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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
Our Life and Times
Guatemalan elections
Nearly 50 people, including campaign workers and family members of candidates, were murdered in the months leading up to the Sept. 9 presidential elections in Guatemala--the bloodiest election in 20 years.
Thirty percent of the vote went to General Otto Perez Molina of the Patriotic Party (PP), who promises to crack down on the violence that wracks the country. Perez Molina, former head of the government intelligence agency was involved in some of the massacres of the indigenous population during the 1960-1996 civil war that claimed some 200,000 lives.
Alvaro Colom of the National Union of Hope (UNE), a center-left coalition, took 36% of the vote, and a runoff election is scheduled for Nov. 4. Rigoberta Menchu, who only formed her party (Encuentro por Guatemala) in February, garnered 3%. In another sign of the weakness of the Left, the URNG, the coalition party of former insurgents formed in 1982, fared so poorly that it might lose representation in Congress.
Another sobering element is that Jose Rios Montt, who ruled the country with Ronald Reagan’s help in 1982-83, and presided over a campaign that slaughtered some 10,000 people (and displaced another 100,000, according to Amnesty International), won a seat in Congress. This means he will have immunity from prosecution for the next four years, at which time he will be 86 years old. Rigoberta Menchu has succeeded in getting a Spanish court to issue a warrant for his arrest for genocide, but within Guatemala he has been protected by the oligarchy that the U.S. has historically supported.
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