Conservative Leading Guatemala Vote

[Judi Lynn]

December 29, 2003


THE WORLD
Conservative Leading Guatemala Vote
With 55%, Oscar Berger declares himself president after runoff, although rival hasn't conceded. The turnout appears to be light.



By T. Christian Miller and Alexander Renderos, Special to The Times


GUATEMALA CITY — The former mayor of this capital city declared himself president of Central America's most populous country Sunday after partial election returns showed him with a commanding lead.

With 94% of the vote counted early today, Oscar Berger, 57, a center-right candidate backed by big business, had 55% of the vote, compared with 45% for his challenger, Alvaro Colom, 51, a moderate former vice minister of economics and a factory owner.

Berger, who led by 16 percentage points in polls before the election, declared victory late Sunday in front of thousands of supporters at his campaign headquarters.

Although his campaign was financed by some of Guatemala's wealthiest industrialists, he promised to govern for all of the nation's 14 million people. "I am the president of Guatemala to serve all Guatemalans," he said. "I have received a mandate today from the needy … to work for the needy and the poor."
(snip/...)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-guat29dec29,1,1489241.story?coll=la-headlines-world

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[Bozola]

1. Isn't that cute. The US' own killing fields pretends it's a democracy.

Otto "The Fourth" Reich, Ollie "The Traitor" North, John Negroponte, and Elliott Abrams must be giggling over drinks today.

[srpantalonas]

2. Both are bad news...

but at least they aren't Rios Mont

[Bragi]

3. What does "conservative" mean here?

The ponder the meaning of the word "conservative" in the headline to this thread. What is a conservative, by Guatemalan standards?

Does conservative there mean someone military or civilian who likes to nail the severed heads of enemies onto carefully-selected fence posts?

And, in contrast, is a Guatemalan "liberal" just someone with enough human decency to hide his victims, and deny public accusations?

Just wondering about reference points here.

- b

[formernaderite]

4. excellent points

You make some excellent points. The terms conservative and liberal mean entirely different things, depending on the cultural perspective. In the former Soviet Union conservatives generally are represented by those desiring to return to the former communist regime.
I don't like either term as they can be manipulated semantically by the media.

[Judi Lynn]

5. The pattern is consistant throughout Latin America

Any search will reaveal the ugly aspects of this clandestine facilitation of murder on a grand scale:

(snip) President Reagan started funding the Contra army to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and greatly increased military aid to the repressive, fascist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala. American military advisors were sent to El Salvador and the death squads were organized in Guatemala by the CIA with the help of the Argentine butchers who were responsible for disappearing over 30,000 leftists in Argentina. (snip)

http://sdimc.org/en/2003/12/102345.shtml

(snip) The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history, the commission concluded.

The army completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops, the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a genocide.

Besides carrying out murder and disappearances, the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations. The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed acts of genocide against the Mayans.

Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals, said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people, he added.

The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan. (snip)

http://sdimc.org/en/2003/12/102345.shtml

(snip) Now Rios Montt is attempting to return to power, and as part of his campaign has even displayed a picture of himself with Ronald Reagan that was taken in the '80s. The U.S. Embassy has pointed out that this photo was taken in a different context, and indeed it was. The context was the Cold War, and the Reagan administration, concerned about leftist insurgencies in Central America, was seeking congressional approval to restore direct military aid to Guatemala. Reagan posed with Rios Montt, praised him as "a man of great personal integrity" who was "totally dedicated to democracy," and dismissed charges of atrocities in Guatemala as a "bum rap."

As Reagan spoke, Rios Montt's troops were preparing to march on a village called Las Dos Erres for a counterinsurgency operation that was to include the rape of young women, smashing of infants' heads and the interment of more than 160 civilians -- some while still alive -- in the village well.

Now the skeletons have been exhumed from the well in Las Dos Erres, as well as from hundreds of other clandestine cemeteries scattered throughout the countryside. A truth commission has documented tens of thousands of abuses committed by the Guatemalan state, as well as a much smaller number committed by leftist guerrillas. And in 1999 President Clinton issued a public apology in Guatemala for the U.S. role in supporting that country's abusive regimes.

The apology came backed by aid -- millions of dollars that the U.S. government has invested in efforts to promote the rule of law in Guatemala, including the truth commission, an extensive U.N. peacekeeping mission and the litigation of human rights cases.

And what does Guatemala have to show for these efforts? Only two major human rights cases have resulted in convictions of senior army officers. And these came only after witnesses were assassinated and investigators, judges and prosecutors forced to flee the country. (Both convictions were subsequently overturned on dubious grounds and remain under review in the courts.) Neither Rios Montt nor his fellow officers have been tried for the massacres of the 1980s. Although the public prosecutor's office has opened a formal investigation into charges that they committed acts of genocide, it has moved at a snail's pace. Meanwhile, the general is running for president and stands a decent chance of forcing a runoff with the rightist politician who is the frontrunner.

Whoever wins the election, the country's most pressing problem will remain its perilous journey toward the rule of law after the years of repressive violence that peaked under Rios Montt's previous rule. The biggest obstacle to recovery is the existence of a shadowy network of private, illegally armed groups that appear to have links to both government officials and organized crime. They are powerful, ruthless and apparently responsible for scores of threats and attacks against rights activists, justice officials, journalists and others. Given these groups' ability to corrupt and intimidate, it would be easy to conclude, as many have, that the situation in Guatemala is hopeless. (snip)

http://www.hrw.org/editorials/2003/guatemala110703.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There's not much a Republican President would WANT to remember about this hell unleashed upon the poor, the utterly innocent.

On edit:

There's no confusion about what "conservative" and "liberal" mean in this hemisphere.

[blindpig]

6. I pity the people of Guatemala

Visited the place on a side trip from Belize to see Tikal. The town we stayed in was one of the most depressing places I've been to. Not in terms of poverty but rather what you saw in the eyes of the people. No hope, just resignation. In the countryside I saw people working in the fields with men standing over them with m16s. Other parts of the country may be better, but I doubt I'll find out!
To the nethermost hell with raygun and his gang of nazi punks.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Dynamic, American-raised Guatemalan Congressman elected

American Maya Goes to Guatemalan Congress
News Feature, Mary Jo McConahay,
Pacific News Service, Dec 29, 2003
Editor's Note: When his brother was assassinated by government soldiers, Maya Indian Victor Montejo fled to America from Guatemala. But the soft-spoken former academic never forgot his homeland or his people's struggle. Now he has been elected to congress in a country experiencing a Maya cultural and intellectual renaissance.

GUATEMALA CITY--Peaceful elections Dec. 28 gave Guatemalans not only a new president unassociated with the country's recent, bloody past, but also a ranking Maya Indian congressman -- a powerful symbol in a land where the native population has been repressed for hundreds of years.

What's more, Victor Montejo, a Jacalteco Maya born into a rural peasant family, has spent most of his adult life in the United States. He raised an American family and is a U.S. citizen.

Center-right presidential candidate Oscar Berger, a former mayor of Guatemala City, defeated Alvaro Colom in the run-off election. Montejo ran in Berger's party.

In many ways, Montejo, 52, is a face of the country's sleeping political giant: its increasingly vocal and sophisticated indigenous majority. Companies are beginning to target a growing Maya market in television and print ads; previously, pictures of such families appeared only in tourism promotions. Before elections, President Alfonso Portillo made a nationally televised presentation dedicating the elegant Casa Crema -- until recently the home of the all-powerful ministers of defense -- to the Academy of Maya Languages. (snip)

(snip) Montejo fled Guatemala in l982, after his brother Pedro, a teacher, was assassinated by government soldiers, and his own name appeared on death lists. With the help of new friends in the United States he began to study and became a writer. For the last eight years he has chaired the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis.
(snip/...)

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=525e3a3ab081ba956705e30cf60f9002