by JOHN CHERIAN
Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, a retired military general and a former intelligence head. SOURCE/Democracy Now
Incumbent left-wing Presidents romp home in Argentina and Nicaragua while Guatemala elects to the top post a former army general.
ARGENTINA, Nicaragua and Guatemala went to the polls recently to elect new governments. Argentina, the biggest of the three Latin American countries and a regional powerhouse, saw the incumbent President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, romp home with an impressive victory. In Nicaragua, another incumbent President, Daniel Ortega, registered a handsome victory. Both Cristina Fernandez and Ortega are part of the broad left-wing “pink tide” which has swept the region in the last decade. But the election of the right-wing Otto Perez Molina in Guatemala is illustrative of the fact that the “pink tide” could be in danger of receding. Perez Molina was a general and the intelligence head in the Guatemalan Army when it was engaged in a brutal campaign against left-wing guerillas during military rule. He is the first person with a military background to become President since the army ceded power after ruling the country with an iron fist for 25 years.
The results did not come as a surprise as opinion polls had predicted wins for all the three. In the case of the Argentine President, it was a remarkable change of fortunes. Until last year, she was sliding in the polls. At one point, popular support had declined to 20 per cent after she picked fights with the powerful farmers’ lobby and media groups over the introduction of export quotas. Her party lost control of Congress in 2009. To add to her misfortune, her husband and political mentor, Nestor Kirchner, the former President, died of a heart attack in October last year. He was the man who revived his country’s economy after becoming President in 2003. Kirchner stood aside in 2007 and let his wife run for the presidency. He was expected to run again this time, but his death left the leadership of the ruling Peronist Party in the hands of his wife.
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One of the key issues the new President has to deal with is the question of impunity for those responsible for massacres and genocide during the 36-year-long civil war that wrecked the country. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, most of them indigenous Mayans, during the civil war. They were victims of the army and right-wing paramilitary groups. Perez Molina was one of the army’s chief representatives involved in the negotiations to end the civil war in 1996. He has been insisting that the army was not involved in acts of genocide or atrocities against civilians despite plenty of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts showing otherwise.
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