The Bureaucratic Entanglement of Guatemalan Justice
POR IRMALICIA VELÁSQUEZ NIMATUJ
TRANSLATED BY GEOFF WATSON
The world is witnessing what analysts and experts have called, inside and outside the country, the process of establishing a “judicial dictatorship” that corrupt local and national elites are imposing by force and terror in Guatemala, and that seeks to entangle the political path using the justice system to block and reinitiate all State institutions and thus prevent the functioning of the nation so that the suffering rule of law ends up dying.
But why does the corrupt pact continue to use and lubricate the path of judicial persecution, even after the voters defeated and humiliated their anointment at the polls on August 20?
Partly because the corrupt pact is finally, now yes, afraid of the national forces that from different origins and positions have told them enough is enough! Using only their vote, to stop criminal acts, whose main effect is materialized in the perverse and shameful levels of national, regional, and municipal corruption, which have turned a rich country into the second poorest country in Latin America.
In the recent election, the population has shown them that they are not an inert mass incapable of differentiating between a woman, Sandra Torres, who has lived by exercising politics at the lowest level, negotiating with obscurantist, conservative, and corrupt sectors, offering to protect not only their economic interests but also ideological ones, in the face of a political proposal that has been nourished by the different social movements that have emerged and been strengthened since the signing of peace in 1996 and that is now represented by a professional, Bernardo Arévalo, who knows the State and who is aware that his election as President is a historical responsibility because it is a turning point since it implies rescuing the State from the clutches of the inhuman mafias that took over the nation and its territories to operate freely and with impunity and who seek to turn it into an authoritarian state that intends to extend until the end of the 21st century.
Silence is no longer an option
Faced with this judicial mess, the world’s response is important, because by witnessing permanent technical blows that do not stop, and then not acting, they are becoming accomplices in carrying out the next actions that, to silence anyone who raises their voice, will be more violent and unimaginable. For this reason, the silence of the diverse, individual and institutional voices, as well as their actions, are key to the future of the Central American region, because the battle so that weak democracy does not die is now being fought in Guatemala.
Today, it seems that the legal actions carried out by female and male Guatemalan citizens are not enough to stop those who seek to impose their will through a regime of unstoppable arrests and pressure towards exile.
Life in Guatemala hangs on a fragile and flimsy thread, only strengthened by the collective action of more than two million four hundred thousand women and men who, on August 20, tired of so much ignominy of their municipal councils, departmental deputies, and the president of the republic, fed up with seeing corruption win the race in any public office, fed up with having to see their loved ones leave in order to guarantee that they will have the basic means to survive, while the old and new elites do nothing but enjoy the honey of power, they ended up getting up and using their right to vote to silently agree and give their support to the Semilla party, knowing that it was the best proposal that the country has had in more than fifty years.
For this reason, the fact of knowing that the demand that “the united people will never be defeated” is materializing is a hope that we should not let die, despite the unstoppable climate of political and judicial persecution in which our beloved Guatemala rises every morning.
Irma A. Velasquez Nimatuj Ph.D.
Maya K’iche’ Journalist and Social Anthropologist.
