Election Monitoring in Guatemala

This post was written by the Rev. Carlton Elliott Smith, assistant minister at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Mass. Rev. Smith is on a JustJourney Election Observance Delegation with UUSC in Guatemala.

November 1, 2007
9:00 p.m.

We are at the end of our first day here at Hotel Los Pasos in the city of Antigua, once the colonial capital of Central America. We have 21 in our delegation, and are a combination of UUSC staff members, lay leaders, ministers, students, and one congressional staff member. After breakfast, Dr. Charlie Clements, UUSC’s president and CEO, gave highlights of the history of UUSC, going back to a few years before WWII and the work of Rev. Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha, who were instrumental in helping more than 2,000 people escape interment and extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

In the early afternoon, our presenter, Miguel Angel Albizures, spoke to us about his experience as a journalist, union organizer, and activist working on behalf of families of the displaced and the disappeared. He was in exile himself for at time, and took on leadership of one of the unions in the 1980s, when assuming such a position was to invite assassination.

Miguel Angel provided background for our understanding of the difficult choices facing the Guatemalans as they elect their next president -- both of the remaining candidates are allied with the military and/or the big businesses that have dominated the government and corrupted the possibility of democracy here for decades. He also acknowledged that Guatemala’s Left has not provided the voting public with a strong alternative to the run-off contenders. At the same time, he affirmed the importance of our presence and that of other international organizations that are deterring greater violence and fraud around the election process.

Late in the afternoon, we had a guided tour of Antigua, including many of its beautiful ruins – the Cathedral, the Franciscan Monastery, the pilas (a kind of ancient, open-air laundromat). We also passed through the town’s Central Park, which was teeming with people enjoying the national holiday of All Saints.

We walked across town to the general cemetery, where graves and family sepulchers were decorated with abundant varieties of flowers, wreaths, and greenery, as people honored their dead by renewing their final resting places. There were thousands of people and many vendors at the entrance to the cemetery, and many people inside, walking in, out, and around. Part of our contingent even had a close encounter with General Otto Perez Molina, one of the two run-off candidates, who caused quite a stir when he showed up to pay his respect at his father’s grave.

We gathered in the hotel’s “chapel” (the building was once a convent, like many of the hotels, homes, and ruins here), where we viewed an edited version of the documentary Discovering Dominga, the devastating story of a young Maya-Quiche’ woman who escaped at age 11 from the 1982 massacre of her village in Rabinal, the town where we will do our election observance this weekend. She ended up in the United States with a family and eventually returned to Guatemala to reconnect with aunts, uncles, and cousins she left behind: both her parents were slain, her mother among the 70 women and 107 children who were systematically led up a hill and shot. This important film was partially funded by UUSC and is a must-see for anyone seeking to understand the injustice visited upon the Maya.

Gracias a todos for your thoughts and prayers for our safety and health.