UNDERSTANDING GUATEMALA
PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GUATEMALA PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT
NETWORK (gpdn/rpdg) AND THE MOVEMENT FOR PROGRESSIVE AND POPULAR UNITY (MUPP)
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Brief Note 003-15
Two assassinations in 15 days
Alejandro
Maldonado was confirmed by Congress as President of Guatemala on September 3rd,
once Otto Pérez’s resignation was approved. On September 6th, the
first round of the 2015 elections ended with Jimmy Morales in first place, a
candidate supported by former and current army officers, former members of
the Otto Pérez’s Partido Patriota , the private sector and the U.S. Embassy.
A few days later, on September 13th, Sebastián Sajic Córdova, a
70-years-old Ixil indigenous mayor and a witness in the Ríos Montt’s trial
for genocide, was assassinated in El Quiché. On September 16th,
Rigoberto Lima Choc, a 28-years-old teacher who last June denounced the
terrible contamination of Río La Pasión by growers of African palm trees, and
who also was a recently elected member for the municipal council of Sayaxché,
El Petén, was killed by two sicarios
riding on a motorcycle. At the same, three persons were kidnapped by
employees of REPSA, the African palm tree enterprise in El Petén, and kept
prisoners for some time as a reprisal for the decision by a judge to stop the
company’s operations. It seems that criminal gangs have felt themselves
empowered by the fact that Maldonado is the current president and Jimmy
Morales is the candidate most likely to win the presidential election. As Honduras
has been showing for years after a military-civilian
coup, this U.S.-sponsored model threatens to bring more death and repression
to Guatemala.
Guatemala
and its Diaspora, September 19, 2015, GPDN/MUPP Secretariat
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