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Guatemala's elections: the riches against the fascists

  • Guatemala's elections: the riches against the fascists (December 1999) Guatemala was abandoned by the world when a ruthless dictatorship uprooted hundreds of indian villages and killed an unknown number of innocents (unfortunately, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the one Indian woman who had nothing to do with all of this, thereby diminishing the entity of the drama).
    Guatemala was the battlefield for a civil war that lasted from 1960 till 1996. It was by far the longest (36 years) and the bloodiest (200,000 people killed, one hundred times more than in Chile or Argentina).
    In 1996, tired of the endless fighting, the parties finally reached an agreement to end the civil war. The curious fact of today's elections, the first truly democratic elections in Guatemala, is that the two candidates selected by the people for the runoff both belong to the right-wing elite that ran the country during the civil war. Alfonso Portillo is widely believed to be simply a puppet politician in the hands of the former dictator, Rios Montt, who is going to be the speaker of the parliament. Oscar Berger is no less clean as he belongs to the wealthiest elite of the capital, the one that profited from the inequality and exploitation of the dictatorship. The party founded by the main rebel leader, Rodrigo Asturias, only won 12% of the votes. The general who had started the peace process, Julio Balconi, sat it out.
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