Guatemala's Indigenous Countryside Drives Election Victory Over Atrocity-Linked General

In an upset victory, Alvaro Colom, who ran on an anti-poverty platform, beat the hard-line retired General Otto Perez Molina with close to 53 percent of the vote. We get reaction from Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman. His new book “The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?” implicates the defeated Perez Molina in the 1998 murder of beloved Guatemalan human rights activist Bishop Juan Gerardi. [includes rush transcript]

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In Guatemala, centrist candidate Alvaro Colom has won the presidential election, according to official results released Monday. In an upset victory, Colom beat the hardline retired General Otto Perez Molina in Sunday's run-off election. Colom ran on an anti-poverty platform and won close to 53 percent of the votes. In his victory speech, Colom thanked his supporters.

• Guatemala President-Elect Alvaro Colom.

General Perez Molina, who had led in the polls until last week, ran on an anti-crime platform. The ex-head of army intelligence, he had promised to expand the police force by half and to use the military to fight crime. He commanded troops in one of Guatemala’s most violent areas and has been implicated in a number of political crimes. Perez Molina conceded defeat in a news conference after the results were announced.

• Gen. Otto Perez Molina.

To discuss the significance of the election and the task ahead for President-Elect Alvaro Colom, we turn now to Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman.

• Francisco Goldman. Acclaimed Guatemalan American novelist. He is the author of three novels, including “The Long Night of White Chickens.” His latest book is his first nonfiction work. It’s called "The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

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AMY GOODMAN: In a few minutes, we’ll be going to Pakistan, but right now to Guatemala, where the centrist candidate Alvaro Colom has won the presidential election, this according to official election results released on Monday. In an upset victory, Colom beat the retired General Otto Perez Molina on Sunday’s runoff election.

Colom ran on an anti-poverty platform, won close to 53% of the vote. In his victory speech, Colom thanked his supporters.

PRESIDENT-ELECT ALVARO COLOM: [translated] We won against all odds, against everything, because truth was on our side, because everyone’s work and each one of you was efficient, because we didn’t cheat or deceive. I said that we would win by between 4% and 7%, and we won by 5.2%.

AMY GOODMAN: General Perez Molina, who led in the polls until last week, ran on an anti-crime platform. The ex-head of army intelligence, he promised to expand the police force by half and to use the military to fight crime. He commanded troops in one of Guatemala’s most violent areas and has been implicated in a number of political crimes. Perez Molina conceded defeat in a news conference after the results were announced.

GENERAL OTTO PEREZ MOLINA: [translated] We said we would respect the results given by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and that we would respect the will of the Guatemalans expressed through the ballots, and that’s what we are doing. We are present here.

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the significance of the election and the task ahead for President-Elect Alvaro Colom, we turn now to Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman. His latest book is The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? It implicates the defeated presidential candidate, General Perez Molina, in the 1998 murder of the beloved Guatemalan human rights activist, Bishop Juan Gerardi. Francisco Goldman joins us again, now from Houston, Texas. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Francisco.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. First, your response to the election results?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: It’s -- as a lot of my friends emailed me from Guatemala yesterday, Guatemalan democracy was saved. The country was on the verge of -- people thought that this General Perez Molina was going to be elected and possibly take them back to some equivalent of the hard-line military rule of 1980s. But the countryside, in this vote, defeated the city. And this is the first time in Guatemalan history, really, that the indigenous people in the highlands have really voted as a bloc and carried, by surprise, Colom to victory.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, talk about the significance of this. Isn’t it the first time that the president did not win the city, but the countryside?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: It’s definitely the very first time that the Indian population, the Mayan Indian population, the rural population, have really decisively backed one candidate. And everybody -- the capital, which, as you know, is more mixed racially and economically, and etc., is quite separate in existence from its countryside.

And in Guatemala City, the media, all the television stations, virtually all the newspapers, which are all owned by pro-business, rightwing-type, you know, kinds of people who were heavily backing the general and, let's say, not quite allowing news that might harm the general's campaign to get into their media.

AMY GOODMAN: We spoke last week before the election, and you gave quite a frightening profile of the candidate who has been defeated, the general, Perez Molina. Can you briefly summarize who he is again?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: General Perez Molina was, during -- you know, during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, it had probably -- the army, which ruled and dominated throughout that war, gave Guatemala probably the worst human rights record in Latin America and among the worst in the world. 200,000 civilians were killed. A lot of the worst atrocities were committed by Guatemala’s intelligence units, especially the G-2 and the EMP, the Presidential Military Staff. That’s where the death squads came from. That’s where the illegal detention centers, the torture centers, came from.

And General Perez Molina, a graduate of the School of the Americas and so forth, was a chief of both of those entities. And even in reporting in places like the New York Times, you know, very vicious crimes that he was responsible for have been reported on.

But in the 1996 peace accords, the army, as the victor, insisted as a condition for peace -- and acquiescent guerrillas agreed -- that there should be a blanket amnesty for all human rights crimes, which means that he really couldn’t be prosecuted for a lot of those crimes. That was eventually breached when the UN declared crimes against humanity had occurred in Guatemala. There can be no amnesty for crimes against humanity.

But impunity still reigns in Guatemala to a great degree, and the courts just haven’t been strong enough to carry human rights trials forward. So what really became the issue, though, in the general's campaign were not his wartime crimes, but news beginning to filter out about his peacetime crimes, which included the allegations that are made in a part of my book about his involvement in the murder of Bishop Gerardi, but also corruption charges and involvement in other crimes. These kinds of things began to bubble up on the fringes, but the pro-Perez Molina media in Guatemala kept it out of the mainstream news down there. But it found its way into the population by other routes, let's say.
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