A mountain to climb
05 June 2007. Inspired by politics in paradise.
Guatemala is tourist paradise. It's very cheap, has stunning scenery, the locals make very pretty handicrafts, and the transport system is made up of entertaining third-world buses when you feel like roughing it, and air conditioned coaches when you don't. It's also extremely photogenic, as you will see in successive posts.
Fortunately for us tourists, visitors are mostly only mildly inconvenienced by the security checkpoints that hint to the country's darker realities.
So far this year in Guatemala, there have been 14.7 murders per day. With a population of just under 13 million, that's a little more than 42 murders per 100,000 population – or third in the world behind Colombia and South Africa. The murder rate has risen fairly consistently over the last few years; many seem either to be political or related to organised crime – in a particularly nasty instance, a senior police officer was jailed last week for taking part in the shooting of three El Salvadorean politicians and their driver. There is also a disturbing rise in random violence against women. Most of the murders take place in Guatemala City, where 2 million of the population live, and much of the city has become a no-go area at any time of the day or night. All of this and more is available to read in daily lurid detail from the country's newspapers.
Guatemala doesn't get talked about much by western media. The weekly print edition of The Economist, for instance, last ran a piece on events in the country in March this year; before that, it ran a short piece in November, and before that it was only featured again the November before. Three significant events in the last twenty years have briefly pushed this mountainous, volcanic and desperately poor country into the limelight: in 1992, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the brave Quiché-Mayan human-rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum; in 1996, the 36-year civil war, which started in part due to a large dose of CIA intervention, finally ended with a peace accord signed in Madrid; and in 2005, the country was hit, hard, by Hurricane Stan.
At the moment, however, something less violent is taking up the country's front pages. If you take even a brief drive along almost any road outside the capital, you can't fail to notice the neat, hand-painted propaganda on any available rock or wall space, all of which displays that Guatemala is gearing up for both presidential and legislative elections this September. Unsurprisingly, crime and security are dominating the political agenda. However, this year's election, the fourth since the civil war, is catching headlines for more than the usual reasons. The candidate for the left-leaning Encuentro por Guatemala party is one Rigoberta Menchú Tum. Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner herself, and she's pledging, among other things, to return land to those who fled during the civil war, and to work on resolving conflicts between mining companies and local communities. Her candidature has led to a great deal of debate in a country where the indigenous population makes up more than 40% of the total, yet the vast majority of business and power is in the hands of the Spanish-descended Ladinos.
Although she's by far the most well-known candidate, and the first person of Mayan descent ever to stand, right now her candidature seems an intriguing footnote. At the time of writing, she's a distant fourth in the race, according to polls. However, she has already stated that she's not so much hoping for victory in this election, as gunning for the next. Why? Because the constitution allows presidents to remain in power for one term only. The current president is a fellow called Álvaro Colom, who lost in the previous electoral run-off to a guy called Óscar Berger – himself runner up in the election before. Great things come to silver medallists who wait.
The last election's third-placed candidate, by the way, was a former lay pastor called Ríos Montt, a friend of Reagan's and the leader of the military government from 1982-3. In his short time in power, Montt dissolved Congress, suspended political parties and abandoned the electoral law. He was overthrown in August 1983, by which time he'd already had time to become one of the bloodiest dictators the continent has seen. This time, he's standing for a seat in Congress (he previously held one for 14 years until his last presidential bid), which would once again grant him temporary immunity from prosecution. He might need it – Spain has spent more than a year trying to extradite him to stand trial for crimes against humanity committed on his presidential watch. The person who presented the original charges against him? Rigoberta Menchú Tum.
The Nobel Prize Winner herself remains hopeful of what the election after this will bring. That election, she says, will lead to a new dawn for the country. If she did indeed win, she would be in power in 2012. According to experts on the Mayan calendar and its prophecies, that year has long been supposed to bring about the end of this world, and a new, fresh beginning. Menchú Tum knows all about that.