Taking It to Guatemala's Streets
JANUARY 15, 2024
BY LAWRENCE REICHARD
Room 20, Hotel Spring, 8th Avenue, Guatemala City. It’s 3:30 a.m. Four hours’ sleep. That’s all my racing mind will allow. It’s not every day I wake up a block and a half from what was, late last night, a possible slow-burn coup, in an ancient land that built pyramids and towering temples when raw sewage still ran in London’s streets.
As I went to bed last night, the fantastically loud music that drove me from the thousands packing Guatemala City’s vast Parque Central thudded into my room, four blocks away. The music is now gone, and, as of 56 minutes ago, AP is reporting that progressive President-elect Bernardo Arévalo was finally sworn in – after midnight. That’s more than eight hours after Arévalo was to take office, and hours after huge tv screens erected in the Parque Central showed bedlam and chaos racking Guatemala’s Congress as it debated whether to give final certification to Arévalo’s resounding victory in last year’s election.
Deputies were shouting, chanting, interrupting and laying siege to the presiding officer, who bore an unsettling resemblance to Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s 15-year U.S.-supported butcher. And the whole scene was broadcast in real-time to the thousands of Arévalo supporters gathered in the Parque.
Arévalo’s taking office was never certain until it happened. Two days ago, Gerardo Jiménez, Mexico and Central American representative for the global Catholic charity Caritas, and longtime observer of Guatemalan politics, told me there would be no coup. The ruling class didn’t need it, he said. It had successfully stripped Arévalo’s Semilla (seed) Party of official party status over alleged ballot irregularities, leaving the relatively new minority party crippled. And under Guatemala’s unusual constitution, even if Arévalo took office, he would be hobbled for two years with the incumbent and powerful Public Minister María Porras, who could bring corruption charges against Semilla Party officials and block charges against Arévalo opponents – a recipe for two years of inaction and disorder. Porras has long been accused of cohabitation with coup plotters.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/15/taking-it-to-guatemalas-streets/