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REPORTS: GUATEMALA |
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Former
Dictator Now Candidate
By: Matt FurshongFrank Jack Daniel
Ríos Montt allowed to stand for
presidency.
On July 31, former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt was finally registered as presidential candidate for the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) for the Nov. 9 elections, after a 14-year legal battle.
Ríos Montt’s 16-month stint as de facto ruler in the early 1980s was one of the bloodiest periods in Guatemalan history since the Spanish conquest. A scorched earth campaign effectively ended a leftist insurgency but led to the death of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were civilian Mayan Indians (LP, July 2, 2002).
In spite of that history, the FRG’s anti-oligarchy rhetoric has appeal among Guatemala’s economically and socially marginalized rural majority. Opinion polls place Ríos Montt in third place with 7.5 percent of those polled saying they will vote for him, but rural opinions are rarely sought.
Ríos Montt’s strongest political opposition comes from Great National Alliance (GANA) candidate Oscar Berger. GANA is backed by most of Guatemala’s oligarchy, together with various prominent former military officers, among them former director of the Presidential Guard Gen. Otto Pérez Molina. Almost every political party fielding a presidential candidate is backed by former military officers.
Ríos Montt’s registration has brought together an unlikely coalition of critics, including human rights advocates and representatives of the country’s economic elite who claim that the former dictator’s candidacy represents a return to violence and instability.
In the week before his official registration, a protest in support of Ríos Montt’s campaign descended into violence. On July 24, hundreds of FRG supporters laid siege to part of the city’s business district and the Supreme Court and Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) buildings.
Most of the demonstrators were bused into the capital from rural districts, but groups of masked protesters in city clothes mingled with the crowd. Journalists were beaten and shot at, and one died of a heart attack while fleeing the protesters.
One week later the Constitutional Court (CC) overruled a Supreme Court injunction against Ríos Montt’s candidacy, ordering that he be registered within 24 hours. Critics complained that changes that added Ríos Montt sympathizers to the panel hearing his case stacked the court in his favor.
The CC decision was the final piece in the jigsaw in Ríos Montt’s most recent bid for the candidacy. The campaign initially ran up against the same legal barriers that prevented him running for president in 1990 and 1995, namely a constitutional clause added in 1985 to prevent former dictators from taking part in elections. Ríos Montt has always claimed that the law did not apply to him because it was introduced after his dictatorship.
Last month both the TSE and the Supreme Court rejected his petitions to register as candidate. He suffered yet another setback when a CC ruling in his favor was stalled by a Supreme Court injunction. It was this last decision that the CC overruled on July 30.
For many, the FRG government has been marked by large corruption scandals, failure to comply with the peace accords, and impunity for military officials accused of high-profile human rights violations (LP, Dec. 2, 2002).
However, for some small farmers the administration of President Alfonso Portillo will be remembered for distributing subsidized fertilizer and implementing a school breakfast program.
What tends to slip the memory is that the fertilizer was paid for by the Japanese government or that the breakfast program was heavily criticized for being insufficient to maintain child nutrition.
"The government has been good, they gave us fertilizers and cheap loans," said FRG supporter José Huarcas Agané, an apple farmer in the highland village of Chicua Primero.
Ríos Montt’s presidential campaign will play up such perceptions and emphasize that his opposition consists of members of the economic elite who have little understanding of the needs of the rural poor.
In Santa Cruz Quiché, the capital of the region worst affected by the 36-year civil war, people returned from a political rally wearing new FRG T-shirts, but not all were convinced.
Luis David, 28, who came from the nearby village of Chujuyub to hear FRG leader Mario Rivera speak, said he had not yet made up his mind about how he was going to vote.
"People say that they suffered when Ríos Montt was last in power and this government has stolen a lot of money, but we will support them if they complete the projects we have been promised," he said, echoing a pragmatic approach to politics often heard across the region.
Nevertheless, some rural Guatemalans who were directly affected by the violence of the Ríos Montt regime are unwilling to give the FRG the benefit of the doubt.
Antonio Caba Caba, one of the witnesses in a genocide case being brought against Ríos Montt in Guatemalan courts, said, "I walked through my village after the massacre, among the dead bodies. ... The important thing for us is that he be brought to justice, that he go to jail. It is an insult that he is running as a candidate."
Such repugnance at the prospect of the former dictator returning to power does not automatically favor the opposition. "GANA is the same, with all the military men that they have. They are not civilians; they are just like Ríos Montt. Otto Pérez Molina was there in Nebaj, massacring people. He is guilty too," said Caba.
Media reaction to Ríos Montt’s candidacy has been overwhelmingly negative. FRG critics hope the July 24 protests will prove to have been a huge political mistake, but the party will spin the final CC decision as a victory for the rural poor over the economic elite.
So far, opposition parties have failed to address the needs of the rural majority, leaving the FRG as the only party actively courting the rural vote. In a country that remains deeply divided almost seven years after the official end of the civil war, it remains to be seen whether Ríos Montt’s populist posturing will be sufficient to overcome the legacy of his harsh dictatorship.
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