Directing Your Call in Guatemala

November 21, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 20 (IPS) – "I was surprised at how hard it was to learn more English. I had looked for work in a bank, but I would have earned only half what I make here, and I’d have had to work more hours," said Carlos de León from his cubicle in a call centre, part of a rapidly growing industry in Guatemala.De León, a 20-year-old university student, works for one of these call centres, which already employ between 16,000 and 18,000 people in this Central American country and are driving technology development, according to the Guatemalan Exporters Association (AGEXPORT).

Guatemala has 75 call centres, although only 15 of them are involved in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). They employ 10,000 young people who are bilingual in English and Spanish, and another 6,000 to 8,000 who speak only Spanish, according to AGEXPORT.

Germán López, of AGEXPORT’s call centre and BPO commission, told IPS that the industry injects some eight million dollars per month into the economy in the form of wages, which vary from 562 to 625 dollars a month on average.

"This goes towards paying for social security, value added tax, supermarket bills, housing, entertainment. And for each of these jobs, four more are created indirectly," he said.

According to AGEXPORT, call centre revenues amounted to 194.9 million dollars in 2011, 46 percent more than in 2010, while this year a 24 percent increase, to 242 million dollars, is expected.

López said the call centre industry has expanded in Guatemala since 2003, when it began to cater to the U.S. market.

"Our proximity, the competitive prices we can offer the United States, and the compatible time zone are features that make Guatemala an attractive country to the U.S. market," he said.

Call centres and other forms of BPO in Guatemala offer technical support and problem-solving in different areas, mainly telecommunications, electricity, banking and finance.

The buoyant growth of this industry here, which has attracted capital from India, Canada and the United States, where the largest centres are to be found, is also stimulating the growth of software technologies, web applications and digital development.

"Industries request ever increasing services. As a company, for instance, we have an agreement with another software development firm by which, if they have a client that wants programme development and a contact centre (which manage all client contact through different mediums such as telephone, fax, letter and e-mail), we can offer that," said López, a manager at the Allied Global call centre.

Furthermore, "as an exporters association, AGEXPORT is looking into the possibility of positioning the country as a provider of technology covering contact centres, software and digital services," he said.

This impoverished country of 15 million people has made strides towards closing the digital gap. Since 2010, for example, a Technological Campus has operated in the capital city, designed as "a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness."

The area, where 100 companies in the information technology sector operate, specialises mainly in the production of special effects for films, video games, and software for mobile phones and the internet.

This year a Guatemalan company, Surtidora de Alta Tecnología, created the CybeTech Pad CT8003, Guatemala’s first tablet computer, assembled in China, to compete with global brands.

Meanwhile, a South Korean company, Sollen-Guatemala, is about to commence operations here to make touch screens for iPad and iPhone with a view to distributing them throughout the Americas.

So call centres are just a part of the range of opportunities for technological development and bolstering competitiveness in Guatemala.

José Calderón, of the Language Learning Centre at the public San Carlos University of Guatemala, told IPS they were working on a project with AGEXPORT, the economy ministry, and other universities, to encourage young people to study English.

"The idea is for young people to learn English from the time they enter university, so that within five years we will have between 40,000 and 50,000 young people who know the language," he said.

As part of this effort, San Carlos University will have to make provisions for its over 150,000 students to study English. "This will allow them to work in a call centre, and to pay for their studies," Calderón said.

"The call centres are encouraging young people to learn English or perfect it, because they may know the language, but not at the level required for this type of work," Patricia Mendizábal of the Instituto Guatemalteco Americano, which offers private English courses, told IPS.

The future of the call centre industry looks rosy.

Roberto Mancilla of the mixed agency Invest Guatemala told IPS that this country, "because of its geographical location, similar time zone to the United States, and teaching of English with American pronunciation, has made a substantial leap forward towards competitiveness in this kind of outsourcing."

However, he admitted that proficiency in English continues to be a challenge.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Economy, Latin America, Report Tagged With: , ,

New Era Augurs More of the Same for Impoverished Maya People

November 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 08 (IPS) – The Maya Indians of Central America and Mexico will have little to celebrate when the current era comes to an end on Dec. 21. The extreme poverty and marginalisation they face contrast sharply with the plans for lavish celebrations to lure tourists.According to the ancient Maya calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 will mark the end of a grand cycle of 13 144,000-day “baktuns”, lasting 5,126 years.

“It’s offensive, it’s an insult, and it is contradictory for indigenous people to continue to be steeped in poverty while public funds are squandered on celebrating," activist Ricardo Cajas, of the non-governmental Guatemalan Council of Maya Organisations (COMG), told IPS.

“There is nothing to celebrate,” he said. “This is an event involving traditional wisdom, which allows us to make an analysis of the ‘internal colonialism’ we see in Guatemala, where a dominant class keeps indigenous people in a state of subsistence and extreme poverty.”

In Guatemala, indigenous people make up close to 40 percent of the population of 15 million according to official statistics, although native organisations put the figure at over 60 percent.

But Guatemala has never had an indigenous president, and only 19 of the 158 members of the single-chamber Congress are Indians. And the only member of the cabinet who identifies himself as native is the minister of culture and sports, Carlos Batzín.

Governments in “Mesoamerica” – a cultural area extending from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, where advanced civilisations like the Maya flourished before Spain’s colonisation of the Americas – are planning major celebrations of the end of the Maya long-count calendar.

The hype and promotion surrounding the end of the current era has led to a surge in global interest in the ancient Maya civilisation and to an explosion of tourism to Maya historical and cultural sites in Mesoamerica.

According to historians, the 13th baktun began on Aug. 11, 3114 BC and ends Dec. 21, 2012, and a new era begins the following day.

The end of the current baktun has also given rise to predictions of catastrophes and even prophecies about the end of the world, which have been debunked by indigenous leaders.

Doomsday tourism

In Guatemala, for example, tourism industry authorities report that 15 official ceremonies will be held, including a major multimedia presentation on the legacy of the ancient Maya on Dec. 20 at Tikal, Guatemala’s most famous Maya archaeological site, in the northern province of Petén.

The preparations for the ceremonies have cost the Ministry of Culture and the Guatemalan Tourism Institute some 8.5 million dollars, according to the non-governmental Indigenous Observatory.

Thanks to government promotional campaigns, Guatemala, Honduras, El

Salvador and Belize are expecting some five million visitors, and Mexico around 10 million in its southern states alone – an average of 10 percent more than last year, according to the Maya World Organisation, which groups the region’s tourism institutes.

But while state coffers will swell with the increased revenues, the authorities will continue to ignore the needs of indigenous people in their budgets, native leaders complain.

Cajas laid the blame on the free market-based “20th century neoliberal socioeconomic system” which “does not have ethics and morals, and tramples the rights of indigenous people,” including the right to land.

Around 80 percent of Guatemala’s farmland is in the hands of just five percent of farmers. But 61 percent of the population is rural and 80 percent of the mainly indigenous rural population is poor, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“In Central America, indigenous people have historically been among the poorest segments of the population,” Néstor Pérez, an activist with the Central American Indigenous Council (CICA), based in the capital of El Salvador, told IPS.

Paradoxically, “indigenous territories have great natural and mineral wealth, but in many cases economic interests are put above the collective rights of native people, in violation of the national and international laws that protect their rights,” he added.

Pérez lamented that the end of the 13th baktun was being used to draw in tourists, with a focus that displays indigenous people and their traditional practices “merely as folkloric shows.”

He said that what were needed were public policies aimed at improving the economic and social conditions of native people.

From splendour to dire poverty

Highly complex, advanced societies with enormous cultural, scientific and biological wealth, such as the Maya, Olmec and Aztec, flourished in Mesoamerica until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

Latin America is home to an estimated 400 native groups, representing around 50 million people. Ninety percent of Latin America’s native people live in the Andes highlands regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and in Mesoamerica.

Indigenous people continue to face severe marginalisation in the region, said Dalí Ángel, an activist with the Mexico City-based Alliance of Indigenous Women of Central America and Mexico.

The native people of Honduras are one illustration, said Timoteo López with the private Chortí Maya National Indigenous Council. “Our development is limited in part because power has only served to protect the interests of those who are governing,” he told IPS.

The Chortí Maya people of Honduras, where Indians represent seven percent of the population of 7.7 million, have made progress in the area of education, he said, but “at the cost of political activism that has even led to death threats and murders of leaders.”

Ángel, meanwhile, was especially concerned about the concessions that the Mexican government has granted to transnational corporations in indigenous territories without carrying out proper consultations with local communities affected by mining, oil industry, logging projects or hydropower dams, as required by the International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.

“The Mexican state has always granted concessions to industries, but lately foreign companies have been given greater facilities to operate here, by means of constitutional reforms,” the Zapoteca activist told IPS.

Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest indigenous population in absolute numbers, which is variously estimated to make up between 10 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who speak an indigenous language).

The country’s native inhabitants are largely concentrated in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, according to the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. In these two states and in the neighbouring state of Guerrero, one of every three people lives in absolute poverty, the Observatory of Social Policy and Human Rights (OPSDH) reports.

“They’re selling everything, even the air,” Ángel said. She complained that the country’s outgoing president, the conservative Felipe Calderón, recently inaugurated a wind power project in the Tehuantepec isthmus in southeast Mexico “where he used deceit to force local communities to sign contracts to yield part of their territory to Spanish companies.”

The activist also mentioned the case of Wirikuta, a 140,000-hectare territory in the Chihuahua desert in the central state of San Luis Potosí that is considered sacred by the Wixarika or Huichol people. According to the National Human Rights Commission, mining projects threaten the environment there.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Human Rights, Inequality, Latin America, Politics, Report, Social Justice Tagged With: ,

GUATEMALA: The War Over Land

September 12, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Sept 12, 2011 (IPS) – The violent eviction of 91 rural families in northern Guatemala was the latest incident in the ageold conflict over land in a country where the army is frequently called in to force peasant farmers off their land.

"This has been the government with the most violent stance against the campesino (peasant) struggle. It has carried out 115 evictions since 2007 because of its ties to strong economic groups, which mean its actions have been in line with the interests of local and transnational companies," Israel Macario, with the Agrarian Platform, a coalition of 21 groups pressing for land reform, told IPS.

"Campesinos, who have a right to land in order to engage in community-based rural economic activities to produce their own food, have been abandoned," the activist said.

In the last few months, there have been a number of evictions of campesino families in this impoverished Central American country.

The most recent occurred on Aug. 23, when a group of soldiers descended on the village of Nueva Esperanza in the northern province of Petén and razed and set fire to the homes of 91 campesino families. A total of 286 people were forced off the land, including 60 children and 30 elderly persons.

They were accused by government forces of having ties to drug traffickers.

The families, carrying just clothing and a few cooking utensils, fled across the border that day to the town of Nuevo Progreso in Tenosique, in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, where they were given assistance by Mexican authorities, the U.N. refugee agency, and NGOs.

The Guatemalan government has now engaged in talks with the families, to find a solution that would allow them to return to Guatemala.

In this country, where roughly half of the population is rural, nearly 80 percent of farmland is in the hands of a mere five percent of the population. Meanwhile, half of the population of 14 million people is poor and 17 percent live in extreme poverty, according to U.N. figures.

This makes Guatemala one of the most unequal countries in the world, where land, indispensable for survival in rural areas, is fiercely disputed, especially by agribusiness interests keen on expanding export crops like sugar cane and African oil palm.

"This country needs a law on rural development to regulate land use, an agrarian code, and an agrarian prosecutor’s office and courts," Elmer Velásquez, the coordinator of CONGCOOP, a network of Guatemalan NGOs and cooperatives, told IPS.

The activist said this legal framework was provided for by the 1996 peace agreement that put an end to the 36-year civil war between left-wing guerrillas and government forces in which some 250,000 people – mainly rural Maya Indians – were killed and forcibly disappeared, according to official figures.

Officially, 40 percent of the Guatemalan population is indigenous, although NGOs such as Refugees International and the U.N. refugee agency put the proportion as high as 65 percent.

An agrarian code would formally recognise customary property held for generations in rural communities, and an agrarian prosecutor’s office would provide legal advice on land tenure to campesinos, Velásquez said.

"But in general terms, the state has decided once again to respond to the demands of campesinos with repression," he lamented.

As of April, just under 3,000 square kilometres of land in Guatemala were caught up in land conflicts involving more than one million people in 1,360 separate disputes, according to a report by the government’s Secretariat of Agrarian Affairs.

In 68.5 percent of the disputes, two or more people claim to own the land; in 19.7 percent, the land in question has been illegally occupied; and the rest of the cases involve land boundary disputes or demands for formal recognition of traditional indigenous lands.

Carlos Sarti, director of Propaz, an NGO dedicated to conflict mediation and resolution, told IPS that land "is Guatemala’s major historical problem."

He complained that "the governments haven’t taken fundamental decisions, when the underlying problems must be addressed through a national pact based on agreement on what kind of agrarian development we want for the future."

Sarti preferred not to discuss legal questions, but said that based on his experience, dialogue was the "only alternative" for reaching agreements on this "thorny issue."

"The government is acting as both judge and plaintiff. In the indigenous world view, land is a gift from nature, while business interests see it as merchandise to be bought and sold. They are completely different visions," he said.

Meanwhile, land conflicts continue to leave campesinos uprooted, injured and even dead.

In the middle of the night on Mar. 15, more than 1,000 police and soldiers evicted over 3,000 Q’eqchi Maya Indians living on land claimed by an agribusiness firm in the Polochic Valley in the northern province of Alta Verapaz.

The security forces burnt or bulldozed the families’ humble shacks and destroyed their subsistence crops with machetes and tractors.

In that eviction and later incidents, 18 people have been injured and three have been killed in clashes with government forces and private security guards, such as the ones protecting the Chabil Utzaj sugar mill, the Committee of Campesino Unity reported.

In August, a campesino was killed during the police eviction of more than 250 families from land in the southwest province of Retalhuleu that will reportedly be used for the large-scale production of sugar cane.

Camilo Salvadó, a researcher with the non-governmental Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences (AVANCSO), told IPS that the evictions form part of a market-based logic aimed at expanding export-oriented production of sugar cane, palm oil, and other products.

In first place, the expert said, the government should put a stop to the evictions, in order to give campesinos access to land on which to grow food, and thus prevent a worsening of the food crisis.

In addition, a national rural development policy is urgently needed, he said, along with legislation recognising communally owned indigenous land and agrarian courts to settle land disputes.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Agriculture, Featured, Inequality, Latin America, Politics, Social Justice Tagged With:

CENTRAL AMERICA: Alternative Tourism Seeks to Overcome Obstacles

March 24, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 24, 2011 (IPS) – Most of the countries of Central America are lagging behind the rest of the tourist destinations in Latin America, despite their impressive natural and archaeological treasures. To turn this situation around, the area is increasingly focusing on alternatives like rural tourism.

"Tourism has become the main livelihood of families here," Olga Cholotío of the Rupalaj K’istalin community association of eco-tourism guides in San Juan La Laguna in the northwestern Guatemalan province of Sololá, told IPS.

The association, run by the Mayan Tzutuhil indigenous people, works in the area around Lake Atitlán, one of the region’s main tourist attractions, offering tours of rural areas and villages where visitors see traditional weavers making colourful textiles, watch small-scale fishers plying their trade, take in traditional music and dance performances, and go on nature walks.

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) this month, says there are two distinct realities in Central America in terms of tourism development. While El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua are in the last places in the ranking in Latin America, Costa Rica and Panama are at the head of the region.

Guatemala is ranked 86th, out of the 139 countries included in the report, followed by Honduras (88), El Salvador (96) and Nicaragua (100).

Of this group, Nicaragua moved up eight spots and El Salvador two, from the last ranking by the Switzerland-based WEF. But Honduras fell nine places, and Guatemala dropped back 13.

Costa Rica, on the other hand, is ranked second in Latin America and 44th overall, while Panama is fourth in the region and in 56th place overall.

The top-ranking Latin American country is Mexico, which is 43rd overall, and Brazil is third in the region and 52nd overall.

Switzerland, Germany and France are in the top slots in the global ranking, according to the report.

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, produced every year since 2007 except 2010, seeks to measure the factors and policies making countries attractive for developing the travel and tourism industry. The index includes three main subcategories: regulatory framework; business environment and infrastructure; and human, cultural, and natural resources.

Cholotío is not familiar with the report. But she has no doubt that Guatemala’s high crime rates have a negative impact on tourism and keep it from fully becoming an engine of development for communities like hers.

In 2010, revenues from tourism, the country’s third-largest source of foreign exchange, fell 14.5 percent from 2009, to just under 986 million dollars, according to Guatemala’s central bank.

But the Central American countries that are lagging in tourism are working hard to innovate, and to bolster the participation of marginalised, vulnerable or remote population groups so they can capitalise on tourism to improve local living conditions.

Rural indigenous communities, for example, are in a unique position to reach out to the growing niche of tourists seeking alternative travel experiences, such as hiking, ecotourism or adventure, rural or community tourism.

Edgardo Valenzuela, president of the Salvadoran Association of Tourism Operators (ASOTUR), told IPS that in his country, the tourism industry is helping drive development, mainly at the level of small and medium-sized businesses in rural areas.

"Tourism brings opportunities in those areas to restaurants, small hotels, hostels, or people with small farms who turn them into agrotourism establishments" where visitors come into direct contact with traditional rural activities, he explained.

"It is immediate, fresh money that generates progress and the emergence of small or large hubs of development," Valenzuela said.

But he lamented the lack of a strategic plan to foment tourism in El Salvador.

"Central America is an extremely important region in terms of tourism opportunities," he said. "We have so many attractions: history, culture, nature, the Mayan world, two oceans that are not far apart from each other, and volcanoes."

In an area of just 523,000 square kilometres, the seven countries of Central America – Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – offer endless opportunities to tourists, including the Route of the Maya, featuring impressive archaeological sites hemmed in by dense jungle.

The isthmus, which has numerous high mountain peaks, volcanoes, rivers and lakes, is bathed by the Caribbean Sea on one side and by the Pacific Ocean on the other.

Despite its tourist treasures, the so-called "industry without smokestacks" has failed to take off in most of the countries of the region, due to different hurdles.

In Honduras, for example, "The June 2009 coup d’état (that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya) set us back a great deal in all areas, including tourism, because the country’s foreign image was damaged," Iveth Lagos, with JM Tours of Honduras, told IPS.

Tourism is the country’s second-largest source of foreign exchange, after remittances sent home by Hondurans living abroad, she pointed out. In 2010, the Honduran Institute of Tourism reported that revenues in the industry amounted to 660 million dollars, five percent up from the previous year.

Lagos stressed the importance of tourism as a source of significant income for the rural population, in its various forms, like ecotourism, hiking and other options linked to nature and rustic or traditional ways of life.

"Many cultures receive support for the development of their communities through visits by tourists, while visitors to our parks and ecological reserves force us to take better care of them," she said.

One major obstacle to tourism faced by the three countries of what is known as the Northern Triangle of Central America – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – is that they have "the highest homicide rates in the world," according to the 2010 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The study says the average murder rate for the 2003-2008 period was 61 per 100,000 population in Honduras, 52 per 100,000 in El Salvador and 49 per 100,000 in Guatemala, compared to 12 per 100,000 in Mexico.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Latin America, Report Tagged With: , ,

"Yes I Can" Say Illiterate Adults in Guatemala

March 10, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 10, 2011 (IPS) – Concepción González, 42, never went to school. She remembers with frustration having to stamp her fingerprint because she couldn’t sign official documents, and having to respond "I don’t know" to her children’s homework questions.

But the Guatemalan mother of four, who depends on the remittances that her husband sends back from the United States, where he has been working for the past few years, finally learned to read and write in 2010, and found doors opening up to a better life.

"Before, it was really hard to go to school, parents told their kids that they were studying just because they felt like it. But in time you realise you needed it," she admits.

"Now a course in beauty school is going to start in the community, and I’m going to take it, to keep learning and try to set up my own business in the future," she said, excited about the results of the three-month literacy course she took in her hometown of Morazán, 100 km northeast of Guatemala City.

Like González, more than 65,000 Guatemalans have learned to read and write since 2007 with the help of the Cuban literacy programme "Yo sí puedo" (Yes I Can), which has been used in at least 28 countries worldwide, including 13 in Latin America.

Thanks to the programme, 11 of Guatemala’s 333 municipalities have been declared illiteracy-free, which means less than five percent of people over 15 cannot read and write — the threshold set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to declare an area free of illiteracy.

In this Central American country of 14 million people, 18.5 percent of adults are illiterate, according to the government’s National Literacy Committee.

That is more than double the average illiteracy rate for Latin America and the Caribbean. The 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, issued by UNESCO on Mar. 1, reported that in 2008, 36 million people in the region were illiterate, equivalent to nine percent of the adult population.

Osmany Justis from Cuba, who is involved in the Yes I Can programme in Guatemala, told IPS that the programme is working, in coordination with the National Literacy Committee, in 254 municipalities in the country’s 22 provinces (known as departments).

The literacy programme’s methodology relies heavily on contextualisation, he explained. "The terms used are mainly of daily use in Guatemala; instructors and students discuss things like marimba, traditional dance rhythms, or difficulties faced in the areas of family planning, violence, and food hygiene," Justis said.

The course involves 65 half-hour daily video classes in which the students have the help of a volunteer facilitator. The 16 videos used in the course were taped in Guatemala by Cuban experts, with the participation of Guatemalan actors. The course lasts between eight and 12 weeks.

So far, the literacy programme has targeted Spanish speakers, but "this year there are plans to tailor the methodology to the Mam and Kiche languages and context," said Justis. These two languages are the most widely spoken of the 22 Mayan languages used in the country, where indigenous people are a majority of the population, according to native organisations.

The literacy method is based on charts that associate letters with numbers, since even illiterate people work with numbers every day, selling or buying products in the market, for example. Thus, the classes move from the familiar (numbers) to the unfamiliar (letters).

The system was created in 2001 by Cuban pedagogue Leonela Relys, at the Cuban government’s request.

The method, used in Africa, Europe and Latin America, was awarded the King Sejong Literacy Prize by UNESCO in 2006.

Justis said that in Guatemala, the programme has captured the interest of mayors and, more recently, the private sector.

"Banana producers are studying it, as is the National Land Fund (FONATIERRA), with the idea of bringing in our advisers to declare their plantations and farms free of illiteracy," he said.

FONATIERRA was created to support land purchases by small farmers, supported by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), Japan and the World Bank.

Morazán Mayor Rigoberto Salazar told IPS that "all Guatemalans should cooperate to bring the light to people who don’t know how to read and write, and who can do this better than the municipalities, which are in close contact with the people."

Last year, his city government provided 37,500 dollars to co-finance the programme — an investment that will help make Morazán the 12th Guatemalan municipality to be declared free of illiteracy, in the next few days.

"From here on out, people will have the ability to communicate, and they will have greater opportunities in life," Salazar said.

Rudy García, with the National Literacy Committee, told IPS that nearly 50,000 people will take the Yes I Can literacy course this year.

The official said poverty was the main cause of illiteracy in the country. Half of all Guatemalans live below the poverty line and 17 percent live in extreme poverty, according to United Nations statistics.

García said it is not easy to predict exactly when Guatemala could be declared illiteracy-free, since "it doesn’t only depend on our efforts, but on other factors like the coverage and quality of education as well."

But "we could see significant results by 2016 or 2017," he ventured.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Education, Latin America, Report Tagged With: ,

WOMEN’S DAY: Overcoming Barriers in Central America

March 7, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares*

GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 7, 2011 (IPS) – Amarilis Chilel, 15, left her hometown of Ixchiguán in northwest Guatemala to work as a domestic in the capital: a common story among rural girls and women in Central America. "I went to school up to fourth grade," she told IPS.

The teenager, who belongs to the Mam community, one of the main Mayan native groups in Guatemala, says her father tried without success to convince her to stay in school.

But since she began working eight months ago, she sends him the equivalent of 43 dollars, exactly half of her monthly wage, to help support her three younger sisters.

Chilel still dreams of becoming a schoolteacher. "Next year I’ll go back to school," she says while getting ready to clean the house and make lunch for the family she works for.

Like her, thousands of Central American women face innumerable economic and social barriers to education and training, which severely limit their job opportunities.

This year, the theme of International Women’s Day, celebrated Mar. 8, is "Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women", considered essential to breaking down the discrimination faced by so many women around the world.

In Guatemala, for example, "At age seven, only 54 percent of Mayan girls are in school, compared with 71 percent of Mayan boys and 75 percent of Ladina (persons of mixed race ancestry) girls," says a 2007 study by the U.S.-based Population Council, a non-governmental organisation that advocates reproductive rights.

"Girls in Central America tend to drop out of school mainly because they have to work, or because their parents have to work and they have to take care of their younger siblings and the housework," Laura Verdugo, at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) office in Guatemala, told IPS.

Paradoxically, "Girls and women in the region have a high level of academic performance. So when they do make it to secondary school, they are more likely to finish their studies than boys," she added.

In the case of Guatemala, Verdugo said an essential measure was the government’s announcement that public school was effectively free of cost as of 2009. Although the right to free education is enshrined in the constitution, until that year schools required payment for services, which limited access for children from poor families.

In Guatemala, more than half the population of 14 million lives in poverty and 17 percent in extreme poverty, according to United Nations figures. And while official statistics put the proportion of indigenous people at 40 percent of the population, native organisations say the proportion is more than 60 percent.

In 2000, eight out of 10 indigenous Guatemalans were poor, compared to four out of 10 for the rest of the population — numbers that have seen little change since 2006, according to a government report presented in late 2010.

The challenge is to improve the quality of education, and make the system more flexible in terms of schedules, attendance and the school calendar, Verdugo said.

The setbacks and challenges for achieving equality in education are also seen in the rest of Central America. "My parents were really poor, and they couldn’t afford to send me to school. That’s why I only went up to third grade," 62-year-old Yolanda Urroz from Nicaragua told IPS.

But today, Nicaraguan girls have more opportunities in education, "although there is still discrimination, and a lot of machismo," she said.

Urroz, a mother of four, was just a girl when she began to work as a street vendor in a city market in the northwestern Nicaraguan province of Chinandega, to help support her family.

Four years ago she emigrated to the Guatemalan capital with her four children in search of opportunities, and now works behind the counter in a bakery. "If I would have studied, ooooooh," she says, implying that she would have been much better off.

But studies are no guarantee for a good job. Cristina Martínez, a 53-year-old Guatemalan business administrator, told IPS about the age discrimination she suffers.

"In one company they told me that because of my age, they would do me the ‘favour’ of paying me 1,800 quetzals (225 dollars) a month — for a senior-level position. You can just imagine that someone with experience can’t accept that salary for that level of responsibility," she complained.

Martínez said that a man "wouldn’t be mistreated for his age, like we are." She added that women have greater difficulties studying and advancing in their careers "because we also have to take care of the home and the children."

In this region, even though women outnumber men at some levels of education, they are still more likely to work in the informal sector, in precarious jobs, and they still earn less than men, experts point out.

The situation in Honduras is a case in point. The director of the government’s National Women’s Institute, María Antonieta Botto, explained that in her country, "the rate of girls between the ages of five and 18 who attend an educational institution is 60.7 percent, compared to 57.6 percent for boys.

"Nevertheless, women earn 66 percent of what men earn, for the same work," she said, explaining that Honduras has launched a Gender Equality and Equity Plan to turn this situation around.

Alejandro Benítez, the director of the training school for the Local Economic Development Agencies (LEDAs) and Services Centres for Women Entrepreneurship (CSEM), has no doubt that training is the key to achieving gender equality.

"Economic empowerment for women" depends on training, he said, adding that they "are generally excluded from such programmes."

The school, based in El Salvador and sponsored by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), is training some 2,000 women from that country, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in entrepreneurial and business skills, and helps them get access to credit.

"Women must be empowered, because they invest in the health and education of their children, in home improvements, and in their companies, which means the impact in terms of the quality of life for their families is greater," he said.

*This article is part of IPS coverage for International Women’s Day, Mar. 8, whose theme this year is "Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women".

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Gender, Human Rights, Inequality, Latin America, Report Tagged With: ,

Elections Unlikely to Bring Change to Guatemala

February 22, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 22, 2011 (IPS) – Guatemalans will go to the polls to elect a new government in September. But the failure to implement in-depth reforms in the political system, including a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, means structural changes that could improve the social and economic situation are unlikely, according to experts and political leaders.

Some believe that nothing will really change under the government in office from 2012 to 2016, from the current administration of social democratic President Álvaro Colom. "We’ll have a new face as president, but the system will carry on just the same," anthropologist Irma Alicia Velásquez told IPS.

The reason, the expert said, is that the rules of the game have remained intact. "Political parties have owners, and are still financed by the economic élite; non-governmental organisations help us monitor the abusive, dishonest and inhuman ways in which they buy the votes of the poor," she said.

Guatemalans will vote in September to elect a president and vice president for the next four years, all 153 members of the single-chamber Congress, 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament and 333 municipal governments.

The presidential candidates leading the opinion polls are Otto Pérez Molina of the rightwing Patriot Party, and Sandra Torres of the governing centre-left National Union of Hope, in spite of the experts’ view that her presidential bid is unconstitutional, because she is Colom’s wife.

Velásquez said Guatemala could be transformed if profound reforms of the system were undertaken, such as convening a national constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution.

"To begin with, the nature of this truly multicultural country should be recognised, and the issues of land reform and full participation by indigenous people, as well as fiscal policy, need to be addressed. It would be a beautiful and healthy exercise for Guatemala, which is bogged down in its post-war state," said Velásquez, a Quiché Indian.

Guatemala has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. About 80 percent of the farmland is owned by five percent of the population, while half of the country’s 14 million people live in poverty and 17 percent are indigent (extremely poor), according to United Nations statistics.

Independent leftwing lawmaker Aníbal García told IPS "the political, economic and social model is exhausted" and no longer works, which is why a constituent assembly is needed "to create a new pluricultural and democratic republic."

In institutional terms, the Supreme Court must recover its full independence, "so that we have authorities and bodies that are completely disconnected from the dictates of economic and political power," he said.

At present, for example, the country’s president appoints the head of the public prosecutor’s office, which coordinates criminal investigations in Guatemala. This undermines the institution’s independence, according to human rights organisations.

This can only be remedied by amending article 251 of the constitution, but to do so would require reviewing the entire constitution and then ratifying it by means of a national referendum.

As for political aspects, "new rules of political representation are needed," because at the moment, elections consist of voting for party lists of candidates. In addition, "party expenses need to be made transparent, and the economic model needs to be freed from constitutional barriers that prevent thorough tax reforms," García said.

The Guatemalan constitution was reformed during the government of President Ramiro de León Carpio (1993-1996). After the 1996 peace agreement that put an end to 36 years of civil war, an attempt was made to amend it by introducing recognition for the Maya, Garifuna and Xinca peoples.

However, the proposed reform failed in the 1999 referendum, which had a turnout of barely 18.5 percent of the electorate.

In 2009 a far-right group, ProReforma, pushed for the amendment of 73 articles of the constitution, seeking at least two-thirds of the votes in Congress, followed by a referendum for ratification. But their proposal was never debated in the legislature, mainly due to rejection of the idea of appointing judges for life and senators for 15-year terms.

Catalina Soberanis, of the Central American Institute for Political Studies, told IPS "the way things stand today, we cannot expect any major changes from the forthcoming elections, because none of the rules have changed."

As part of national restructuring, the country must achieve consensus to move ahead on fiscal policy, the system of political parties, citizen security, rural development and dealing with climate change, among other issues, Soberanis said.

For instance, "the parties should encourage greater participation by sectors of the population that are at a great disadvantage for participating at present, like women, young people and indigenous people," she said.

Virgilio Álvarez of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) said that in Guatemala "the state must be reconstituted."

"The political classes should reclaim their autonomy and independence, and cease answering to powerful economic interests," he told IPS.

He said that at present "no single dominant group in the oligarchy is fighting for government power; instead, there are several, all with the same aspiration, which shows that politics depends on economics."

In any case, "an election always opens up opportunities for making changes that are positive for the country," Álvarez concluded.

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Surviving the Sexist Genocide in Guatemala

February 9, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 8, 2011 (IPS) – "He would punch my head all the time, pull my hair, smack and kick me. And he would make me wear long sleeves to hide the bruises; even on my wedding day I had a black and blue mark on my arm," Heidi Velásquez told IPS in Guatemala.

"That’s how your days, weeks, months and years go by until you understand the circle of violence, which starts with insults, then goes on to blows, then the ‘honeymoon’, and then silence, until it starts all over again," she said, describing her life with her husband and attacker.

Despite everything, Velásquez, a 32-year-old mother of two, was lucky: she found the strength to seek support, and put an end to her marriage, leaving behind 12 years of violence.

In this Central American country of 14 million people, 46,000 complaints of domestic violence filed last year made it to the legal system.

But thousands of victims of gender-related killings have not survived. Between 2000 and 2010, more than 5,200 women were killed in this impoverished country, most of them shot to death, according to the police.

In terms of gender violence, that figure outshadows even Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the U.S. border that is notorious for the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women, mainly factory workers, involving sadistic sexual violence since 1993. These gender-related killings, known as "femicides," rose to 306 in 2010, according to official figures.

Guatemala is one of the most violent countries in the world, with a murder rate of 52 per 100,000 population.

Velásquez has survived her personal tragedy, but it hasn’t been easy. She has to raise her children, ages five and nine, on her own; she is seeing a psychologist; and she is involved in a legal dispute with her former husband, who is accused of misogyny, child abuse and other offences.

"I don’t regret the decision I made. Our economic situation is different, but we have enough to eat and there is love in our house. Now the atmosphere is different; we don’t feel frightened or denigrated," she said.

The risks of putting up a legal fight are enormous, as 23-year-old Mindy Rodas tragically learned.

The young mother of a five-year-old boy had part of her face cut off with a machete by her husband Eswin López in July 2009. She miraculously survived and immediately launched a legal battle. While she was recovering in hospital, the police arrested her attacker.

But her hopes for justice died fast. Just a few days later, López was released on a judge’s order, based on a forged document that was presented, which stated that the case had been withdrawn.

Rodas did not give up, however, and sought support from non-governmental organisations and the authorities to clarify the case, while she issued a call for the fight against violence against women in the local and international media, removing the surgical mask that she typically wore to cover her disfigured face.

In February 2010, she travelled to Mexico to begin reconstructive plastic surgery. But she plunged into depression and returned to Guatemala.

On Dec. 18, her tortured, strangled body appeared in the capital, alongside the corpse of another young woman.

They thus joined the ranks of the 680 victims of femicide in Guatemala last year.

The trial opens on Jun. 16. But Mindy, as she is affectionately known by the public in Guatemala, will not be able to testify. Death caught up to her before justice did.

According to the United Nations-mandated International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), 98 percent of all murders go unsolved in Guatemala.

"I was shocked when they told me Mindy was dead," said Velásquez, unable to stem her tears. "How sad that the laws aren’t enforced here, even when all the evidence is in, and the proof of physical violence is in plain sight."

Norma Cruz, director of the Survivors Foundation, a women’s rights organisation based in Guatemala City, told IPS that "women should report any attack, so that it will be investigated.

"As long as the aggressor is in the house, the chances that these women will be murdered increase," said the activist, whose foundation is providing support to Rodas’ family and to Velásquez.

But the cost of reporting the violence is high, because "many of the women have to leave their homes, friends and families to avoid being found by their partners, and they also have to deal with the post-traumatic psychological stress," Cruz said.

Financial difficulties, therapy and legal disputes are part of the challenges that the victims have to face, "even if they receive support from family members and friends," she added.

But the violence can take many forms, and the victims have different ways of dealing with it.

"The violence I suffered wasn’t physical, but psychological," Telma Sarceño, 52, told IPS. "It was subtle, and you think it’s normal, and you put up with it for your children, and because you don’t want to change.

"It’s seen as normal for a woman to be under someone’s authority, there’s an idea that you have to do this and be like this because you’re a woman; we have to change this way of thinking," she said.

With that aim, Sarceño and seven other victims of gender violence staged a play about their lives, "Las Poderosas" (roughly, the powerful ones) in 2010, to raise awareness about domestic violence.

"At first I felt afraid to show the public what I had gone through. But as time has passed, it has become more gratifying. Especially because of the life-changing message we’re putting out there," said Sarceño, who is aware that her case is not the most severe.

Fabiola Ortiz, director of the National Coordinator for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Violence Against Women (CONAPREVI), a government body, told IPS that "10 years ago people didn’t even believe violence against women was a problem."

Even though "it is a very complex phenomenon linked to the unequal power relations between men and women," Ortiz believes some progress has been made.

"Today the problem has credibility, its existence is recognised, we have a law against femicide, the institutions are creating mechanisms to tackle the issue, and women are reporting more cases," the official said.

Ortiz explained that her work goes beyond coordinating public policies to provide assistance to victims. CONAPREVI also works to change society’s mindset, through educational and informational campaigns.

But she acknowledged that change won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, the media continue to report on the ongoing violence against women: "Alta Verapaz Reports One Rape a Day in January" read a recent headline in one local newspaper, Prensa Libre, referring to a province in northern Guatemala.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

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A Janus View of Guatemala

December 8, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IDN

By Julio Godoy

http://www.indepthnews.net/ 

GUATEMALA CITY (IDN) – Something extraordinary happened in Guatemala City on December 2: Jean Marie Simon’s historic photos of the crimes committed by the Guatemalan army during the civil war’s peak years that exsanguinated the Central American country between 1979 and 1983, were shown in a unique exhibition in what used to be the Guatemalan government’s headquarters, the so-called National Palace, downtown in the capital.

The exhibition is unique, because Simon’s photos, irrefutable proof of the indescribable brutality of the Guatemalan army’s operations against civilians, including children and women, are now being shown in what used to be the centre of military power in Guatemala.

Generals ruled Guatemala in those bleak dictatorial years from that very palace — a dictatorship that killed more than 200,000 people, including children and women, kidnapped more than 40,000 civilians, forced some one million into exile, out of a population of less than six million at the time, and transformed the country into an unfathomable nightmare. The National Palace was then the heart of Guatemalan darkness.

One horrendous, memorable photo of the exhibition shows the tortured body of Beatriz Barrios Marroquín, a 26-year old school teacher kidnapped on her way to the airport. Army death squads captured her on December 10, 1985, just while she was trying to flee to Canada, where she had found asylum. Her body, discovered a couple of days later, had no hands — her killers had amputated them. The body shows also numerous slices and burnings wounds. Her killers had tortured her to death. The teacher had also been sexually abused.

Simon remembers that a piece of cardboard was found near Barrios’ mutilated body, with her name written on it and the words "more to come".

Simon adds: "When security agents arrived to take fingerprints from her severed hands, Captain Armando Villegas, head of the Honor Guard G-2 (military) intelligence office was already there. When they asked him, ‘Hey man, what happened?’ Villegas responded by taking out a card on which he had written Barrios’ name, and told them that it was she. The writing on Villegas’s card matched that on the cardboard message."

A couple of months later, Villegas was named director in the official personal guard of Vinicio Cerezo, who had been elected civilian president. Cerezo was the first civilian president Guatemala had since 1952. Villegas never faced any charge.

The photo, which Simon shot in a morgue near Guatemala City, is now being shown as an overdue homage to Beatriz in the very corridors where her death was decided and planned. Another grim detail of the exhibition — the U.S. government, allegedly a mentor of the criminals who killed the teacher and thousand others and converted Guatemala into the inferno it is now, was represented in the opening of the exhibition by its current ambassador, Stephen McFarland.

The photo of the tortured teacher’s body is but one of the numerous proofs Simon collected of the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army in those years, and had been published before, in a book printed in the U.S. in 1988.

During the more than 20 years that have gone past since, Simon’s book, ‘Guatemala: Eternal spring, eternal tyranny’, a photo essay accompanied by a written account of the atrocities the photos documented, circulated in Guatemala in its original English version only among very restricted circles. But this year, Simon could publish a first Spanish edition, printed in Guatemala by a courageous publisher, supported by international institutions such as the Foros Foundation and New York-based human rights groups.

SIGNIFICANT STEP

The very fact that the book is now available in Spanish to Guatemalan readers is already a significant step in the writing of country’s modern history in Guatemala itself. It offers local society the irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed by the army.

This proof is necessary, for Guatemala has never openly discussed its recent history, least of all the involvement of the ruling oligarchy in the army’s campaign of scorched earth in the countryside and of systematic killings of political opponents, students and unions’ leaders in the cities.

The few attempts to debate modern history — such as the report by the Catholic Church’s office of human rights, published in 1998 — were smothered to silence by more ruthless violence. The church report’s leading author, Juan Gerardi, was assassinated only a few days after the document was made public.

Furthermore, army officials still justify these crimes arguing that the Guatemalan military during the civil war only fulfilled its constitutional role and was protecting the rule of law. To begin with, the Guatemalan army started manipulating elections and killing annoying political opponents as early as 1954 — long before the war reached its infernal heights of the 1980s.

The army’s manipulations of elections continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s and until the early 1980s, accompanied by corruption of the military, unparalleled in Latin America. To pretend that the army, by killing civilians and manipulating elections and illegally amassing fortunes, was defending the country’s constitutional order is simply absurd, not to speak of hypocritical. Guatemalan rulers obviously seriously suffer from denial.

The recent publication of Simon’s photos in Guatemala has triggered a heated debate on memory and justice in a society not accustomed to discuss any national matter in a civilised manner.

Expectedly, the oligarchy and the army condemned the publication as a provocation only aimed at resurrecting the country’s past, and thus contribute to reopen the unhealed wounds left by the civil war.

MORE THAN AN OBSERVER

Some exhibitions and lectures had to be cancelled, under terror threats. Some even accused Simon of being French — comments addressed at Simon were published, in incorrect French, in the local newspapers. Jean Marie is actually a U.S. citizen — although she might be a Guatemalan at heart. Obviously, some members of Guatemalan upper class are so irrational, that accusations of being European is the worst insult they can think of for those whom they see as their class enemies.

Jean Marie Simon first came to Guatemala in 1981, as an unofficial observer for the human rights group Americas Watch. She had worked as photographer in New York, and she continued to do so in Guatemala. As reporter for Americas Watch, Simon was pivotal in formulating the group’s yearly reports on Guatemala, the first to denounce the genocide the army was committing against the Mayan Indian population, and also the infernal cadence of killings against civilians in the cities.

But Simon was more than an observer and a reporter. She became a close witness to the suffering of widows and mothers and sisters who had lost husbands, children and siblings at the hands of the army death squads.

Simon would visit every morgue in the country — and come back with photos of the dead and shocking testimonies of what human beings can inflict upon their fellows. She would offer emotional comfort to the relatives, be their friend and protector, and sometimes even financial patron.

Simon also helped people under death threats to safely leave the country. Surely it is not an exaggeration to say that in those disastrous days, Simon alone made a larger contribution to the defence of human rights in Guatemala than all the diplomatic corps and organisations active in the country. For that reason, the publication of her book and the exhibition of her photos in Guatemala is also a modest homage to her uncompromising work.

But, in a way, the release of Jean Marie’s book in Guatemala and the exhibition of her photos at the very heart of darkness are both a proof of how much the country has changed since the late 1980s, and also an irrelevant exercise in civil courage.

Guatemala is today disposing of the better press it has ever had. Freedom of speech, something undreamt of in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when journalists would be killed every day, is today taken for granted. Numerous newspapers and other media also give room to a variety of voices, though journalists may still be harassed.

Also, some subjects remain a tabu — for instance, the involvement of leading economic and military personalities in illegal cocaine dealing, in money laundering, and in other forms of international organised crime. But still — compared to the climate of repression and self-censorship three decades ago, Guatemala’s is on the whole a country with freedom of speech.

And yet, this civil virtue might help to conceal the unchanged undemocratic, corrupt, brutal nature of Guatemalan society. Some 6,000 people are killed every year in the country — related to its population, this crime rate makes of Guatemala the most violent country in Latin America.

Women are a preferred target of crime. Every year, some one thousand women are killed, in what local activists have dubbed feminicide. Sexual violence against women and children occurs on a daily basis.

RANDOM VIOLENCE

Furthermore, today’s random violence is somehow worse than the political motivated sadism of the 1970s and 1980s. In those years, even if terror was palpable in everyday life, you knew who could be target of a hit squad. Even if you were a political activist, if you were cautious enough, you could survive.

Today, crime is omnipresent, and it hits where you expect it the least. This randomness of crime has transformed former idyllic neighbourhoods and regions into high security tracts — not only in the old gated communities of the rich, where oligarchs and military and their servants hide away their incommensurable wealth, but also in the most modest districts, where poor dwellers are forced to live behind bars lest that ruthless gangs attack them and take their last possessions.

Corruption continues to be rampant, and goes up to the highest echelons of political, military and economic elite. Poverty is as dramatic as ever, despite the enormous wealth amassed by army officials and oligarchs.

Thousands of Guatemalans still die of hunger every year, in a country endowed with natural resources, from gold to oil and a potentially rich agriculture. To make crime worse, impunity is all but absolute. Less than two percent of crimes are ever elucidated. This impunity has led international observers to dub today’s Guatemala a paradise for assassins.

In a nutshell: Guatemala might now have a freer press and hold regularly free elections, than it ever did since independence from Spain in 1821. But the other, ugly, ruthless face of Guatemala is unlikely to change.

Oligarchs have been threatening to carry out a coup d’état against the powerless, incapable elected government of President Alejandro Colom, only because he has been trying — rather unsuccessfully — to introduce a modest tax reform. They even orchestrated a seemingly perverse complot involving the suicide of one of their own, and raised unfounded charges of assassination against Colom. Meanwhile public schools and hospitals decay into ruins and in prisons inmates kill each other as if they were protagonists of a Hollywood horror movie.

Obviously, oligarchs have learned that freedom of speech and free elections is a price they can afford, even if they keep complaining about it. What they won’t let happen are the fundamental social and economic changes Guatemala needs to survive as a functioning state and perhaps become a civilised society. (IDN-InDepthNews/07.12.2010)

Copyright © 2010 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

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Filed Under: Featured, History, Human Rights, Insurgency, Latin America, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

GUATEMALA: Controversial Early Start to Election Campaign

November 16, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 15, 2010 (IPS) – Guatemala’s election campaign got off to a controversial and premature start, with an evangelical pastor, a military officer, a former president, the president’s wife and the daughter of a general who led a coup emerging as presidential hopefuls, although three of them face legal barriers to their candidacy, according to experts.

"The president’s wife cannot run for president," lawyer Mario Fuentes told IPS. "Article 186 of the constitution clearly states she cannot stand for this office because of her degree of affinity with the president."

Sandra Torres, wife of social democratic President Álvaro Colom, as well as former president Álvaro Arzú (1996-2000) and Zury Ríos, the daughter of former dictator general Efraín Ríos Montt, are considering running for the country’s next president, who will take office January 2012.

"Zury Ríos is also banned by Article 186, because she is related to a general who staged a coup, while Arzú cannot stand for president because Article 187 of the constitution expressly bans presidential reelection" at any time, the expert said.

Guatemalans will go to the polls September 2011 to elect the president and vice president for the next four years, as well as 153 lawmakers for the single-chamber Congress, 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament, and 333 local governments.

The controversy so far is centred on who is or is not eligible to run for president. But beyond the letter of constitutional law, there are precedents which are raising concerns among Guatemalans.

As unlikely as it seemed, Ríos Montt was a presidential candidate in 2003, although the constitution expressly banned him for having led a military coup in March 1982, and having governed as dictator for 16 months, a period of massive human rights abuses.

Article 186 of the Guatemalan constitution states that the commanders of a coup d’état cannot become president, nor those who have assumed the position of head of government after overthrowing the constitutional order. However, after a legal battle that was marked by numerous irregularities, Ríos Montt did become a candidate, although he was defeated.

Fuentes said this precedent should not be a cause for concern. "The ruling that allowed Ríos Montt to stand has been expunged from constitutional jurisprudence, so it cannot be cited as a precedent," he said.

In spite of the impediments, the presidential hopefuls continue to campaign. "Retomemos el camino" (Let’s get back on course) say the publicity spots for ex president Arzú, head of the rightwing Unionist Party and present mayor of Guatemala City, who has openly stated his intention of returning to power.

Meanwhile the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) proclaimed Zury Ríos their candidate. On Nov. 10 she said she would seek the support of women voters to achieve her goal.

President Colom’s wife, who is highly influential in the governing National Union of Hope (UNE), has not publicly stated her intention to run, but her opponents take it as read, pointing to her frequent appearances on television at official events.

Roxana Baldetti of the opposition Patriot Party said Torres is using the entire state apparatus to launch her candidacy, which she called "illegal and immoral."

Another constitutional lawyer, Roberto Villeda, concurred that Torres, Arzú and Ríos are specifically banned from standing as presidential candidates by the constitution.

The 1985 constitution, amended in 1993, closed a chapter of Guatemalan history marked by coups and dictatorships with the return to democracy in 1986, and laid the foundations for the pacification of the country. To this end, it fixed four-year presidential terms that could not be extended, and included specific measures to prevent perpetuation in power and coups.

Further controversy has arisen because the present virtual campaign by presidential hopefuls is also forbidden. The electoral law states campaigning can only commence when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal calls for elections, in May 2011.

But other presidential hopefuls, like retired general Otto Pérez of the Patriot Party, who is leading in the polls, and evangelical pastor Harold Caballeros, of Vision with Values (VIVA), have also increased their media presence to promote their aspirations.

Thus the media are broadcasting ever more frequent spots promoting the various presidential hopefuls, while huge billboards along the main avenues in the capital depict the most prominent political personalities.

Not all of this is negative. Political analyst José Dávila told IPS that Guatemala is "slowly" moving towards political maturity.

"Fraud and political repression are no longer major issues, but we need the parties to address national problems with a more serious focus, and greater citizen participation, not only in elections but also in government programmes and in elected positions," he said.

Quota laws to ensure the participation of women, direct election of lawmakers, and strict regulation of the funding sources for political parties are changes necessary for political progress, the expert said.

Political analyst Miguel Ángel Balcárcel told IPS that, furthermore, citizen participation is crucial for monitoring the work of political parties.

"Parties do not change by themselves; they need a context where they meet with more reflective citizens who won’t fall for their jingles. This is a backward society in terms of building citizenship," he said.

Gerardo López, a young leader in the VIVA party, told IPS that part of their political strategy is promoting structural political changes, like direct election of lawmakers rather than voting for lists of candidates, debating the funding of political parties, and reducing the number of lawmakers to 80.

"We think there is more of an opportunity with new parties that have not become stale and worn-out like the parties represented in Congress," he concluded.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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