The Enduring Tragedy: Guatemala’s Bloody Farce
November 26, 2015
The Enduring Tragedy: Guatemala’s Bloody Farce
by Joseph Grosso
Should it be considered a supreme irony that Guatemala’s just elected president, Jimmy Morales, is an evangelical right-wing comedian with no political experience and ties to a political party made up of military veterans dedicated to opposing investigations into the behavior of the military during the decades longs civil war – all the more striking in that it was only a few months back that a Guatemalan court ruled that Rios Montt, another evangelical, would be allowed to be retried for such crimes despite Montt suffering from dementia. Montt was already convicted in 2013 for genocide and crimes against humanity, specifically relating to a series of massacres against the Ixil population of the Quiche region during his rule between March 1982 and August 1983 that resulted in 1,771 deaths and the forced displacement of 29,000 people (the first head of state to be convicted of genocide by a court in his own country), though that ruling was suspiciously overturned by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala on procedural grounds.
Morales ran a standard outsider campaign with the requisite slogan, ‘neither corrupt, nor a thief’, that found its footing on the heels of a major corruption scandal brought huge protests and saw the resignation and arrest of the last elected president Otto Perez Molina for his alleged role in a wide ranging scandal involving the lowering of duties in exchange for kickbacks. The scandal also took down the Vice President, the Vice President’s private secretary, as well as two Chiefs of the Tax Authority.
Perez Molina himself is a former military man, one who represented the military in the negotiations that officially ended the civil war in 1996. His name has also turned up in some shadowy places: Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder, suggests that Perez Molina, was at least complicit, if not more so, in the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in April 1998. Bishop Geradi’s murder occurred two days after he oversaw the publication of a report, Guatemala: Never Again (produced by the Recovery of Historical Memory Project), that established, echoing a UN sponsored truth commission, that the Guatemalan military was responsible for a great majority of the deaths and disappearances of 200,000 civilians during the Civil War. Perez Molina’s name also turned up in Montt’s first trial where a witness, a former Army mechanic who was stationed in the Ixil areas during Montt’s dictatorship, testified Perez Molina was the commander in charge of the local military garrison that had burned down villages and ordered the executions.
Morales ran under the banner of the National Convergence Front, a party founded by retired generals. Despite these eerie ties Morales has vowed to limit the power of the military, a promise made by some a few of his predecessors. Meanwhile as the mechanics of elite corruption and plunder carry on 60 percent of the population is impoverished and almost half of Guatemalan children suffer chronic malnutrition.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/26/the-enduring-tragedy-guatemalas-bloody-farce/
