https://www.persuasion.community/p/guatemala-just-ran-january-6th-in
"A popular progressive stuns an entrenched, corrupt political establishment to
win a presidential election in one of the most unequal countries on Earth.
Knee-deep in corruption, the political class he’s pledged to unseat panics and
goes all out to overturn the election. They control the government, the
lame-duck Congress, the courts, the prosecutors’ office, the media, everything,
and they’re not afraid to use every tool at their disposal. They have a court
rule the president-elect’s party illegal, they harass his supporters,
investigate them, maneuver to overturn the election, try one dirty trick after
another to prevent his inauguration.
Soon, a largely-indigenous grassroots movement mobilizes behind the
president-elect, taking to the streets day after day and facing down riot
police to demand their votes be respected. They come out in numbers, calling
out the corrupt pact for trying to overturn an election they know they’ve won
fair and square. The establishment’s sabotage never lets up, it keeps going
right up until the very day of the inauguration, when the outgoing Congress
maneuvers furiously to keep the new president’s supporters from gaining the
speaker’s chair and swearing the new president in, even as hundreds of
thousands of protesters mass outside in the street chanting in anger against
the power grab. Against all odds, they succeed, facing down the coup plotters
to get the president sworn in late at night, having beaten back every attempt
to block him.
That Guatemalans needed to resort to such heroics to keep their democracy in
place is one sign of how far off the rails the country had gone. Long one of
the most racially and economically unequal countries in the Americas, Guatemala
emerged from its long civil war against Marxist rebels in 1996 to an
elite-dominated democracy that soon devolved into kleptocracy. Official graft
was so out of hand, and corruption so enshrined throughout the country’s
institutions that, in 2007, the country tried to effectively outsource its
anti-corruption efforts, asking the UN to backstop the country’s failing
institutions.
The ill-fated International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala had a
long, rocky couple of decades swimming against the current until 2019, when it
tried to investigate campaign funding irregularities by then-president Jimmy
Morales, who retaliated by ending its mandate. Since then, all brakes have been
off, with what Guatemalans call “the pact of the corrupt” taking over every
state institution and politicians barely bothering to conceal the scale of
their graft.
Unsurprisingly, democracy suffered, as the
pacto de corruptos maneuvered to
ensure their cozy arrangement couldn’t be upset by anything so vulgar as an
election. Ahead of last summer’s vote, every high-profile reformist candidate
was disqualified from the ballot on one technicality or another. It was a very
obvious stitch-up… only they left one loose end: A single, mostly-unknown
reformer—an egghead former diplomat and academic—was polling so low, the
pacto
de corruptos didn’t even bother disqualifying him. His name was Bernardo
Arévalo. Nobody had heard of him.
Two days ago, Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in as president."
Via
What Could Go Right? January 25, 2024:
https://theprogressnetwork.org/longer-lifespans-more-centenarians/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
