Guatemala: Political murders - full text
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Two men, a presidential security guard and an associate of Gen.(retd) Otto Perez Molina (one of two presidential candidates contesting a second round run-off vote on Nov. 4), were shot and killed in Guatemala City (the capital) on Oct. 8. The two men (security guard Valerio Castanon and Aura Salazar) were sitting in a car parked near Congress (the unicameral legislature) when they were shot, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) reported on Oct. 8.
Immediate Context
The murders were the latest episode in a wave of political violence linked to Guatemala’s ongoing presidential election. More than 50 people, mostly politicians and political activists, had been killed since campaigning started in May, making it the most violent election in Guatemala since the end of the country’s civil war in 1996.
In the first round of the presidential election, held on Sept. 9, Alvaro Colom Caballeros, the candidate of the centre-left Unity for Hope (UNE), secured 28.23 per cent of the vote, whilst Perez, the candidate of the right-wing Patriotic Party (PP), won 23.51 per cent. A second round of voting (between Colom and Perez, the two leading candidates) was called because, under Guatemalan electoral law, a candidate was required to win more than 50 per cent of the vote to win the election in the first round.
Colom, who also contested Guatemala’s presidential elections in 2003 and 1999, was campaigning on a platform of increasing social spending to reduce poverty, whilst Perez was pledging a crackdown on law and order. President Oscar Berger, who won the presidential election in 2003, was barred from contesting the 2007 election because Guatemala’s constitution did not allow the country’s head of government to serve consecutive terms in office.
Reaction and Outlook
Presidential candidate Gen.(retd) Perez described the murder of Salazar, his secretary and aide, as an act of “political intimidation” and “a political attack against someone who worked very closely with me", according to reports published respectively by the IHT and the Reuters news agency on Oct. 8.
The Reuters report said that the other candidate, Colom, blamed the majority of the election-related violence on drug traffickers who were, he claimed, attempting to enter the political process.
According to an opinion poll conducted by Borge y Asociados and cited on Oct. 15 in a report published by the Angus Reid Global Monitor, “50.71 per cent of decided voters would back Perez”, whilst “49.29 per cent would support Colom”.
Historical Context
Spain colonised Guatemala in the 16th century, but the Central American country achieved its independence in September 1821. Soon after achieving its independence, however, Guatemala was invaded by Mexico and in 1822 it became part of General Agustín de Iturbide’s Mexican Empire. After Iturbide was deposed in Mexico, Guatemala joined the United Provinces of Central America (UPCA), a federation of Central American nations including those now known as Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. By 1837, however, factional strife brought the UPCA to an end and Guatemala was declared fully independent in 1839.
Over the next 100 years Guatemala was ruled by a series of de facto dictators, including Jose Rafael Carrera Turcios, a conservative who became the country’s first president in 1840 and ruled until his death in 1865, and Justo Rufino Barrios, a liberal strongman who ruled from 1873 until 1885. General Jorge Ubico y Castaneda assumed the presidency in 1931, overseeing a programme of modernisation of Guatemala’s infrastructure and military forces. President Ubico, widely regarded as the last of Guatemala’s liberal authoritarian leaders, resigned in July 1944, amid widespread discontent over his rule and an economic depression. After resigning, Ubico transferred his executive powers to a military junta and Congress (the unicameral legislature) agreed to its request to appoint Gen. Federico Ponce as the president, but the military government was overthrown in October and power was then assumed by a joint military-civilian junta, which held elections in December 1944.
In the 1944 elections, Juan José Arevalo, commonly referred to as a “spiritual socialist”, won power and headed a “reformist” government from March 1945 until March 1951, when he was replaced by Lt-Col Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who won presidential elections held in November 1950. Arbenz’s leftist policies, including agrarian reforms designed to redistribute idle land to the poor, was frowned upon by senior conservative figures in Guatemala’s armed forces, business community, and in the Catholic Church. Arbenz’s reforms also alarmed the US government, with whom diplomatic relations soured in February 1953, when his administration expropriated land and assets owned by the US-based United Fruit Company, the largest banana producing company and land owner in Guatemala. The incident provoked strong criticism from the USA, and, in June 1954, Arbenz was ousted in a CIA-organised military coup. Power was immediately assumed by Col Carlos Diaz, as the head of a three-member military junta, who in December returned the expropriated assets to the United Fruit Company.
By the 1960s, a number of leftist insurgent groups had taken up arms against the ruling military junta, marking the beginning of Guatemala’s 36-year long civil war, during which up to 200,000 people were thought to have been killed and some 40,000 others “disappeared”. A protracted campaign of kidnappings, assassinations, and attacks against government and military installations by leftist rebels prompted the emergence of paramilitary “death squads”, which were thought to have been responsible for the assassination of up to 50,000 suspected dissidents in the 1970s. The war became increasingly fierce during the dictatorship of President Efrain Ríos Montt (1982-83), who combined populist measures to redistribute land to the poor with a harsh counter-insurgency campaign.
Civilian rule was restored in January 1986, when Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was inaugurated as president, after winning the second round of a presidential election held in November 1985. Jorge Serrano Elias was elected as president in January 1991, but he was replaced by Ramiro de León Carpio in June 1993 , after an attempt to stage an army-backed “self-coup” (autogolpe) resulted in his removal from power.
During Carpio’s presidency, in March 1994, peace talks between the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrilla group led to a preliminary accord on human rights and agreement on a timetable for continued negotiations. In January 1996, Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen was inaugurated as president, after winning a second round run-off vote. Just three months later, in March, the URNG guerrillas announced that they would cease military activities unless they were themselves attacked, prompting Arzú to suspend the ongoing counter-insurgency campaign. The civil war formally ended in December 1996, when URNG commanders and Arzú signed an historic peace accord in Guatemala City.
