The Right’s militarism and lack of solidarity

Guatemala’s fundamental problem today is that the presidential victory of retired General Otto Pérez Molina is feeding a call to militarism, militarily-conceived state security, and harsh treatment for those who dissent, who are seen as “enemies.” During the eighties, the most dramatic years of Guatemala’s history, that same conception was “the source of all other violence.”

Juan Hernández Pico, SJ

In nearly two centuries of independence, the Guatemalan Right has never accepted a proposal for any structural change that doesn’t favor it. This is especially, though hardly exclusively, true on fiscal issues. Guatemala is the Latin American country with the lowest tax burden, not only on the rich but on anyone. The income the Guatemalan State collects through direct and indirect taxes totals only around 10% of the gross domestic product. In Chile, it’s double that.

President Otto Pérez Molina’s first serious political action was to present Congress with a fiscal reform law. At the time, it was considered a step toward fulfilling what he described in his inaugural speech as giving “special priority to a genuine agreement of State that facilitates tax administration and permits an effective and comprehensive way to deal with the current challenges of State financing, improve spending allocation and above all ensure transparency in its execution.”

Big business comes out
against the fiscal reform

Taking advantage of his “honeymoon period,” Pérez Molina got Congress to approve the law rapidly, in February 2012, only a month after taking office. Naturally it couldn’t go into effect retroactively, so with the calendar year just starting, it would be nearly a year before it was applied. But by the time that date rolled around, all the business chambers had already filed writs of protection with the Court of Constitutionality against the fiscal reform law.

The law touches an especially sensitive nerve in the relatively modernized and diversified landed Guatemalan oligarchy, a nerve inherited by banking, commerce and agricultural or industrial businesses In their view, if the State isn’t at the service of private enterprise, it isn’t the State Guatemala should have. What they like to see is a State whose tax income comes basically through indirect taxes, in other words the highly regressive value-added tax applied at the same rate for everyone, independent of their income, and that’s enough to maintain military, intelligence and security forces and the infrastructure that allows communication among their business platforms in the city and countryside. The State of their choosing is fundamentally a repressive one. Otherwise it doesn’t work for private investment, whether national or international. In short, the State must be strong enough to protect the security of a well-heeled minority but too weak to promote and protect the common good, particularly the good of the majorities. And if it isn’t, it needs to be put in its place so it can get back to meeting the expectations of those who created it.

Those who in fact created the Guatemalan State were the coffee growers of the 1870 Liberal reform, who also made the second most important agrarian reform of independent-republic history, obviously in their own favor, by expropriating many communal and indigenous common lands. They did it the same way the conquistadores-encomenderos—those who received colonial land grants for their conquests—did it before them: expropriating native peoples’ land.

The two social classes that have made up Guatemala’s Liberal and Conservative oligarchy took great interest in writing Guatemala’s history from the outset, whether or not it was included in the history of New Spain. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier under conquistador Captain Hernán Cortés, is believed to have been the author of the first-person narrative “Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España” (The Truthful History of the Conquest of New Spain). According to Guatemalan anthropologist Marta Casaús, the Castillo family, which founded the Guatemalan beer industry at the end of the 19th century, can trace its genealogical tree back to Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

We shouldn’t forget that the first fiscal reform, the State effort that dates back to 1985, the time of the current Constitution, was designed by the industrialist—and from that perspective visionary—Rodolfo Páiz Andrade, finance minister during the government of President Vinicio Cerezo, the first civilian government following years of military rule. His millionaire colleagues’ opposition was utterly intransigent, to the point that they attempted to frustrate the transition from de facto military rule to civilian rule through a coup d’état. Journalist Mario David García, who also led the charge against President Colom by publicizing lawyer Rosenberg’s accusation against him some years later, can speak volumes about that coup attempt, which, ever faithful to his conspiratorial vocation, he supported through his radio program.

There are still radio, newspaper, television and digital news blog journalists who speak like García in spirit, if not exactly in form. One of these is Pedro Trujillo.

Let him who is free of ideology…

Trujillo and I crossed paths five years ago in a debate at the United Nations Development Programme on formal or procedural democracy vs. participatory democracy organized by Guatemalan sociologist Edelberto Torres Rivas, in which Torres Rivas and I were the presenters. I won’t easily forget the dogmatic harshness with which Pedro Trujillo referred to my lukewarm appraisal of what can be called Guatemala’s formal “liturgy” of elections every four years thanks to the minimal advance in participatory democracy during the inter-electoral periods of government. Hernández Pico’s analyses, said Trujillo, ooze ideology.

As if a person’s ideology—a leftist one in this case, he insinuated—undercuts the intrinsic value of that person’s political analysis. And as if his own ideology—a rightist one from his chair in the Francisco Marroquín University—indisputably marks him as an analyst beyond any suspicion. I should have responded to him; Let him who is free of ideology cast the first stone.

Today Pedro Trujillo, sometimes in conjunction with other signatures of the same ideological roots, is dedicated to producing television reports that try to stigmatize as terrorists and communists the members of various indigenous organizations, among them the Mechanism of the OxlajujTz’ikin Indigenous Peoples, for promoting the basic rights of populations where an attempt is being made to build a hydroelectric plant or where the government is granting concessions to explore or exploit mineral veins. In Convention 169 of the UN’s International Labor Organization, signed by Guatemala during the presidency of Álvaro Arzú, these rights include requiring that the populations living where the affected water flows or mineral veins are found be consulted prior to permitting the initiation of such works.

They don’t debate, they attack

These ideologically totalitarian and false attacks go back to the ”incident” in which six indigenous peasants were killed and several seriously wounded by soldiers on a security mission to back up the Police (see Ricardo Falla’s article “Totonicapán: The story of the first massacre since the peace” in the November 2012 issue of envío).

Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj has published several articles in El Periódico clearly showing how Trujillo’s reports intentionally deform OxlajujTz’ikin’s project proposals. She points out that serious investigative reporting is one thing while twisting project outlines that still haven’t been fully defined by that indigenous organization’s board as if they were definitive in all their details is totally unacceptable. The particular malignity behind this deformation is to relate the projects—which may be financed by the Swedish government—with the Totonicapán massacre and portray the deaths as voluntary manslaughter by “other terrorist indigenous leaders” and the victims as cannon fodder or scapegoats.

Attacking rather than debating is the profession of such journalists. And the ideologues of private enterprise—wasn’t the Francisco Marroquín University founded by private enterprise?—also do nothing but attack. Journalism’s role is to inform, offer perspectives, debate and reason with adversaries or with those who simply have another way of seeing things. It should never see those adversaries as enemies, because the essence of free expression is precisely the expression of diverse opinions in a society that aspires to be free.

Rightwing totalitarianism

Journalists of the cut of Pedro Trujillo, Armando de la Torre and others know perfectly well that the different media forms in Guatemala are increasingly oligopolized by writers, anchor people and commentators of their same line of thinking. There is one apparently drastic way of affecting freedom of expression: let the journalist know that there’s no longer any space in a given medium. But there’s also another more delicate and subtle way to restrict freedom of expression: preferentially assign opinion columns to spokespeople for a single ideology, while parading a few dissidents from the media line as proof of the media’s openness to all kinds of opinions.

What’s behind all this? It would seem, simply, to be rightwing neo-totalitarianism. Lawyer Antonio Arenales Forno of the Arenales family—of rank political lineage and a nest of State functionaries—is a declared adversary of the Peace Accords, but was chosen by President Pérez Molina as Secretary of Peace. Arenales promptly restricted all access to the Peace Archives and set himself up as the State’s defense lawyer before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHPR) in cases of flagrant human rights violations defined in the Law of Reconciliation as crimes against humanity, which cannot be prescribed or amnestied.

We need to recall that Arenales Forno wrote and signed the Peace Accord on respect for human rights, which establishes that the State must act firmly against impunity and that the government will not adopt legislative or any other measures aimed at impeding the trial and sanctioning of those responsible for human rights violations. Twisting the meaning of his actions, he now refutes what he then signed.

On December 22 of last year, the sentence in the “Military Diary” case submitted to the IACHPR five years earlier was communicated to the Myrna Mack Foundation. After evidence was found in what is called a Military Diary leaked in 1999, the foundation had counseled 27 petitioners, many of them family members of victims of forced disappearances between 1983 and 1985 during the government’s most violent years of military repression, to sue the State of Guatemala. The Court found the Guatemalan State guilty not only in those cases, but also those filed for the Río Negro massacres of 1980-1982 and the 1984 forced disappearance of union and student activist Fernanco García. The Court demanded that the government pay reparations to the victim’s relatives, conduct full investigations and punish those found guilty of the crimes, among other things.

With that, the Guatemalan Congress passed Presidential Resolution 370-20/12, presumably authored by Arenales Forno, stating that it only recognized the Court’s right to hear Guatemalan cases arising after 1987, the year Guatemala recognized the Court’s jurisdiction. Arenales Forno is convinced he’s never wrong; he’s a member of that species of Conservatives that, wearing their Catholicism on their sleeve, act as if they too are infallible. Such rightwing ideologies and their politicians have spent 191 long years aspiring to exercise that infallibility in Guatemala’s daily political life. Isn’t that precisely a totalitarian aspiration? Surely such impenitent aspiration is contrary to the faith in democracy they profess to defend.

Encouraging the call for militarism

The basic problem hovering over Guatemala now is that the presidential victory of retired General Otto Pérez Molina has again fed the call for militarism in the country. Pérez Molina is the first military officer (“once a soldier, always a soldier”) elected in Guatemala since 1985, 27 years after a period of our history we thought had been returned to civilian rule under the aegis of democracy.

Legally he had the right to be elected, as he was no longer formally under Army discipline. The problem isn’t one of constitutional law. It’s one of civil desperation, fundamentally among the oligarchy, big business and the middle class, but also a good part of both the urban and rural grassroots sectors. They are desperate about the violence, which isn’t yet uncontrollable, but is certainly getting there. The problem is also a cultural one of military messianism.

And there’s yet another problem: electoral formalism. The candidate who loses in one election wins in the next. That has been the case since 1990, with the exception of President Ramiro de León Carpio, elected by Congress to finish the term of President Serrano, kicked out after his failed self-coup. Presidents Arzú, Portillo, Berger, Colom, Pérez and now Molina have all been elected after losing to their predecessor in the previous elections. On top of this, the 1992 constitutional reform cut the presidential terms from five to four years, making it even more difficult to govern effectively.

The symbolism of a government headed by a general, however retired he may be, is very strong. The current minister of government, Mauricio López Bonilla, is also a retired officer who reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, then studied political science after his retirement. Ricardo Bustamante, who heads the President’s Security Advisory Council, is another retired general, a great “intelligence” expert who never got his dream of being minister of defense. And more than a few of the civilian officials in Pérez Molina’s Cabinet are more militaristic than the officers, especially Arenales and Pérez Molina’s own Vice President, Roxana Baldetti.

Between the center-Right and
the extreme radical Right

It is said among political analysts that four rightwingers in this panorama are actually looking to the center: Pérez Molina himself; López Bonilla, his minister of government; Finance Minister Pavel Centeno; and economist Fernando Carrera, his new foreign minister, who was previously the secretary general of planning. Carrera has succeeded Elim Church pastor Harold Caballeros, who went down due to his ineffectiveness during his first year in government and this unfortunate comment on the Totonicapán massacre: “I painfully recognize that there are places where eight deaths is a big deal… Although it sounds bad to say it, we have double that number of deaths every day. So it’s not exactly a big attention-getter.”

It therefore falls to Vice President Baldetti, Arenales Forno and the president of the Security Advisory Council, Ricardo Bustamante, to head up the government’s extreme rightwing militarist current. And they can count on journalists like Trujillo, De la Torre and many others to put themselves at the service of this current purely out of their own radical right extremist conviction.

The extreme Right’s targets

This current’s preferred target is Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, appointed by former President Álvaro Colom and continually accused in the media of being an “extreme leftist.” It’s rumored that the US Embassy strongly leaned on Pérez Molina not to to replace her.

Another target is the director of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), Costa Rican UN official Francisco Dall’Anese, who clearly and repeatedly backed the effort to keep the attorney general in her post. The radical Right has raised the nationalist banner against him, claiming foreign interference. They lack the honesty to recognize that they don’t consider foreign interference invalid when it favors their own interests.

Yet other targets include the fiscal reform; the rural development bill promoted by the Agrarian Platform, of which the Institute for the Advance of Social Science Research (AVANCSO) is a part; and the cellular telephony bill. Private enterprise has come out against all of them with enormous virulence.

From his public statements, it would seem that President Pérez Molina supports the Rural Development Law, which after more than 16 years would lay some groundwork for compliance with one of the most ambitious peace agreements. Some analysts think his public words are just to tone down the discontent of the peasant movements and that he has actually already assured private enterprise that the law won’t get a majority in the Congress.

Not just with words

The battle isn’t just being waged in efforts at public disparagement in and by the media against center or leftist institutions. It has already translated into violent attacks. On January 17 AVANCSO’s offices were broken into, following a sophisticated attempt to drug the guard with tampered food.

The break-in was a skillful operation resulting in the theft of most of the computers and other information-storing instruments. The AVANCSO offices are just two blocks from the Presidential offices, in the most thorough surveillance circle in the country. A month and a half after the event, the efforts of the Minister of Government and the Attorney General of the Republic have turned up very little.

On February 17, exactly one month after the burglary, another attempt was made to break into the same offices. This time the National Police responded rapidly after receiving the call from the new guard. It is a clear intimidation attempt. AVANCSO has received solidarity from many research institutions and study centers and has courageously continued its work.

The Myrna Mack Foundation had its web page hacked at the beginning of the year and the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) has also been subjected to verbal attacks. The message appears to be that if you don’t “behave yourself” you’ll be the next target.

“Security” in the
“Criollo homeland”

We can’t fool ourselves. Militarily conceived state security and the conception of those who dissent as “enemies” was “the source of all other violence”—the State’s violence against its own citizenry—during the most dramatic years of our history. The inability to conceive of Guatemala any other way than as the “Criollo homeland” is the source of that violence, because all demands by the citizenry that human rights be respected in the country are immediately translated into the language of the big landowners: “What they really want is land, and the land is ours.” That mentality of these powerful landed criollos—the term for a Spanish American of pure European (usually Spanish) stock—is still in effect today, not only in agro-industrial private enterprise, but also in its large private financial, industrial and commercial counterparts.

The terrible thing is that this same mentality reigns in mining companies and large hydroelectric companies: the land belongs to the huge multinational corporations. In other words, it’s also in force in the globalization homeland. It’s not a question of “monkey see, monkey do” as they say here. It’s the very creed of the globalizers, savage capitalists led by finance capital. Like the criollos in Guatemala, they are a small but hugely powerful global minority.

In the United States, for example, the truly wealthy make up only 0.01% of the population. They are represented today by the Republican Party, which has nothing to do with the thinking of Lincoln, or even of the Republicans prior to Ronald Reagan’s first term in 1980. Today they are struggling vigorously and unscrupulously to open Alaska and the North Pole to oil exploration and exploitation, denying any scientific validity to the effects of climate change.

Cayalá: An aseptic city

Guatemala’s already globalized capitalists aren’t as “Neolithic.” They belong to a species of capitalism that believes dominion of the land is for “the chosen” and would never put themselves in the shoes of the poor. Could they tolerate for their children the living conditions that exist in such impoverished areas as Incienso or Puente de Belize?

The desperation the wealthy feel regarding the widespread violence in the country leads them to spend inconceivable amounts on security. The best symbol of their concern with their own safety and indifference toward those who have
no protection against the violence they themselves have spawned is the building of Cayalá, a city within a city not very far from the worst, poorest and most violent settlements. It’s an aseptic city, with closed circuit televised surveillance and watchtowers, a whitewashed city that’s a modernized version of the old Guatemalan criollo city of Antigua. It’s a city for the minority, on the little land that remained to be used in Asunción Valley, expropriated for what is constitutionally called a “social urgency.”

Who is “the social conglomerate”?

On January 3, Armando de la Torre wrote in his new column in El Periódico: “From the tyranny of judges we have moved to one of Presidents with bills and parliamentary legislators. The latter are still more corrupt and ignorant of the consequences of the system. The worst thing is the evaporation of the general and abstract laws that govern all fair conduct. In their place casuistic, privileging and unjust regulations have multiplied, all at the service of particular spurious interests that, on top of it all, are economically very ruinous for the ‘social conglomerate.’”

Should we understand the “social conglomerate” to be those who are authentically privileged, both by the “abstract laws” and the “casuistic” ones, those millionaires who make up perhaps 1% of Guatemala’s population?

Several years ago I had the privilege of debating the issue of neoliberalism in Guatemala’s Landívar University in a forum accompanied by Gert Rosenthal and Armando de la Torre. De la Torre found no better argument than to use irony to try to annul the effect in the auditorium of the mention of Guatemala’s tax burden, which at that moment wasn’t even 9% of the GDP: “A Jesuit priest,” he said, “whose institutions are tax free, is coming to give us lessons about tax burdens.” It was evident that ad hominem arguments are hauled out to try to destroy the adversary, who is viewed as the enemy, rather than to buttress the solidity of one’s own arguments.

A logical leap and
a bold conclusion

It is noteworthy that, according to his text, it‘s the inexistence of what De la Torre calls ”abstract” laws that led to “the reigning criminal impunity.”

It’s an impressive logical leap, and even more so when one hears that the positivism of Augusto Comte is to blame for that casuisticness that is corroding the legal edifice of the “Ibero-American” countries. In exchange, the “empire of the law” in
the Anglo-Saxon ones is supposedly the reason for the wellbeing of the “social conglomerate.” Hasn’t De la Torre ever heard that it was in the very streets of Los Angeles that Guatemala’s mara members learned how to organize into gangs?

Nonetheless, he ends his text with this bold conclusion: “And should we still wonder the reason for this underdevelopment of ‘students’ who refuse to study, ‘police’ who refuse to defend the public order, narcs with no hobbles on their stealing and murdering, inept and lazy bureaucrats, arrogant and mendacious politicians, just like the union leaders or social agitators from their university classrooms determined to chain us in their obsolete and useless recipes?” And he ends paraphrasing Mark Twain: “’It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure’ but that has nonetheless been superseded by experience.”

The world would be less unjust

The world would be unquestionably less unjust if, in the midst of such a globally brutal crisis as the current one of capitalist globalization captained by the huge financial companies, some philosophers of economics, partisans of the most radical neoliberalism of Von Hayek, Von Misses and their disciples in Guatemala would speak just once about the real dictatorship of the market rather than the abstract laws theorized by Adam Smith for a perfectly and equitably informed and perfectly and equitably competitive market.

It would also be less unjust if, based on their Christian tradition, at least some of them would talk about the abstract law of social justice, which in the gospel is concretized in giving food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, welcome to the homeless, clothes to the naked and visits to the sick and imprisoned. That is the law that would open their eyes to structural misfortune and their heart to solidarity.

Juan Hernández Pico, sj, is the envío correspondent in Guatemala.

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