A Guatemala voter picks up ballots for the Nov. 9 election at the polling place in Rabinal in the province of Baja Verapaz. (Cindy Karp/UUSC photo)

Guatemala election: Ex-dictator
loses in bid to return to power

In an election closely watched by human rights observers, Guatemala voters rejected the candidacy of former military dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in his effort to return to power as president.  Ríos Montt finished third in the presidential balloting, leaving him out of the running in the Dec. 28 runoff election between the top two finishers. The runoff is required since no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote. 
 

The winner in the Sunday, Nov. 9 election was Oscar Berger, a former mayor of Guatemala City and businessman with strong ties to Guatemala's economic elite.  Finishing second was Alvaro Colom, an engineer from a prominent Guatemalan political family.
 

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee led a delegation to monitor and observe the presidential election in Guatemala. The group included UUSC President Charlie Clements, Service Committee members, a photographer, a congressional aide, and Allison Kent, a UUSC program associate.
 

 Prior to the election monitoring delegation, Ms. Kent spent two weeks in September in Guatemala where she met with UUSC partners and other human rights activists and political analysts. She returned with several accounts of the hopes and fears of indigenous Guatemalans as the presidential election drew near, including the story of Eulogia López recounted here.
 

Threats, memories of massacres, cloud
hopes for free elections in Guatemala

 In October 2003, UUSC Program Associate Allison Kent traveled throughout Guatemala for two weeks to meet with UUSC program partners and other activists to assess the political and human rights situations in the country. She found that prior to the November 9 presidential elections in Guatemala, the country, already reeling from rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions, was growing even more tense.

 Substantiated reports of vote-buying and intimidation were common in rural areas.  In one town, Ms. Kent was told that political operatives were telling the indigenous people there that their vote would not be secret because there would be tiny video cameras on the ceilings, recording people's votes. Others heard that, like in past elections, thousands of dead people would mysteriously vote for the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), the ruling party with deep military roots.

 Chemical fertilizers were being passed out for free in rural areas of Quetzaltenango and Quiche by the FRG to those who promised to vote for the party. Teachers were told in Baja Verapaz that if they did not participate in FRG political rallies, their contracts would not be renewed. 

 The complaints of violations of Guatemala's electoral laws were coming in every day to the country's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office in Guatemala City and to the four civil society groups that united as a national election monitoring unit. People were frightened, and especially in the rural areas confidence was very low that these elections would be free, fair and participatory.

 Hoping for a long sought peace

 Although the 36-year civil war ended with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, peace has been elusive. An estimated 200,000 people (primarily indigenous) were killed during the civil war. Efraín Ríos Montt, who was military dictator during some of the worst years of the violence in the early 1980s, is currently president of Congress, the head of the FRG, and was their candidate for President in the November 9 election after a disputed court decision allowed him to run.  Accusations of genocide by UUSC partners, survivors of the massacres of their family members and neighbors, played a role in his third place finish in the presidential elections.

 As the Peace Accords have never been fully implemented in Guatemala, the balance of power has never shifted away from the military and the ruling elite. Over the last year, political violence, military and paramilitary remobilization, threats against human rights defenders, and a steadily weakening judicial system have all worsened the situation significantly.

 Guatemala is now, as Ms. Kent learned on her fact-finding trip to Guatemala, undergoing its worst period of human rights abuses since the civil war ended. On July 24-25, General Ríos Montt and the FRG allegedly orchestrated two days of violent riots of thousands of people in the capital, effectively crippling the city in a show of force and organization meant to intimidate the population with the then upcoming election.  In some areas, the strategy worked.

 Given the full support of the military apparatus and much of the ex-paramilitaries behind General Ríos Montt's bid for president, the final results of the presidential election do not promise an immediate end to violence and a cessation of oppression against the indigenous people. 

Eulogia López, a massacre survivor's story