TORONTO STAR, Analysis: January 4, 2004
For the majority of Guatemalans, last Sunday’s run-off election for the presidency was won, and lost long before the ballots were counted. It was won because former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala’s history, was knocked off the first ballot a month earlier thereby clearing the way for genocide charges against him. And it was lost, because the winner, Oscar Berger and his right wing Gana party are more preoccupied with restoring power to the country’s traditional economic elite than sharing it with the country’s long-suffering people.
Elections are a habit in Guatemala, rather than evidence of real democracy. Regular elections continued even after the CIA-supported overthrow of a popular reform government in 1954 and despite a succession of military dictators and electoral frauds. In this election, a functioning democracy would have provided alternatives to Guatemalans beyond a tilt back towards the traditional elite from the upstart army engorged by 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. Instead the people got two presidential candidates on the final ballot that represented different shades of the country’s small wealthy class. On the first ballot the only real alternative was Ríos Montt of the ruling FRG, whose backers include the most conservative parts of the army and elements of organized crime.
Real democracy would have involved a debate about poverty, the nation’s most fundamental problem. The majority of Guatemala’s 14 million people are poor; over 20% live in extreme poverty. The companions of that poverty are illiteracy, which is over 30%, and inadequate health care, leading to an infant mortality rate seven times that of Canada. Guatemala has the world’s third worst distribution of income. And poverty is itself an important obstacle to meaningful participation in Guatemalan elections.
Guatemala is not poor. But its grossly unequal distribution of wealth explains much of its tragic modern history. The country is rich in arable land that produces profitable coffee, banana, and sugar exports. A landowning oligarchy owns most of this land. The resulting land-less or near land-less condition of millions of peasants — with plots of land once described as “the size of graveyards” — guarantees an ample supply of callused hands working for meager wages in miserable conditions.
The country’s oligarchy or elite used to be content dictating policy to government, instead of running it. The army mainly played the role of the elite’s best friend, repelling calls for a sharing of the nation’s wealth. This idyllic balance for the rich in Guatemala — the land of eternal spring — came to a crossroad when popular reform governments from 1945 to 1954 began agrarian reforms. Land, much of it vacant, was expropriated from giant landholders like the United Fruit Company and redistributed to peasants. For some of the poor it meant the opportunity to live in dignity. For the elite it meant a threat to their dominance. They cried communist, and the U.S. came running.
The C.I.A. helped “liberate” Guatemalans from their government in 1954. A right wing government in step with the interests of the elite and U.S. business — and by the by “anti-communist” — was installed. The reforms were reversed and the army tried to silence popular demands. The armed conflict officially started in1960.
The wealthy class was happy to have the army do its dirty work. But when the army began reimbursing itself from the country’s resources, including vast tracts of undeveloped land, the elite became anxious. Army atrocities against civilians provoked no similar anxiety.
In its rural counterinsurgency campaign, military brutality knew no bounds. When peasants began supporting the guerrilla on promises of land, cement blocks for homes, and electricity, the army massacred tens of thousands of them. The army then obliged all men to join volunteer civil defense patrols to be its eyes and ears against the guerrilla. In the 1980s, these patrols counted almost 900,000 men.
The civil defense patrols, the army’s foot soldiers (often forcibly rounded up in towns on Sunday’s after mass), and the guerrilla, were largely from the indigenous population — the poor fighting the poor. The guerrilla fought the army in hit-and-run attacks. The civil patrols terrorized their neighbours on behalf of the army. The army, unable to find the guerrilla, fought unarmed civilians. The fleeing civilians fought for their lives. And the powerful landowners fought for a place in line at Disneyland.
By the time the war ended in 1996, the army had become an economic power in its own right. In addition to its accumulated landholdings and one of the largest banks in the country, the army was enmeshed in most sectors of the economy and politics. The army continued its close ties to clandestine groups that threatened and murdered individuals that spoke out against the status quo. Some army officers turned to narcotrafficking and arms trading to keep themselves occupied.
The traditional landowning elite, joined by newer business interests, expected the army to resume a more subservient role. Instead the army continued to contend for power, including political power. The FRG, with General Rios Montt in charge behind the scene, won the 1999 elections. During its tenure, crime, government corruption, and attacks against human rights and other groups increased from already high levels. The reigning lawlessness did not preoccupy the FRG and its army and organized crime backers. Indeed, they were a good part of the problem. And the ongoing instability was good for the business of the army because it justified a continuing prominent role, even if the war was over.
The traditional elite needed a new friend. They turned to the neo-liberals, as once they had turned to anti-communists, to reign in army power. By properly aligning itself with the new international order, the elite would find support for its power struggle.
Grahame Russell of Rights Action, a human rights monitoring organization, suggests that Berger and other right-wing political parties used Rios Montt as a “distraction” in the effort to regain power for the traditional elite. Only someone as notorious as Rios Montt could make the oligarchy look like the champion of the people.
Russell sees the problems in Guatemala as part of the larger international economic system that tolerates exploitation of workers. After all, he notes that Guatemalan “workers on the plantations are producing stuff for slave wages for Canadian consumers!” He says that with a continuation of “global business as usual … the hopes of the campesinos, which do spring eternal, will again be crushed sooner or later” because neither Guatemalan nor international power holders, including Canadian economic interests, are really interested in human rights and equality.
Julio Ceren, of Toronto’s Guatemala Community Network and himself an exile from Guatemala’s state repression, doesn’t believe the new president’s interest in the neo-liberal agenda of free trade, privatization, and less government regulation has anything to do with helping the people of Guatemala. He notes that it was the unwillingness of the traditional elite to share power in the first place that plunged the country into 36 years of civil war. The root of Guatemalan injustice, says Ceren, is the gap between the rich and poor, while the experience of neo-liberalism internationally is to widen that gap.
Ceren says, “there can never be peace in Guatemala with the existing level of injustice, including the unequal distribution of wealth.” He sees the 1996 Peace Accords as a “light by which the country can escape the current situation.” Those Accords required the government to deal with the land distribution problem, among other structural issues. But seven years after their signing, the Accords remain largely unimplemented.
The tenacity of Guatemala’s traditional elite in holding on to their nation’s wealth is remarkable because it has required such an obvious willingness to watch, even inflict, incredible suffering on their fellow citizens. Equally remarkable is the continuing exuberance of the U.S. for foreign interventions. Their involvement in the 1954 coup cost Guatemala more than a half century of turmoil, hundreds of thousands of lives, and the continuing misery of millions. But most remarkable is the continuing struggle for justice in Guatemala. Each generation of campesino, worker, and human rights activist that has been threatened, tortured, murdered or exiled has eventually been replaced by another willing to risk his or her own life.
“In Guatemala, if things aren’t worse, they are better”, says Russell. The election of Berger as president did not make life worse for Guatemala’s popular movement, and therein lies some hope for the future of their country.
