In October 2023, the political rise of the indigenous peoples led by their ancestral authorities occurred. Every day they displayed massive expressions of peaceful protest in all territories – including Guatemala City – against the determined intention of the Corrupt Pact to conceal the electoral results using the attorney general’s office and the judicial courts.
The defense of democracy is the flag that unites these historically excluded peoples. Without the mobilizations, which have continued in the first days of November, the fragile democracy would be buried in this Central American country. President-elect Bernardo Arévalo and his young party, Movimiento Semilla, would have been easy prey for the perverse alliance of corrupt politicians, bureaucratic elites, rapacious oligarchs and violent organized crime networks.
Ancestral authorities constitute pre-state forms of organization that have survived extermination strategies, such as massacres since the 16th century and acts of genocide in the 1980s, which began to be tried in Guatemalan courts just ten years ago; Other tactics have been subtle, such as constant operations of co-optation and clientelism, internal division and invisibility. There are more than 20,000 bearers of the rod of authority—one in three is a woman—, trained as children and who, as adults, are designated by community consensus to provide temporary services, supported by another logic of family remuneration. They do not constitute closed worlds or anchored in the past. The forced migrations of recent decades have pollinated their cultures, forging the most cosmopolitan generations. Learning from their ways of coexistence, it is not difficult to conclude that there would be no idea more undemocratic than thinking about a single model of democracy.
In the eyes of the non-indigenous society of Guatemala—and of the world—this October, a political subject as ancient and enigmatic as its hills and mountains acquired a multiple body and diverse voice, invested with conclusive legitimacy for its peaceful methods and its claim incontestable respect for civil liberties, even though they were not invited to write those laws. The high political and judicial officials, always reluctant to receive and listen to them, do not get out of their confusion. The most influential businessmen have agreed to sit at the table with them—with international facilitation—and after weeks they continue to decipher their arguments, even though they were expressed in Spanish with logic as basic as it is overwhelming.
For the future Arévalo Government, if indigenous peoples did not occupy a central place in its program, it is clear that without them and their leaders governance is unthinkable. In fact, he already formed a table that produced a basic agreement for the defense of democracy in which for the first time in history the emblems of the moderate employers’ chambers, of indigenous mayors’ offices and of the new president appear in the same text.
But the obscurantist forces are not defeated. They continue to control the handles of the three powers of the State and are nourished from the shadows by countless pockets of money resulting from corruption, organized crime activities and economic privileges, which translate into the capacity for bribery, disinformation and hiring of shock units, as was seen during the blockades, particularly on drug trafficking routes. They crouch and at every opportunity they find they swing their paws. Last Thursday the 2nd, they provisionally suspended the status of the Semilla party. Days before, Congress ruled on a public budget for 2024, which must be approved before the end of November, which constitutes a true poisoned gift for Arévalo and his future cabinet. The purpose is to paralyze investment in essential services from the first year to fuel social discontent.
The United States has multiplied individual warnings and sanctions. It has revoked visas of officials and businessmen, and their families. Most names are not published. They find out when, as just happened to the president of Congress, they are prevented from entering the United States, or when their relatives receive an email asking them to leave the country. Thus, pressured by the indigenous peoples and the international community, they seem like a cornered beast.
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