Caribbean & Central America - May 2011 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The indigenous leader and Nobel peace prize laureate, Rigoberta Menchú, has confirmed a fresh bid for the presidency in the September 2011 general elections. Having managed just 3% of the vote in the last 2007 election, and having maintained a low profile since, few believe she is likely to pose a threat to current the frontrunners, Otto Pérez Molina of the right-wing Partido Patriota and former First Lady Sandra Torres running for her ex husband’s (President Alvaro Colom) centre-left Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE). Menchú’s candidacy for the Frente Amplio de Izquierda, a broad coalition comprising her own party, Winaq, former guerrilla-turned political party Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) and the left-wing party Alianza Nueva Nación (ANN) along with more than 60 social movements, is nonetheless significant. It represents the first concerted effort to unite the Left since the 1996 Peace Accords which ended the 36-year civil war.

Unlike El Salvador and Nicaragua, where the former guerrilla-turned left-wing parties Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) are in power, the more radical Left in Guatemala has failed to unite and prosper as a viable political movement. This is despite the fact that, as US Ambassador to Guatemala Stephen McFarland noted in a 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks, “widespread poverty [51% and 15% of Guatemala’s population live in poverty and extreme poverty respectively], hunger, marginalisation of the large (but fractious) indigenous minority [which conservative estimates put at 40% of the population] and a long history of state neglect of the poor could provide fertile ground” for such proposals.

In the three elections since the Peace Accords (1999, 2003 and 2007), those parties borne out of the guerrilla movement, which advocate tackling inequality through more structural reforms such as agrarian reform and the fiscal pact – the two key areas to register little or no progress since the Accords-, have seen their influence wane, largely as a result of internal splits. In 1999, the URNG (which signed the Peace Accords with the government), together with the now defunct Desarrollo Integral Auténtico (DIA) and Frente Democrático Nueva Guatemala (FDNG) formed the ANN as an alliance and fielded Colom as its candidate. Although the ANN suffered the withdrawal of the FDNG, which then ran separately, Colom nonetheless came in third, with 12% of the vote, while the ANN won nine congress seats (out of the then 113-seat unicameral legislature).

The ANN alliance proved short-lived, however: in 2002, the former guerrilla leader and URNG secretary general, Jorge Soto (AKA Pablo Monsanto), left the URNG over leadership differences to found the ANN as a political party. Since then, the two parties have persistently failed to overcome divisions and run together, resulting in the decline of their overall influence. In 2003, the URNG won 2.58% of the presidential vote, managing just two seats in the newly expanded 158-member congress while the ANN, which did not run a presidential candidate, took six congress seats. In 2007, the URNG saw its vote dwindle to 2.14% and retained its two seats in congress. The ANN took less than 1% of the vote, failed to win any congress seats and lost its legal status as a result (under the electoral law, parties lose their legal standing if they achieve less than 5% of the vote or fail to secure a legislative presence), forcing it to go through the necessary procedures to re-register. Also serving to further split the Left’s vote in the 2007 election was the emergence of two new movements, Menchú’s Winaq and the Encuentro por Guatemala (EG) of Nineth Montenegro, a former ANN legislator. EG-Winaq ran as an alliance with Menchú as its presidential candidate and Montenegro at the top of its list of deputies (winning the EG’s only seat in congress). Initial hopes that the candidacy of Menchú, Guatemala’s first indigenous presidential candidate could nonetheless prove a galvanising force for those traditionally excluded sectors, ultimately foundered. Her disappointing performance was attributed to a range of reasons including: racism; lack of financial resources; and the EG’s weak party structure [RC-07-09].

Aside from failing to unite as a single platform, the more radical Left also struggled in the last election, losing some of its support base to the more moderate centre-left UNE, which Colom had set up in 2002. Pledging to establish a “social democracy with a Mayan face”, the UNE had campaigned on an anti-poverty platform, appealing to the indigenous rural vote. It stopped short of broaching the thorny issue of land reform, opting instead to tackle poverty through strategies such as promoting and financing rural development and cooperativism. Once in power, Colom has sought to address poverty primarily through social programmes such as the conditional cash transfer scheme, “Mi Familia Progresa (Mifapro)”, which, given the opposition’s persistent refusal to approve tax reform, is the only method of state intervention available to his government. The fight against poverty looks once again set to underpin the electoral campaign for the UNE’s presidential candidate, Sandra Torres, in the September vote: through her identification with Mifapro as former head of the Social Cohesion Council (CSS), charged with administering the program, Torres has cultivated an image as “champion of the poor”.

The need for structural reform
Colom may well boast that Mifapro, which McFarland, in the same leaked cable, dubbed a “ground-breaking official effort to alleviate poverty”, benefited some 814,625 families at a cost of US$138m in 273 municipalities (out of a total of 332) by end 2010, up from 280,996 in the first year of his mandate. However, the ultimate failure of his government to address the structural inequalities which gave rise to the 1960-1996 internal conflict was once again laid bare amid renewed concern regarding the food crisis afflicting the country. Last month, Colom declared that Guatemala, which has the highest rate of child malnutrition in Latin America and the fourth highest in the world, was facing a situation of “nutritional risk”, with 15,000 children in 127 municipalities facing the prospect of chronic malnutrition.  The announcement came on the back of a damning report by the human rights ombudsman (PDH), which claims that 953 people died from chronic malnutrition in 2010.  It also serves as the latest in a string of warnings. In 2009, Colom was forced to declare a “state of calamity” after 462 people died in the first seven months of the year from starvation, sparking international outrage and prompting a visit from Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Schutter’s chief conclusion was that the structural causes of the problem lie in the country’s “intolerable” levels of inequality and unequal distribution of wealth [RC-09-09]- once again highlighting the failure of Colom, long hamstrung by his weakness in congress, to enact fiscal reform. Tax take was just 10.5% of GDP in 2010, the lowest in Central America and once again below the 12% stipulated by the 1996 Peace Accords. Colom himself acknowledged to Schutter that “malnutrition in Guatemala is historic and is to a large extent considered [...] one of the factors which caused the armed internal confrontation”.

In its report, the PDH recognises that Colom has faced a particularly challenging situation due to rocketing global food prices (which in mid April, the World Bank noted were 36% above the levels registered last year) and climate change. Highlighting the devastation wreaked by an “above average” cyclone season - one of the 10 most active in the country’s history-, the PDH singled out as the two key weather events Tropical Storm Agatha, which struck in June 2010, and the eruption of the Pacaya volcano, which caused US$1.5bn worth of damage (or almost 4% of GDP). The PDH did, however, pin some of the blame on Colom. As well as flagging up poor coordination between those authorities responsible for food security, the PDH pointed to his ultimate failure to distinguish himself from his right-wing predecessors in the area of land reform. With the latest URNG-backed rural development bill - a chief demand of indigenous peasant organizations – stuck in congress since 2009, the PDH report pointed out that just 3.2% of private estates account for 65.4% of agricultural territory, criticising the increasing usage of land for cash crops rather than basic food crops (see sidebar).

• Agrarian reform

The objectives in the 1996 Accord relating to agrarian reform include: the establishment of a land fund to improve access to landownership through market-based land reform; the revision and update of legislation on idle lands; legal reform to simplify land registration procedures; development of a legal land title registry; establishment of a land tax on underused and undeveloped land; the establishment of  conflict-resolution mechanisms to settle land conflicts; and the implementation of agricultural development and rural investment programs that facilitate a more equal distribution of credit, technology, training, and information.

• Land usage

A March 2010 report by APRODEV, an association of 17 European NGOs, in response to the food crisis, urged the Colom government to “stop the expansion of agrofuel production, giving priority to the sustainable production of food”. It warned that the “expansion of the oil palm [industry] has increased the pressure on land… restricted the access to land of peasant and indigenous communities, and has proved to have a very negative effect on the right to water”. According to figures cited by the Inter Press Service, the area used to cultivate African palm expanded from 40,000 hectares (ha) at the start of the 1990s to 120,000ha currently, while the total area planted with sugar cane increased from 84,000ha in 1985 to about 220,000ha in2009.