Guatemala joins the rebellion
2015Elena Zeledon 2015-07Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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4 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2015 SAN JOSE, Costa Rica—Since April, the people of Guatemala have been engaged in a mass protest demanding the removal of the corrupt government of President Perez Molina. Each Saturday, the streets of the principal cities have been jammed with protesters, up to 65,000 in Gua temala City alone, each demonstration seeming to build off the last. An estimated 1,500,000 have taken part in these pro tests, nearly 10% of the population of 15.8 million.
Guatemala is now the latest of three countries in the region in open rebellion against a series of corrupt and murderous regimes. It joins Mexico and Honduras in the list of countries where political insta bility has exploded into mass action.
The trigger in the case of Guatemala has been a string of corruption cases exposed through the arrests of dozens of officials charged with a seemingly unending litany of corrupt practices involving everything from bribery and kickbacks in the award ing of contracts to outright embezzlement from the national social security system.
The political fallout has been devastat ing for the country’s oligarchs. Starting with the forced resignation of the vice president, and four Cabinet members in cluding the interior minister (a very close confidant of the president), dozens of of ficials associated with the regime have been dragged before the courts with each new revelation further delegitimizing the political structures of the post-1996 pact ending the previous dictatorship.
The demands from the mass movement are far more than the removal of the cur rent regime. Despite the fact that the Su preme Electoral Tribunal has scheduled elections for September, and the minions of U.S. imperialism in the Organization of American States are pleading for calm and order, so “that nothing disrupts the integrity of the process,” the social actors in Guatemala are demanding not just a change of regime but a change of system.
Central to their struggle is the conven ing of a National Constituent Assembly, where the corrupt present structures would be replaced with a new constitu tion, guaranteeing a political role for the indigenous peoples’ organizations, for women, youth, and the poor and working masses of the country. This demand runs headlong into the aims of imperialism and its ruling-class puppets—a vicious and fascistic ruling class responsible for the deaths and disappearance of a docu mented 200,000 persons in the decades of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s who, above all else, require an executive system of domi nation which can maintain the relations of exploitation and misery.
North American socialists have a spe cial responsibility to the peoples of Latin America. The building of a continental solidarity movement with those fight ing the economic and political/military wars of North American imperialism, the building of bridges to those in struggle is needed.
The creation of a new “Organization for Latin American Solidarity,” involving the organized antiwar movement in North America, can be one concrete step in forg ing the links necessary to give material meaning to the great motto of solidarity: an injury to one is an injury to all!