Tag: Guatemala

Indigenous survivors pursue justice at genocide trial in Guatemala | Crimes Against Humanity News

Warning: This article contains details of violence that may be upsetting.

Guatemala City, Guatemala – Jesus Tecu remembers wrapping his little brother in his arms in an attempt to protect the two-year-old from the horrors unfolding around them.

It was March 13, 1982, and their village of Rio Negro — a Maya Achi community situated along a river in central Guatemala — was under attack. Guatemala was in the midst of a grisly civil war, and army and paramilitary forces had been stalking the countryside, razing Indigenous villages to the ground.

Already, Tecu’s parents had been among the dozens of Rio Negro residents slaughtered just one month prior in another village. But now soldiers and paramilitary patrolmen were in the town, and 10-year-old Tecu hoped to shield his brother from the killings and rapes they were witnessing.

A patrolman decided to take Tecu to be his household servant, but he did not want to bring home a toddler too. Ignoring Tecu’s desperate pleas, the patrolman grabbed the two-year-old from his arms, smashed him against rocks and threw his body into a ravine.

An estimated 107 children and 70 women died in Rio Negro that day. Tecu and 16 other children survived only because they were chosen to be servants.

Now, Tecu hopes a criminal case in Guatemala can offer a shred of accountability for atrocities thousands of Indigenous people experienced during that period.

“We have never stopped seeking justice,” said Tecu, who has spent the last 30 years as a human rights activist and advocate for community rebuilding.

On Friday, Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia, the former head of Guatemala’s army, is slated to stand trial for genocide. It is the latest chapter in the country’s fitful, stop-and-start efforts to achieve justice for the systematic killing of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples.

An estimated 200,000 people were killed during the war, which stretched from 1960 to 1996. More than 80 percent were Indigenous Maya.

A United Nations-backed truth commission found that the military committed acts of genocide against five of the country’s 22 different Maya peoples between 1981 and 1983. That period overlaps with Lucas Garcia’s tenure as the chief of the general staff of the army.

For seven months between 1981 and 1982, Lucas Garcia helmed Guatemala’s forces, as part of the administration of President Romeo Lucas Garcia, his brother. He now stands accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, forced disappearances and sexual violence.

But Tecu points out that time is running out for survivors to find justice. Decades have passed since the war’s end. Alleged perpetrators like Lucas Garcia, 91, are growing old — and in many cases, dying.

“The importance of this case is that there is an intellectual author alive,” Tecu told Al Jazeera. “He needs to be held accountable for what happened with the deaths of so many children, women and men.”

Benedicto Lucas Garcia, second from right, walks with a fellow military leader, Manuel Callejas, on their way to court in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on November 25, 2019 [Moises Castillo/AP Photo]

Delay tactics

Lucas Garcia, however, has denied wrongdoing. Rather, in a live video feed on March 25, he told Guatemala’s High Risk Court A, “I am a national hero”, though he later clarified he meant it in reference to accomplishments unrelated to the armed conflict.

The March 25 hearing came after a year of postponements. Expecting the trial to start, genocide survivors had gathered outside the courthouse in Guatemala City to hold a ceremony in support of the proceedings.

But one of Lucas Garcia’s two lawyers had announced her resignation just days ahead of the hearing, and then the other quit too — something critics believe was a tactic to further delay the trial.

Ultimately, Lucas Garcia accepted to use a public defender and was permitted to continue to attend hearings by video conference while recovering from surgery. The trial’s start date was rescheduled for April 5, to give the new lawyer time to prepare.

“We know these are all manoeuvres and strategies that Benedicto Lucas Garcia is using,” said Diego Ceto, a Maya Ixil leader providing support for witnesses and survivors during the trial.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on the courthouse steps right after the postponement, Ceto explained that other defendants have likewise used stalling techniques to evade justice.

After all, one of Lucas Garcia’s co-defendants — a former head of military operations — died in 2020. And in January, another — a former head of military intelligence — was found mentally unfit to stand trial and will face separate proceedings.

“They look for any justification to avoid the start of the trial,” Ceto said. “Nevertheless, as Ixils we will continue to insist on the pursuit of the truth.”

Women kneel for a ceremony outside of a courtbuilding in Guatemala City. A ring of flowers sits in front of them.
Maya Ixil women take part in a ceremony outside the Guatemala City court complex on March 25, before the genocide trial of Benedicto Lucas Garcia was postponed to April 5 [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]

From the Ixil region and beyond

The area Ceto is from is at the heart of the ongoing case. Prosecutors are focusing on crimes allegedly committed in the Maya Ixil region, 225km (140 miles) northwest of the capital.

More than 30 massacres were carried out under Lucas Garcia’s command and at least 23 Ixil villages were completely destroyed, the plaintiffs’ lawyers have said. The prosecution plans to present more than 80 experts and 150 witnesses as part of the trial.

Evidence also includes forensic reports from exhumations and military documents lawyers say will help establish the genocidal intent behind the crimes.

Atrocities in the Maya Ixil region also formed the centrepiece of another historic trial: that of the late military ruler Efrain Rios Montt, who took power from Romeo Lucas Garcia in a military coup.

In 2013, Guatemala made history when a court convicted Rios Montt of genocide. But the verdict was overturned soon after in a widely-questioned ruling, illustrating the difficulties of prosecuting such a case.

Rios Montt died before a partial retrial could end in 2018. On September 27 of that year, a tribunal ruled the military did commit genocide, but no one was convicted.

Advocates, however, emphasise that the atrocities perpetuated by Rios Montt and others extended beyond the Mayan Ixil people, also targeting other Indigenous peoples, unions, clergy, student movements and other groups.

For example, in a separate case from 2018, Lucas Garcia was convicted of rape, forced disappearance, and crimes against humanity for actions taken against an activist and her family. He was sentenced to 58 years in prison.

In June 2023, however, an appeals court ordered Lucas Garcia’s release, along with that of his co-defendants. However, he remained in custody due to a pretrial detention order in the genocide case.

In another case that has yet to go to trial, Lucas Garcia is one of several former officials accused of crimes in connection with more than 550 human remains exhumed from mass graves on a military base.

“Right now we are on the Ixil case, but the destruction was not just in the Ixil area,” said Eleodoro Osorio, a representative of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), an organisation of survivors and relatives from five of the hardest-hit Indigenous regions.

More than 200,000 people, most of them Indigenous Maya civilians, were killed during the armed conflict in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996 [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]

Power of grassroots movements

Osorio’s group formed in 2000. That same year, it filed a formal legal complaint against Romeo Lucas Garcia for genocide, followed by one against Rios Montt the following year. Those legal actions eventually led to the prosecutions of Rios Montt and Benedicto Lucas Garcia, the army leader currently facing charges.

AJR has joint plaintiff status in Lucas Garcia’s trial, allowing its own legal team to intervene on behalf of victims alongside the prosecution.

The group’s participation improves the outlook for a successful conviction, according to Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco.

She pointed out that grassroots movements can help exert pressure on Guatemala’s legal system, which has seen the erosion of judicial and prosecutorial independence in recent years.

“In the trials that we’ve seen in Latin America, that has been the case. It’s been the lawyers for the victims that have basically carried the lion’s share of the actual work,” said Roht-Arriaza, who was a legal adviser in a similar case brought against Rios Montt in Spain.

She sees the pursuit of justice in Guatemala as part of a broader regional phenomenon.

“I think Latin America has been the leader in holding national trials around massive violations of human rights. So it’s not just Guatemala. It’s also Argentina and Chile, Colombia, [and] to some extent Peru,” she told Al Jazeera.

The bulk of genocide prosecutions have been in international courts, not domestic ones, according to Mark Berlin, a political science professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin whose research focuses on accountability for human rights violations and war crimes.

He explained that “atrocity crimes” — including genocide and crimes against humanity — are usually committed by state actors, and states are unlikely to prosecute themselves.

So when a country does prosecute genocide within its own borders, it is often the result of shifting power dynamics in the government itself.

“It’s usually when a group that was previously targeted is able to come to power and use that power to then target for prosecution those who were previously in power,” Berlin told Al Jazeera, pointing to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide as an example of that dynamic.

The situation in Guatemala was different, though, he said. “Given that those conditions do not exist in Guatemala, the odds were stacked against the possibility for Guatemala to be able to carry out genocide prosecutions.”

Still, Berlin said other factors, including foreign assistance and forensic work, helped enable the genocide prosecutions to move forward.

“Guatemala did have kind of a perfect storm of other kinds of factors that did make it able to carry out these prosecutions,” he said.

“One was — or continues to be — the existence of a very active and well-organised social movement, a very tenacious and persistent social movement that has been calling for accountability for decades.”

Grassroots movements are credited with driving legal campaigns to prosecute the civilian deaths and forced disappearances during the decades-long Guatemalan civil war [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]

Half the battle

But now that Lucas Garcia is about to be brought to trial, efforts to secure a conviction present new hurdles.

Prosecuting genocide is considered more complex than it is for other human rights violations and crimes against humanity, due to legal elements set out in the 1948 Genocide Convention and incorporated into Guatemala’s criminal code in 1973.

“You have to demonstrate that the actor or the accused had the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group of people,” said Geoff Dancy, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

“That is very difficult to demonstrate and has only been successfully demonstrated in a few cases, really.”

There have been about 105 trials involving genocide charges in 15 countries around the world, according to Dancy, who is a principal investigator in a research project compiling and analysing global data on transitional justice mechanisms, including human rights prosecutions.

But even if prosecutors are not successful in convicting figures like Lucas Garcia of genocide, Dancy said the trials can still be useful tools for justice.

He pointed out that even though leaders like Guatemala’s Rios Montt, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet died while prosecution efforts were still under way, the cases were still incredibly important, helping to unearth injustices and put them into the public record.

Ultimately, Dancy said, it is “really important to get these things on the map and have the evidence produced and considered by a court”.

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As Arevalo inauguration approaches, Guatemalans express cautious optimism | Elections News

Guatemala City, Guatemala – Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arevalo is poised to assume office on Sunday, following his landslide victory in the 2023 presidential elections.

But Arevalo’s impending inauguration has been overshadowed by a string of recent legal attacks against him and his party — widely interpreted as attempts to overturn the vote.

Now, as he prepares to be sworn in, analysts question how much the uncertainty of the past months has weakened Guatemala’s fragile democracy and shaken public confidence.

Arevalo, an anticorruption candidate, first catapulted into the international spotlight with a surprise second-place finish in the June general elections.

Those results assured the dark-horse candidate of a spot in the run-off election — and placed a target on his back. Guatemala has long struggled with corruption in its government, and several leading candidates had already been disqualified.

Beginning in July, prosecutors under Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras sought to suspend the legal status of Arevalo’s party, the Seed Movement, citing alleged irregularities with the years-old signatures used to form the party.

Prosecutors also pursued court orders to raid the party’s headquarters, as well as the offices of Guatemala’s election authority. In the process, boxes with sealed ballots were opened, spurring concerns of election interference.

Arevalo nevertheless delivered a commanding victory over his run-off opponent, former First Lady Sandra Torres, earning 60 percent of the vote.

But the legal actions against him continued. In November, prosecutors issued a request to strip Arevalo and his allies of their political immunity over their support for student protesters in 2022.

To date, Guatemala’s Supreme Court has not ruled on whether to lift Arevalo’s immunity, which would leave him potentially vulnerable to prosecution.

In December, prosecutors went so far as to openly question whether to annul the 2023 election results — despite assurances from the country’s election authority that the tally was “unalterable”.

All the while, the volley of legal attacks has ignited widespread outcry, both within Guatemala and from international observers. Indigenous leaders organised weeks of protest in the country, with some blocking highways and camping outside the attorney general’s office for 100 days.

The United States and European Union, meanwhile, have both imposed sanctions on officials accused of undermining the 2023 election.

But Arevalo has proceeded with his plans to take office on Sunday, announcing a largely traditional slate of cabinet picks on January 8.

In the week ahead of his inauguration, Al Jazeera spoke to residents in Guatemala City about the attacks on the country’s democratic process — and whether they are optimistic for change under the new administration.

Luis Mendez Salinas, right, and Carmen Lucia Alvarado expressed hope for the Arevalo administration [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Luis Mendez Salinas, 37, author and co-owner of the publisher Catafixia from Guatemala City

“It’s strange to say, but every [legal attack] that has been made from June 25 until today — and probably until January 14 — has filled me with optimism. Because every attempt that has been made by these corrupt political elites and political clients has failed.

“2023 was a historic year. It seems to me that the crisis generated by Arevalo’s victory, paradoxically, brings with it a possibility of redirecting Guatemala along the democratic path that was opened in 1985.

“Why? Because we were seeing a very noticeable deterioration of all institutions and an authoritarian regression.

“It seems to me that the fact that the population has surged in terms of voting for a candidate who was totally outside of that system is a great lesson in the possibility of hope.”

Carmen Lucia Alvarado, 38, author and co-owner of the publisher Catafixia from Quetzaltenango

“I hope that the population understands that we are not facing a miracle. We are facing the logical reaction of a society that collectively chose an option that can give us at least a path forward.

“I hope the new government achieves the minimum to return dignity [to the people].”

Jose Miguel Echeverria worried that highway blockades in support of President-elect Arevalo would negatively impact small businesses like his [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Jose Miguel Echeverria, 36, coffee roaster and small business owner from Guatemala City

Echeverria was hopeful Arevalo’s administration would follow through with its promises to improve Guatemala’s healthcare and roadway infrastructure, but he expressed frustration with the highway blockades that accompanied pro-democracy protests in recent months.

“The situation has been difficult and complex.

“The roadblocks in October really affected the country. We were afraid that, if they lasted longer than 15 days, we would have to lay off people.

“Sooner or later, these political conflicts will begin to affect small- and medium-sized businessmen and entrepreneurs. That is the most difficult issue, because we understand that the country’s situation is difficult. We also understand that there is horrible corruption that is taking advantage of our taxes. But on the other side, slowing [corruption] is sometimes complex, because no one knows where to start.

“The only job of the politicians — of the president, of Congress, those who are developing policies — is to meet the needs of the people.”

Elsira Rodriguez expressed frustration with the government of outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Elsira Rodriguez, 70, flower vendor from San Pedro Sacatepequez

“Everything [about the election crisis] has been bad for us. We do not have a government that supports us.

“We hope to God that Arevalo is also a responsible person, that he fulfils what he promised us, and that he fulfils [the promise to] provide for security.

“We truly hope that this new government will come to change everything.”

Romelia Jalal accused past Guatemalan governments of knowing how to ‘steal’ the things they want [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Romelia Jalal, 58, vendor of artisanal crafts from Tactic

Jalal said she is cautiously optimistic about Arevalo’s government. She credited the attacks on his campaign to establishment politicians refusing to accept defeat.

“People do not know how to lose. Maybe [Arevalo] has new purposes, new goals, something new for Guatemala, but we Guatemalans do not know how to lose.

“The governments [we have had] have not known how to govern, and it is known that they steal.

“It is a matter of waiting to see what the new laws there are, what the new president does. No one knows what is coming.

“Let’s hope that they [the members of the Arevalo administration] are going to be different. Hopefully, it will be something different, something new, which we have not seen before.”

Ice cream salesperson Milda Diego voiced disillusionment with all forms of government, saying ‘they don’t help’ [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Milda Diego, 28, ice cream vendor from Santa Eulalia

“It has been difficult. The current government has made life more difficult for us.

“Governments do not do anything. Right now, [we] are fighting for [our] lives. It’s just that the governments don’t help.”

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The price of passage: Migrants fear threat of extortion in Guatemala | Migration News

Tapachula, Mexico – Luis Alfredo Rodriguez held his young son’s hand as he walked along a busy street near Tapachula’s central plaza, asking for money from those passing by.

The 27-year-old Venezuelan migrant had just crossed into the Mexican border city hours earlier with seven of his relatives, including his wife and children.

But they arrived with no money, Rodriguez explained. Everything they had was lost to extortion as they travelled northward through neighbouring Guatemala.

“At every police checkpoint, the police officers demanded money,” Rodriguez told Al Jazeera, his forehead creased with worry as he kept an eye on his children. “It was a lot of money.”

Hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers like Rodriguez pass through Guatemala every year, as they make their way through Central America to the southern border of the United States.

But many are reporting that the country is one of several hotspots for extortion, as officials and security forces target travellers with pay-for-passage schemes.

A Venezuelan migrant holds up a sign asking for help in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on December 28 [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]

Al Jazeera interviewed 25 migrants in Guatemala City and Tapachula for this story, all of whom said they had been targeted for extortion while in Guatemala.

For Rodriguez, the experience dwindled his meagre savings to zero. He and his family passed five police checkpoints, and at each one, officials demanded extortion fees ranging from 30 to 150 quetzales — about $4 to $20 per bribe.

Rodriguez said the police threatened to turn his family over to immigration officials and expel them south to Honduras. “If you don’t pay, they say they will return you,” he explained.

He was one of several migrants and asylum seekers who described Guatemala as the most difficult country he crossed, calling it even more challenging than the Darien Gap, a notoriously perilous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.

“I think the route through Guatemala is harder, a more difficult experience to go through,” said Martina, a 30-year-old migrant from El Progreso, Honduras, who asked to use a pseudonym in her interview with Al Jazeera.

She reported being forced to pay 500 quetzales — about $65 — at a police checkpoint outside of the capital Guatemala City.

“They ask for money to be able to pass,” she explained. “Because if not, they can return you to Honduras. They instil fear in you so that you have to give them money.”

Migrants and asylum seekers report being targeted for extortion by officials as well as criminal gangs [File: Sandra Sebastian/Reuters]

Extortion schemes have long been an issue in Guatemala, according to Eduardo Woltke, a migrant rights defender in the office of the country’s Human Rights Ombudsman.

But Woltke told Al Jazeera that the problem has recently grown worse. He has received reports of officials abusing their positions not only to compel payments but also to coerce sexual acts.

Extortion “is a recurring complaint from people who are in transit through the country, regarding the police”, Woltke said. “But in recent months, we have heard more about this type of violence, including accusations as severe as assault and sexual assault.”

Meanwhile, the pool of prospective victims continues to grow. The United Nations estimates a record number of people migrated north through Central America in 2023, with at least 500,000 migrants and asylum seekers documented in the Darien Gap alone.

Some 22,000 were expelled from Guatemala between January and November, according to data from the country’s Immigration Institute.

The government has grappled for years with how to address extortion among the burgeoning population of migrants and asylum seekers.

Accusations became so widespread that, in November 2022, the then-secretary of Guatemala’s congressional migrant commission, Ligia Hernandez, held a meeting with officials to discuss the issue.

Some of the attendees, however, brushed aside questions of extortion as unfounded rumours. “There are no specific complaints,” police director Héctor Leonel Hernández Mendoza told the meeting, according to local media reports.

Members of Guatemala’s anti-extortion task force line up in the El Gallito neighbourhood of Guatemala City on February 22, 2013 [File: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters]

But Ligia Hernandez, who has since become president of the Regional Integration Commission — a congressional body tasked with addressing concerns stemming from regional trends — said she heard testimony suggesting there is a network of corruption that spans the country, targeting migration routes.

“Extortions occur from the moment migrants enter the country’s borders,” Hernandez said. “To date, there is no real policy from the [state] institutions to stop this abuse. There are no free reporting mechanisms for migrants or possibilities for immediate investigation.”

Nevertheless, 20 officers have been dismissed in 2023 alone for extorting migrants, according to Hernandez.

Jorge Aguilar, the spokesperson for Guatemala’s Ministry of the Interior, told Al Jazeera that the national civilian police has a zero-tolerance policy against extortion.

Any officer accused of extorting migrants will be investigated by the Inspector General of the Police and fired if found guilty, he added.

But Woltke, the migrant rights defender, said cases often stall due to the nature of the crime.

“[Migrants] want to leave the country as soon as possible,” Woltke said. With the victims absent, the public prosecutor’s office regularly closes extortion cases, he explained.

Migrants from Venezuela walk along the streets of Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 2022 [File: Sandra Sebastian/Reuters]

Some migrant rights advocates also point to corruption in Guatemala as a barrier to justice.

Statistics cited by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) indicate that 61 percent of Guatemalans feel corruption is widespread among public officials. And interference in the 2023 presidential election has drawn international attention to longstanding issues of corruption in Guatemala’s government.

“Migrant brothers and sisters are suffering from the scourge of corruption we have in Guatemala,” said German Tax, a friar who oversees a Franciscan-run migrant shelter in Colonia Mezquital, a town south of Guatemala City.

“Where are they going to complain? Who are they going to file a complaint with? Who is going to pay attention to him then?”

Some migrants who spoke to Al Jazeera laughed outright when asked whether they would file a complaint about the extortion they endured. Reporting their experiences, they said, was simply not an option.

“Maybe a complaint could be made, but would doing it mean that the government of Guatemala is going to do anything?” said Hector, a 25-year-old migrant from Honduras who declined to provide his last name for fear of reprisals.

He said he paid around 2,500 quetzales, over $300, for him and his son to pass seven different police checkpoints in Guatemala.

Still, filing a report felt like a pointless endeavour. “It wouldn’t be worth it,” Hector said, “because everything is controlled by corruption.”

Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman contributed to this report.

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Year of the underdog: How ‘outsiders’ upended Latin America’s elections | Elections News

Buenos Aires, Argentina – Poverty through the roof. Out-of-control inflation. Overwhelming debt. Javier Milei painted the grimmest of pictures when he delivered his inaugural address as president of Argentina earlier this month.

“There is no money,” he said in a grave voice. “There is no alternative to tightening our belt. There is no alternative to a shock.”

It was not the sort of message you would expect to elicit cheers from a society battered by economic recession. But the roar from the crowd demonstrated the extent to which Milei – a relative newcomer to the world of politics – had succeeded in tapping into voters’ discontent with the status quo.

Milei, a 53-year-old libertarian economist known for his shaggy hair and cloned dogs, was part of a wave of political outsiders who surged into leadership positions in Latin America this year.

Countries across the region saw dark-horse candidates sweep into the presidency in 2023, delivering a rebuke to the political establishment.

In Ecuador, for instance, Daniel Noboa stunned the nation by defeating political veteran Luisa González in an October run-off vote. Like Milei, Noboa, the heir to a banana industry fortune, had only served a single term in public office before his ascent to the presidency.

Guatemala, meanwhile, saw progressive congressman Bernardo Arevalo come from behind to win a landslide in his country’s presidential elections, defeating former First Lady Sandra Torres.

Arevalo had been seen as a long-shot candidate, polling with less than 3 percent support in the lead-up to the first vote. But he sailed to victory on a wave of popular frustration he characterised as a “democratic spring”.

President Daniel Noboa became Ecuador’s youngest-ever elected president when he was sworn in on November 23 [Carlos Noriega/AP]

Even in Paraguay, another long-shot, Paraguayo Cubas, made a surprisingly strong showing in the country’s presidential race. Describing himself as an “anti-system” candidate, the far-right leader landed in third place in the final vote.

But Pablo Touzon, an Argentinian political scientist, said “anti-system” might not be the right term for this trend of political outsiders.

“It’s not that they are anti-system. They are the new system,” he said of the slate of new leaders, who span the political spectrum, from left to right.

Touzon traces this crop of political outsiders to a global shift that has been brewing for more than a decade.

He explained that the global economic crash of 2008 and the rise of social media empowered new voices to rail against the status quo, rocking political establishments from Europe to North America to the Middle East.

This period of upheaval in the early 2000s coincided with a commodities boom in Latin America: The price of raw materials and other exports rose, fuelled by demand from countries like China.

That lowered regional inequality slightly, but Touzon warned that Latin America has “yet to find its economic model” – one that will ensure the region’s stability. Instead, economic uncertainty has created the conditions for the current “political rupture”.

“The new system might be more unstable, more variable, with a power that is easier to obtain and easier to lose,” Touzon said.

President-elect Bernardo Arévalo has faced legal challenges since winning Guatemala’s presidential election with a dark-horse campaign [Moises Castillo/AP]

The economy was a leading issue in several of the countries that saw upstart candidates take power.

Argentina’s dismal economic outlook dominated its election cycle, with inflation soaring past 160 percent and its currency tanking. More than 40 percent of the population sits below the poverty line.

Likewise, Ecuador’s economy has struggled to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts have warned that high youth unemployment could provide “easy recruits” for criminal gangs, another top concern in this year’s election.

Corruption was also a mobilising issue. In Ecuador, outgoing President Guillermo Lasso faced impeachment hearings until he dissolved the legislature and called for new elections.

In Argentina, meanwhile, the previous administration hit a speed bump when a federal court found then-Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner guilty of corruption last December.

And in Guatemala, a litany of government scandals drove voters to back the Movimiento Semilla or Seed Movement, an anticorruption party led by Arevalo.

“My candidacy and our party channelled the frustration with an intolerable situation of corruption,” Arevalo said in an interview with the BBC in November.

Even so, government prosecutors and rival politicians have mounted repeated efforts to question the legitimacy of Arevalo’s victory, spurring international observers to warn of election interference.

Supporters reach out towards Argentina’s newly inaugurated President Javier Milei, bottom right, on December 10 [Natacha Pisarenko/AP]

Distrust in government institutions has been a uniting theme throughout the 2023 elections, according to commentators like Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Andrés Oppenheimer.

In an appearance on Mexico’s Imagen Radio, Oppenheimer credited the clamour for change to longstanding frustrations.

“The wave of outsider presidents that they are electing in Latin America – from Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, all the anti-systemic leaders are appearing ahead in the polls – all of that is part of the same thing,” Oppenheimer said. “There’s a wave of unhappiness in the world.”

In some cases, when faced with major obstacles like economic turmoil or corruption, voters turn to politicians they come to view as “messiahs”, said Romina Del Pla, a left-leaning member of Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies.

“It’s the expression of the magnitude of the crisis that we have been living through in Argentina for many years,” Del Pla said of her country’s recent election.

She added that the thirst for “messiah” figures extends beyond Argentina, pointing to the success of populists like Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

“We’ve seen that this phenomenon is international in nature, with Trump, with Bolsonaro, with others, that are the people who have managed to channel that huge frustration,” she said.

Protesters demonstrate against President Javier Milei’s slate of reforms outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 21 [Rodrigo Abd/AP]

Del Pla observed that, during this year’s presidential race, there was a “rupture” among working-class voters who had traditionally supported large political parties. Many were instead drawn to Milei, who denounced the political establishment as corrupt.

On the campaign trail, he often referred to the governing parties as a “political caste”, implying a fixed power structure meant to keep outsiders like him at bay.

But for all his working-class appeal, Del Pla warned that Milei’s economic measures were sure to hit the middle class and poor the hardest.

Upon taking office, Milei devalued Argentina’s currency by more than 50 percent, a move poised to send inflation even higher and weaken consumer spending power. He also unveiled a legislative package that sought to overhaul some 300 laws by decree, with language that would curtail the right to strike and set the stage for the privatisation of state assets.

His government also pledged to crack down on protests, releasing guidelines that indicate a zero-tolerance approach to demonstrations that cut off traffic.

Critics like Del Pla see the guidelines as a move to suppress dissent. After all, the early days of Milei’s administration have seen clashes with police as protesters rallied against his reforms.

“Now, we see that all of the caste that they were supposedly going to fight against is actually in the government,” said Del Pla. “In the end, Milei is not that much of an outsider.”

Supporters of Javier Milei gather outside the National Congress on December 10 to hear his speech after he was sworn in [Martin Cossarini/Reuters]

But outside the National Congress building on Milei’s inauguration day, his supporters celebrated a leader they saw as upending the political establishment.

“I was tired of governments who used poor people to get to power,” said Norma Fernandez, 57, an elder-care worker who joined the crowd to watch Milei speak. “I think Javier Milei is something different.”

Another supporter, 36-year-old secretary Sol Calvo, expressed her excitement about the new president through tears of joy.

“I’m happy that people have finally changed their minds,” she said of the new political outlook under Milei.

Both women acknowledged that challenges lay ahead under Milei, a relatively untested political leader with radical plans to reshape the government. But Fernandez said she believes that most people who voted for Milei understood what was in store.

“Milei is going to get us out of this,” she said. “But it’s going to be hard.”

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Israel is taking scorched earth policy to a new level | Gaza

In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.

And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.

According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first utilised in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese levelled their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. The strategy has since been seen in an array of armed conflicts worldwide, including the 36-year civil war in Guatemala that ended in 1996 after killing and disappearing more than 200,000 people, primarily Indigenous Mayans.

In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and United States buddy Efraín Ríos Montt – who oversaw a particularly bloody segment of the war in the early 1980s – was found guilty of genocide in a Guatemalan court. And while subsequent judicial machinations and Ríos Montt’s own death by heart attack saved the man from earthly atonement for his crimes, you might say the truth is not so easily wiped “off the face of the earth”.

Indeed, scorched earth was a primary component of the Guatemalan army’s genocidal approach to its adversaries, and hundreds of Indigenous villages were destroyed along with water supplies, crops, and anything else that might sustain life. And what do you know: Guatemalan state savagery was boosted by none other than the state of Israel, which after all already had several decades of experience in eradicating Indigenous life in Palestine – pardon, “making the desert bloom”.

As journalist Gabriel Schivone notes in an article for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), not only did Israeli advisers help ensure the success of the 1982 military coup that brought Ríos Montt to power, but Israel also “assisted every facet of attack on the Guatemalan people” from the late 1970s into the next decade. For successive Guatemalan governments, Schivone writes, Israel had become the “main provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weaponry, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance”.

In keeping with the “desert-blooming” variety of blasphemy, Israel was also credited with assisting Guatemala in agricultural endeavours during the civil war era – since there’s clearly nothing better for agriculture than, you know, scorched earth.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring El Salvador, the United States’s supposedly existential fight against communism during the Cold War also enabled right-wing regimes to slaughter a whole lot of peasants. And like in Guatemala, Israel was standing by to offer a helping hand – including in the implementation of scorched earth policies.

An AJ+ video draws attention to the fact that Israel helped train ANSESAL, the Salvadoran intelligence agency that “would lay the foundation for death squads” during El Salvador’s own 12-year civil war, which killed at least 75,000 people and ended in 1992. According to the video, from 1975 until the start of the civil war in 1979, Israel was the source of a full 83 percent of El Salvador’s military imports. The vast majority of wartime killings were perpetrated by the US-backed right-wing state and associated paramilitary groups.

It goes without saying, of course, that scorched earth campaigns are deadly – and sometimes, that deadliness outlives the conflict itself. Take Vietnam, where the US military’s quite literal scorching of the earth with the toxic defoliant Agent Orange continued to cause miscarriages, birth defects, and severe illnesses decades after the official end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

In Iraq, the US’s use of depleted uranium munitions might also qualify as a scorched earth policy of sorts, as saturating a territory in radioactive poison doesn’t do much to ensure its long-term habitability.

Speaking of poisons, the Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli military fired US-supplied white phosphorus rounds at southern Lebanon in October despite the use of such weapons in civilian areas being “generally prohibited under international humanitarian law”. As per the Post’s writeup, south Lebanese residents affected by the attack “speculated that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area”.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or in the Gaza Strip, which has seen its fair share of illegal white phosphorus bombardments by Israel.

As the Israeli military now carries on scorching and re-scorching the earth in Gaza and the humans therein along with it, there is a singularity that distinguishes Israel’s efforts from scorched earth experiments of the past. In El Salvador, for example, the army’s goal was never to eliminate the very concept of El Salvador, whereas Israel appears intent on annihilating Gaza altogether.

But unfortunately for Israel, resistance is one thing that can grow in scorched earth.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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UN raises alarm on attempts to annul Guatemala’s general election results | Elections News

UN human rights chief calls ‘persistent and systematic’ attempts to undermine poll outcome ‘extremely disturbing’.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights deplored “persistent and systematic” attempts to undermine the outcome of Guatemala’s elections and called for the will of voters to be upheld, after public prosecutors moved to overturn President-elect Bernardo Arevalo’s victory.

On Saturday, Volker Turk, The UN’s human rights chief, noted that “Friday’s announcements, aimed at nullifying the outcome of the general elections and questioning the constitution and existence of the Movimiento Semilla party are extremely disturbing.”

“Judicial harassment and intimidation against electoral officers and elected officials is unacceptable,” Turk said.

On Friday, prosecutors threatened to annul the victory of Arevalo, who is set to take office on January 14.

Prosecutor Leonor Morales said investigations concluded that the election of anti-graft political outsider Arevalo, his vice president and parliamentarians was “null and void” due to counting “anomalies” in the first round in June.

In an attempt to stop him from taking over as president, Arevalo has repeatedly faced an onslaught of legal challenges, including moves to suspend his party.

Guatemala has long struggled to rein in official corruption. The International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed body, found itself abruptly shuttered in 2021, after then-President Jimmy Morales accused it of illegal acts.

Arevalo’s surprise triumph after the general elections in June and his pledge to fight corruption are widely seen in Guatemala as alarming to the establishment’s political elite.

In a news briefing on Friday, the prosecutors reiterated their request that Arevalo be stripped of his political immunity, a step that could open him up to prosecution. They accused him of improperly gathering signatures for his presidential campaign, as well as mishandling political funds.

But after the prosecutor’s office sought to annul the election results amid accusations of an “attempted coup”, Guatemala’s electoral court on Friday insisted the results were “unchangeable”.

Blanca Alfaro, the head of the Supreme Election Tribunal, affirmed that Arevalo and his vice president, Karin Herrera, would take office as planned. “At this moment, there is no way that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is going to repeat the elections.”

Protests have also broken out across the country to uphold the results.

“It is encouraging that, despite the long list of judicial and political actions taken by some authorities, which clearly undermine the integrity of the electoral process and breach the rule of law and democracy, people have been standing up for their rights and have been opposing what they perceive as a theft of their political will,” Turk said.

“It is critical to safeguard democracy and respect for human rights.”



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Guatemala prosecutors threaten to annul victory of President-elect Arevalo | Elections News

Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has declared the results of this year’s presidential race “unalterable”, after public prosecutors openly questioned whether to annul the vote.

The prosecutors’ statements sparked a domestic and international firestorm, marking what critics consider the latest — and most directly stated — effort to overturn President-elect Bernardo Arevalo’s election victory.

The Organisation of American States (OAS), a regional election watchdog, went so far as to condemn the statements as “an attempted coup d’etat“.

“The actions and statements of prosecutors Rafael Curruchiche and Leonor Morales constitute an alteration of the country’s constitutional order, a breach of the rule of law and a violation of the human rights of the population of their country,” it said in a statement on Friday.

“The attempt to annul this year’s general elections constitutes the worst form of democratic breakdown and the consolidation of a political fraud against the will of the people.”

The latest chapter in Guatemala’s ongoing election turmoil erupted on Friday with a press conference led by Curruchiche, Morales and Ángel Pineda Ávila, the secretary general of the Public Ministry.

Prosecutors with the Public Ministry have been accused of undemocratic actions in the past. The United States, for instance, has previously alleged that Curruchiche and Pineda “obstructed investigations into acts of corruption” to further their political aims.

In a press conference on Friday, the prosecutors reiterated their request that Arevalo be stripped of his political immunity, a step that could open him up to prosecution. They accused him of improperly gathering signatures for his presidential campaign, as well as mishandling political funds.

But they went a step further, raising the prospect of the presidential election being overturned as the result of their findings.

“Today is a historic day for democratic institutions,” Pineda said in the press conference, defending his colleagues’ work as “impartial” and denying any intent to interfere in the election results.

But the backlash to the press conference was swift. Blanca Alfaro, the head of the Supreme Election Tribunal, a government body charged with maintaining election integrity, quickly responded with a news conference of her own, refuting the possibility that a new election could be held.

“I would like to ratify, in my role as magistrate and in a personal capacity, that the results are valid, official and unalterable,” she said.

She also affirmed that Arevalo and his vice president, Karin Herrera, would take office as planned. “At this moment, there is no way that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is going to repeat the elections.”

Prosecutors have previously targeted the Supreme Election Tribunal itself, ordering raids on its offices after the elections that resulted in sealed ballot boxes being opened.

Protesters on December 7 hold up banners criticising Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras, left, and prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, right, for undemocratic actions [Cristina Chiquin/Reuters]

Guatemala has long struggled to rein in official corruption. For instance, a United Nations-backed body called the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) found itself abruptly shuttered in 2021, after then-President Jimmy Morales accused it of illegal acts.

Morales himself has since come under investigation for corrupt activities.

This year’s presidential race has likewise been marred by questions of election integrity. Three prominent candidates were disqualified before the first round of voting, including the then-frontrunner.

Arevalo, meanwhile, was a dark horse, running on a progressive anti-corruption platform with the Seed Movement party. But he soared into the spotlight with a surprise second-place finish in the June general elections, securing one of two spots in the run-off race.

That’s when the trouble for him and his party started. Within days, a Guatemala court agreed to suspend the results of the vote, pending a review. After the results were upheld, the Seed Movement itself faced suspension, after prosecutors alleged it had improperly gathered signatures to register as a political party.

The efforts to suspend the Seed Movement persisted even after Arevalo notched a landslide victory in the run-off. He secured over 60 percent of the vote, trouncing former Vice President Sandra Torres, a conservative candidate.

But prosecutors have continued to investigate Arevalo, prompting election observers to question whether they plan to scuttle his victory through antidemocratic means.

In November, for instance, the Public Ministry filed a request to strip Arevalo of his political immunity over his participation in a student-led protest movement, citing his social media posts at the time.

Protests, however, have broken out across the country to uphold the election results, many of which have been led by Indigenous leaders.

Arevalo is scheduled to be sworn into office on January 14, succeeding outgoing conservative President Alejandro Giammattei.



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