From The News Insider (Nov. 2003):

The Return of El General

Edward F Fischer (Vanderbilt University)  

I.
            General Efraín Ríos Montt talks to God.  To hear him tell it, they are good buddies–two old, privileged white guys sharing their disgust at the state of affairs in the word today, from the rise in crime and corruption to the decline in family and faith.  Ríos Montt’s God speaks in Old Testament tones, calling for vengeance rather than forgiveness, the need for discipline more than compassion.  And it was this God who told the former military dictator, current head of congress, and born-again evangelical Christian to run for president in Guatemala’s upcoming November elections.
            The legality of Ríos Montt’s candidacy was in doubt until recently.  A quaint section tucked away in Article 186 of the Guatemalan Constitution bars those who have participated in coups from being president, and a military junta brought Ríos Montt to power in 1982.  On this basis, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled in June of this year that he was ineligible to run for president, a decision at first upheld by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court.  Ríos Montt, however, continued to campaign, confident that he would prevail.  On July 24^th, “Black Thursday” as it has come to be known, the Ríos Montt campaign organized demonstrations that shut down Guatemala City and cost millions in property damage.  Thousands of rural supporters were bussed into the capital city and armed by campaign workers with machetes, sticks, tires, and gasoline; organizers, cell phones held up to their black ski masks, directed the protestors toward targeted courthouses, government buildings, and private businesses, a number of which were looted while police looked on, unwilling to intervene.  As smoke from burning cars and buildings filled the Guatemala City skyline, Ríos Montt announced to the press that he would not be able to control his supporters, that the people must be heard and their will heeded.  Following this none too subtle flexing of muscle, the Constitutional Court overruled itself and, citing international accords, voted 4 to 3 that retroactively applying the 1985 Constitution to Ríos Montt’s 1982 actions would violate his human rights
            One would hope that wearing the mantel of human-rights victim would be uncomfortable for el General (as he likes to be called).  Various human rights monitors, from Amnesty International to the U.S. State Department, hold him largely responsible for the torture and death of tens of thousands of noncombatants during his 1982-1983 reign at the height of Guatemala’s long civil war against Marxist insurgents.  The victims were overwhelmingly rural Maya Indians (who make up about half of the country’s population), leading a U.N. Truth Commission to declare the violence a case of genocide.  But politics can make for unlikely bedfellows, and today it is poor, rural, Maya peasants–the very targets of his scorched earth campaign two decades ago--who form the base of Ríos Montt’s popular support.  As the majority leader of congress, Ríos Montt has cultivated this allegiance by pushing through huge subsidies for fertilizer, increases in the minimum wage, and making large payments to those who served in the country’s notorious civil patrols of the early 1980s.    

II.
            I saw Ríos Montt speak one Saturday afternoon this June in Xenimajuyu, a Maya village in the area of highland Guatemala where I do my fieldwork as a cultural anthropologist.  In the local Kaqchikel language, Xenimajuyu means “at the foot of the mountain,” and true to name a dramatic peak rises over the village, overshadowing the distant volcanoes.  Before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1524, the mountain served as an outpost of Iximche’, the nearby capital of the Kaqchikel Maya empire.  Climbing up its preposterously steep slopes, one sees why–the mountaintop offers a strategically unencumbered view for dozens of miles around.  Today, the ground is littered with potsherds and broken obsidian blades churned up by impoverished decedents of the ancient Maya as they colonize the last remaining lands around town for their small farms.  In contrast to its environs, Xenimajuyu appears somewhat drab: a few cinder block buildings (the school, the health center, a few small churches) compete with wood plank and adobe houses to front one of the village’s two dirt roads, kids play in the street, women dressed in their vivid handwoven blouses go about their daily chores, and men can be seen walking to and from their fields of corn and beans much as their ancestors have done for millennia. 
            On the day of the rally, over a thousand people gathered in a large field on the edge of the village.  I was surprised at the turnout–both because of Ríos Montt’s reputation as an iron-fisted dictator and because the sole publicity for the event consisted of a few members of Ríos Montt’s advance team going around that same morning recruiting supporters.  I had only heard about the rally a couple of hours before it was to begin at noon, and made it to the site right at 12:00--which turned out to be about two hours early by Guatemalan time.  Under the glaring, high-altitude sun (before the rainy season’s afternoon clouds had formed), I milled among the crowd as inconspicuously as possible for a tall, blond gringo.  Several people I talked to had come to the rally because they were promised information about the next installment of payments the government was promising to men (or their widows) who had served in the army-led Civil Auto-Defense Patrols (PACs) during the country’s civil war in the early 1980s. 
            The PACs were a bad idea to start with–forced para-military service by villagers charged with protecting their towns from “subversives,” often given quotas of suspects to hand over to the local military garrison for “questioning.”  Many never returned from these interrogations, their bodies showing up days or weeks later by the side of the road, perhaps missing a hand or covered in cigarette burns.  During Guatemala’s civil war, PACs were responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings (as the Guatemalan legal code delicately phrases it), working with the army to instill a quotidian terror in Guatemalans that we can scarcely imagine, even in this age of terrorist threats.  Yet, the civil patrollers were also victims, forced into their position under the threat of persecution and death themselves--poor Maya farmers forced to turn on their neighbors and friends, also poor Maya farmers, in this hot spot of the Cold War.  It is for this suffering that the Guatemalan congress, led by Ríos Montt (who, twenty years earlier, oversaw the expansion of PACs and sanctioned their atrocities), authorized compensating former civil patrollers with cash payments.  The payments are to be disbursed in three parts.  The first payout of 5000 Quetzales (about $640, a year’s income for a poor farmer) per claim was made in April and two more payments are scheduled after a new government takes office following the November elections.  Over 600,000 applications have been filed, but only the 250,000 whose names appear in the official, but incomplete, government registry of patrollers are eligible for payment.  Even still, this is a half billion dollar cost that Guatemala can ill afford as it battles increasing budget deficits and bears the fallout from economic woes in the United States.  As most opposition parties are opposed to the PAC payments, Ríos Montt is able to hold the second and third installments hostage for the November elections.
            This is Ríos Montt’s fourth attempt at the presidency.  In 1974, he lost an election under suspicious circumstances.  While early results gave him a decisively lead, television and radio broadcasts mysteriously stopped on the night of the vote count.  By the next morning, when broadcasting resumed, his rival, General Kjell Laugerud, had apparently pulled ahead in a decisive lead to win the presidency.  Fearing for his life, Ríos Montt fled to California, where he made contact with Pat Robertson’s Church of the Word.  Born again as an evangelical protestant, Ríos Montt came to believe that it was God’s will that he lead Guatemala in the battle against communism that threatened his land.  Toward this end, he returned to Guatemala to head a 1982 coup that overthrew another military dictator, General Romeo Lucas García.  Ríos Montt’s reign as head of state lasted only 18 months, but it was the bloodiest year and a half in the country’s ongoing civil war.  Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, often in horrific ways: pregnant women were eviscerated, children were swung by the legs to shatter their skulls against walls, men were castrated and decapitated.  In scenes reminiscent of the holocaust, victims frequently had to dig their own mass graves before being executed.  Whole villages were bombed and fields burned to the ground, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee into the jungle or to the anonymity of Guatemala City’s slums.  By 1983, Ríos Montt’s megalomaniacal excesses became too much for even the hardened army brass, and he was overthrown and replaced by a reformist general who oversaw a transition to, at least nominal, democracy in 1986.
            In 1989 Ríos Montt mounted a campaign for president, but his candidacy was blocked by the electoral tribunal and the constitutional court.  He went on to found a new political party, the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG).  Courts again barred Ríos Montt from the 1994 FRG presidential ticket but he was elected to congress, where he serves as majority leader.  In 1998, the FRG ran Alfonso Portillo as a stand-in for Ríos Montt in the presidential elections.  Portillo, who as a young leftist living in exile in Mexico had killed two men in a 1982 political dispute, was able to spin scandals about his past in his favor (“A man who can defend himself to defend our country”) to win the five-year term that ends in January 2004. 
            The current FRG government (which holds the presidency, a majority in congress, and great sway over the judiciary) has been troubled by corruption scandals involving shockingly large amounts of money (hundreds of millions of dollars) even for a system long accustomed to a high level of graft.  The commission set up to investigate the Panamanian bank accounts of senior officials is led by Ríos Montt’s daughter (Congresswoman Zury Ríos) and his niece.  Ríos Montt, who is campaigning on a platform of greater security (to combat the wave of crime that has swept in the country in the years following “demilitarization”) and an end to corruption, finds himself in a position of having to distance himself from Portillo and other officials of his own party.  Arguably the most powerful man in the country, el General is running as the underdog, fighting corruption and the entrenched oligarchy. 

 
III.
            Ríos Montt arrived in Xenimajuyu in a red helicopter, accompanied by a fanfare of firecrackers and campaign songs (“my mommy votes for Ríos Montt, my daddy votes for Ríos Montt . . .”).  Like private jets in the United States, helicopter are de rigueur for serious Guatemalan presidential aspirants, allowing them to travel the campaign trail above rather than on the country’s poor roads.  Just outside of Xenimajuyu, the Pan-American Highway–the country’s primary transportation artery–is a poorly paved two-lane road that looks like a county highway in rural Alabama.
            A sprightly 77, el General rouses crowds with the fervor of an evangelical pastor.  Even knowing of his brutal past, I found myself captivated by his impassioned sermon about the country’s many ills and the straightforward solutions he proposes.  He railed against corruption: “I am not a rich man.  I started out with three little quetzales [about $3 at the time], and I am where I am today because of my hard work.  But I am not rich.”  He inveighed against political patronage: “Who does your mayor work for?  Who does your congressman work for?  Who does the President of the Republic work for?  You, that’s right.  And so why should you have to enter their offices with your head bowed and hat in hand to beg for a little favor?  This is wrong.  You are their boss.”  And he preached against infidelity and loose morals: “I have been married to the same woman for almost 50 years.  A man should have just one wife, just one woman.  If any candidate–even the FRG candidate for mayor of your town–cheats on his wife, I urge you not to vote for them.”  At this last remark, the mayoral candidate, who was on the dais, looked sheepish and a wave of muted giggles passed through the crowd.
            El General took no note, moving on to embrace Pedro Palma, a former guerilla leader, holding his hand tight while declaring that “the past is behind us and we must leave it there.  We must move forward.  Together.”  The contrasting appearance of the two men was striking: Ríos Montt wore a cheap, slightly ill-fitting grey suit, looking like a humble man dressing up for a special occasion; Palma, in contrast, sported black designer jeans and a stiffly pressed Guayabera shirt, looking like a dandy dressing down for a trip to the countryside.  Palma, who lived for years in the jungle fighting the Guatemalan army, appeared unbothered by the irony of running for congress on the ticket of his former mortal enemy.
            Pointing to one side of the stage, Ríos Montt stated “there is the plantation of yesteryear” and pointing to the other side, “there is the nation of tomorrow.”  He said that Guatemala is walking this treacherous path from plantation to nation while dark forces try to pull it away from the straight and narrow.  Yet, Guatemala should fear no evil–el General has his eye out for evil, and like the national patriarch he seeks to be (“I am Guatemala,” he is fond of saying), he will guide the his Guatemalan family to safety.  This will not be easy, Ríos Montt admits, but he claims to have the moral fortitude and the “mano dura” to see it through.  Like the protagonist of Miguel Angel Asturias’ novel El SeZor Presidente, Ríos Montt is a man fighting demons of surrealistic proportions, but his demons of a particular fundamentalist variety.
            During his speech, Ríos Montt repeatedly mentioned the PAC payments–pointing out that the opposition candidates were opposed to them, and that the FRG was the only party that would ensure the next round of payments.  At one point, Ríos Montt’s daughter Zury took the microphone and declared the sitting opposition congressman from the region a traitor for walking out on the congressional debate over PAC payments. 
            The day after his visit to Xenimajuyu, Ríos Montt made an ill-timed campaign stop in Rabinal, a Maya town in the K’iche’ region.  Forensic anthropologists have been working for some time in Rabinal, excavating clandestine graves and identifying victims’ bodies in order to document what happened there during the violence and to bring some sense of closure to still-grieving families who never knew for sure the fate of their “disappeared” loved ones.  On the day Ríos Montt arrived in Rabinal, several bodies were being reburied in marked graves.  The presence of the man many hold responsible for these deaths was too much for some townspeople, and they arrived at the rally with a coffin painted black and began to jeer at Ríos Montt.  Not heading the advise of his security team, Ríos Montt took the stage to try to calm the crowd, but he was met with a barrage of bottles, sticks, and rocks.  After getting hit on the head with a stone, Ríos Montt retreated to his helicopter holding a handkerchief on his bleeding forehead.  The reasoned editorials of the national press that followed pointed out that it was foolish for Ríos Montt to have gone to Rabinal that day but they also condemned the protestors for using tactics of intimidation in a free election.  But who can really blame them?  

 
IV.
            Barring a coup (and, as usual at this point in the election cycle, rumors abound), Guatemala will hold presidential elections on November 9^th.  All of the polls give center-right candidate Oscar Berger an undisputed lead, perhaps even reaching the absolute majority needed to avoid a runoff.  But, as a Guatemalan friend recently noted, “at this point, anything can happen.”  In fact, most polls are based on samples from Guatemala City, while the bulk of Ríos Montt’s votes will come from rural areas.  Voter turnout has steadily decreased since 1985, falling in recent national elections to below 20%.  Abstention rates are highest in rural, Maya populated regions.  If the FRG can mobilize this neglected segment of the electorate (and their PAC payments and fertilizer subsidies certainly help), Ríos Montt might defy the pollsters and win the election.
            While not opposed to the heavy hand of authority and amenable to the influence of fundamentalist Christianity in government, the Bush administration has nonetheless singled out Ríos Montt as the hemisphere’s greatest human-rights threat–resurrecting Guatemala’s 1980s image as a poster child for human rights abuses.  Indeed, the situation in Guatemala is grim.  Lawyers and judges as well as rights activists and international monitors must fear for their lives as they go about their work.  At the Rigoberta Menchú Foundation, bomb and assassination threats (often just a funeral dirge left on an answering machine) have become macabrely routine.  And they are carried out frequently enough to have their desired terrorizing effect.  This summer, it seemed that hardly a day went by without a press report about the death of a mid-level human-rights worker or an activist judge, which would be written off by the police as a robbery or random drive-by shooting.  With the post-war rise of gangs, for-profit kidnappings, and organized and common crime, Guatemala’s political violence persists but it is more effectively obscured from attribution than ever before.
            Citing close ties between narco-traffickers and senior government and military officials, the Bush administration recently “decertified” Guatemala for lack of progress in the war on drugs (that other war that we are still fighting), imposing stiff foreign aid and trade penalties.  The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala condemned the Black Thursday demonstrations as a perversity of the right to protest.  And if Ríos Montt wins the presidency, the Bush administration promises to suspend talks to include Guatemala in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) scheduled to be finalized later this year.  This would be a major blow to the country’s already fragile, export-led economy–just the threat has already allowed U.S. negotiators to force through several painful concessions in the Guatemalan position.
            If elected, Ríos Montt vows to end crime and corruption in Guatemala, fighting it with overwhelming force.  He invokes an odd nostalgia for the order of authoritarian rule–the streets were clean and robbers almost nonexistent during his previous reign.  Whatever the outcome of the November elections, Guatemala will continue to suffer the legacy of el General for many years to come.  “I don’t care what he says,” declared a Maya man at the Xenimajuyu rally, “we remember who he is and what he has done.  We have suffered enough.  I will never vote for him no matter how much money he promises.”