Guatemala Nibbles

I have to confess I’m a bit disengaged from Guatemala at the moment, looking forward to a month’s holiday away, leaving tomorrow. But that’s not the only reason I haven’t written anything recently. I’ve been trying to write about some of the harder issues here – guns and violence and gangs and ‘narcotraficantes’ – but it is all so interconnected and so overwhelming that it is hard to take it in small gulps. I also feel I have to be careful with accuracy and facts when I am not speaking from personal experience, and that takes time and research. So this posting is a collection of bits and pieces – nibbles rather than a gulp. When I return, refreshed, I’ll dive into my newspaper clippings and notes and see what comes out.

Nibbles....

§ My son told me that the school at the rubbish dump here – Safe Passage – has to pay the children’s parents the equivalent of the child’s earnings from garbage sorting, so that they will allow the children to attend the school.

§ The one-legged lady came back, but only for one day. She looked tired and a bit straggly, and barely managed a smile. I wonder about her every time I drive past her corner, which is most days.

§ The law to provide a monthly old age pension of 500 quetzales (USD 67) to elderly citizens has stalled again. It is in the Constitutional Court on a technical matter related to fiscal policy that I don’t really understand. It might have something to do with the fact that the government originally estimated there were 40,000 citizens over 65 without any pension income, then a consultants’ report said it was actually 240,000, although the agreed working figure seems now to be 200,000. Even so, that’s a difference between an annual pension outlay of 240 million quetzales (USD 32 m) and 1.44 billion quetzales (USD192 m), which, on most accountants’ reckoning, would be pretty significant. It is strange to think that a government can know so little about the economic status of its own population. It is a reminder that, despite the superficial trappings of both development and democracy, this is still a country in development in both respects

§ The elderly citizens have not been going quietly. A group calling itself by the catchy title, ‘Citizens of the Third Age Without Pension Schemes’ (it is even longer in Spanish) has managed to generate a lot of publicity over the delay in the old age pension law. They are a mix of men and women and, going by their faces and clothing in newspaper photos, I would guess that most but not all are indigenous, or at least ‘campesinos’ (poor country workers who may be ladino or indigenous). Last week they met with Vice-President Stein, who persuaded them to break a hunger strike on the basis that the government was doing all it could. Then, with the law stalled again, they met this week with President Berger, who has promised to set up a commission (one of many such bodies) to look after their rights. But their hunger strike on the steps of the Palacio Nacional, the seat of government, was brought to a halt one midnight, when police came and removed them bodily and took them to hospital for ‘medical treatment’. Reported versions of this dark-of-night event vary wildly between the police version of leading them as gently as lambs, to some protesters’ version that warning shots were fired and elderly people were punched. No wonder they did it at midnight.

§ It is not so long ago in Guatemala that protests such as that of the elderly citizens couldn’t happen at all. During the military dictatorships and the period known as “la violencia”, especially the 1980s and early 1990s (before the 1996 peace accords), the organized campesinos and many indigenous villagers were regarded as communist guerillas. In this period there were massacres in 625 villages and approximately 11,000 civilians were killed, most of them indigenous (the total for the 35 years of civil war is usually cited as 200,000). According to the UN and Catholic Church reports on the massacres, 3% of the killing was done by the revolutionary guerilla forces, while 97% was the work of the military and paramilitary forces. The UN report described these as “acts of genocide” against the indigenous peoples. Two of the Presidents who oversaw this period have recently been in the news. One was Lucas Garcia, President from 1978 to 1982, whose quiet death in Venezuela at the age of 81, after some years suffering from Alzheimer’s, was met by mixed responses in the Guatemalan press. One side said he was guilty of violence and abuse of rights and that the only sad thing about his death was that he was never brought to account for his actions. The other side said that he had saved Guatemala from communism and was one of the greatest presidents. The other ex-President in the news has been Efrain Rios Montt, who is far from deceased. He overthrew Garcia in early 1982 in a military coup and remained President for two years before being removed by another coup. He is in the news because Spain wants to try him for events in Guatemala in and around 1980, specifically the burning of the Spanish Embassy with all its staff along with the Guatemalan campesinos and students activists who had occupied the Embassy in protest at Garcia’s policies. Rios Montt was the general in charge of such army operations at the time.

§ Efrain Rios Montt is also not going quietly. He is one of a group of people wanted by the Spanish courts, both for the Spanish Embassy burning and for acts of genocide. One of the protesters killed in 1980 was the father of Rigoberta Menchu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on the Guatemalan peace. It is her foundation that has taken the action in the Spanish Courts. After years of appeals in Spain, the Spanish Judge is here this week to start taking evidence. So far Rios Montt has managed to prevent him proceeding, by appealing to the Guatemalan Constitutional Court.

§ Rios Montt was in fact allowed by the Constitutional Court (CC) to run for president in the 2003 election, despite a constitutional provision that banned people who had participated in military coups from becoming president. In that election he was soundly defeated by the more moderate Oscar Berger, but still Rios Montt strides the political stage as the elder statesman of the FRG, the main right wing party here. And it looks as if he is gearing up for another go at the Presidency in 2007. I don’t suppose anyone will bother appealing to the CC this time.

Mariposa Pesada
25 June 2006