead to the fall of Pérez Molina. They're calling for a general strike, mass demonstration today. The issue is corruption. But if the movement develops further, if it spreads more fully to the Mayan heartland of the country, then the issue could move from corruption to justice, because the reason the Guatemalan elite, like General Pérez Molina and Vice President Baldetti, have been able to loot the treasury to the tune of more than $100 million, been able to steal for themselves cash which was used for Jaguar cars, plantations, villas, yachts, airplanes, helicopters, was because they took and have maintained themselves in power through mass murder. Pérez Molina was a commander in the northwest highlands during the '80s. He personally helped implement the Ríos Montt program of mass murder—effectively, genocide—against the Mayan population. And that's what the Guatemalan system has been built on.
So if this uprising spreads, if it becomes an even broader, deeper movement, and you move from the question of corruption to the question of justice for mass murder, that can only be resolved by implicating not just Pérez Molina personally, but also the Guatemalan army as a whole institution, also the U.S. government, which has armed, trained and financed that army, backed that program of slaughter, which the American CIA had Pérez Molina on the payroll when he was head of G-2, the intelligence unit. And it also can't be resolved without implicating CACIF, the association of the oligarchy, which backed the army during the slaughter and which, individually, ran its own death squads. The oligarchs, the young men, would go through what was kind of a ritual of bloodying their own hands, and if there was a union-organizing drive at their fathers' factory, some of the boys would get together, and they'd go out and kill the unionists. And those young men who did that in the '80s are now in their fifties and sixties, and they're the leaders of the Guatemalan oligarchy. So the last thing they want to see is a true investigation and bringing to justice of perpetrators. That's the last thing Washington wants to see.
And the situation is basically out of control right now. The U.S. is trying to prop up Pérez Molina. They're trying to keep him in office. CACIF is trying to co-opt and wind down the movement, the demonstrations. But no one knows if they'll succeed, and no one knows where this will lead. And it could lead to fundamental change in Guatemala. There's already talk of postponing the elections, which are due for September 6th, of rewriting the electoral law, of rewriting the constitution. So it's a question of whether popular power prevails or whether the same old perpetrators continue to run the country, and nobody knows what will happen.
MORE: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32545-guatemala-president-faces-arrest-as-business-interests-and-us-scramble-to-contain-uprising
AMY GOODMAN: In Guatemala, a judge has ordered former Vice President Roxana Baldetti must remain in prison while her corruption trial takes place. The ruling comes on the heels of the Guatemalan Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to lift the immunity from prosecution for President Otto Pérez Molina, clearing the way for his impeachment. The court passed the impeachment recommendation along to Congress. Miguel Pineda is a spokesperson for the Guatemalan Supreme Court.
MIGUEL PINEDA: <translated> Today, all Supreme Court judges met for an extraordinary session regarding a request for the impeachment of President Otto Pérez Molina. Because of this, they met with the head magistrate of the Second Chamber of the Criminal Court of Appeals, Magistrate Gustavo Dubón. They then studied the case, and after their respective analysis, they established that there exists the possibility of transferring the case to the republic's Congress. Consequently, the request has been passed on to the republic's Congress for its resolution.
AMY GOODMAN: A general strike has been called in Guatemala for today. Well, for more, we're joined by Allan Nairn, longtime journalist who has covered Guatemala since the 1980s.
Allan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what is engulfing Guatemala today, the significance of what's happening to the president, the general strike that's called for today?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it's an uprising, and it could lead to the fall of Pérez Molina. They're calling for a general strike, mass demonstration today. The issue is corruption. But if the movement develops further, if it spreads more fully to the Mayan heartland of the country, then the issue could move from corruption to justice, because the reason the Guatemalan elite, like General Pérez Molina and Vice President Baldetti, have been able to loot the treasury to the tune of more than $100 million, been able to steal for themselves cash which was used for Jaguar cars, plantations, villas, yachts, airplanes, helicopters, was because they took and have maintained themselves in power through mass murder. Pérez Molina was a commander in the northwest highlands during the '80s. He personally helped implement the Ríos Montt program of mass murder—effectively, genocide—against the Mayan population. And that's what the Guatemalan system has been built on.
So if this uprising spreads, if it becomes an even broader, deeper movement, and you move from the question of corruption to the question of justice for mass murder, that can only be resolved by implicating not just Pérez Molina personally, but also the Guatemalan army as a whole institution, also the U.S. government, which has armed, trained and financed that army, backed that program of slaughter, which the American CIA had Pérez Molina on the payroll when he was head of G-2, the intelligence unit. And it also can't be resolved without implicating CACIF, the association of the oligarchy, which backed the army during the slaughter and which, individually, ran its own death squads. The oligarchs, the young men, would go through what was kind of a ritual of bloodying their own hands, and if there was a union-organizing drive at their fathers' factory, some of the boys would get together, and they'd go out and kill the unionists. And those young men who did that in the '80s are now in their fifties and sixties, and they're the leaders of the Guatemalan oligarchy. So the last thing they want to see is a true investigation and bringing to justice of perpetrators. That's the last thing Washington wants to see.
And the situation is basically out of control right now. The U.S. is trying to prop up Pérez Molina. They're trying to keep him in office. CACIF is trying to co-opt and wind down the movement, the demonstrations. But no one knows if they'll succeed, and no one knows where this will lead. And it could lead to fundamental change in Guatemala. There's already talk of postponing the elections, which are due for September 6th, of rewriting the electoral law, of rewriting the constitution. So it's a question of whether popular power prevails or whether the same old perpetrators continue to run the country, and nobody knows what will happen.
MORE: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32545-guatemala-president-faces-arrest-as-business-interests-and-us-scramble-to-contain-uprising
Fast Food restaurants were closed in solidarity today.
Workers were on strike. It seems like the whole country was out on the streets today demanding Molina resign. Now.
For an MSM report, there's Reuters: Thousands march in Guatemala to pressure president to resign
Exciting times
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