Jeff Abbott
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales, who promised voters he was “not corrupt or a thief,” at an event for reforestation in Chuarrancho in June, 2016. Morales has faced investigations into corruption in his own Administration.
On September 12, thousands of people gathered in Guatemala City’s Central Plaza to express their anger at President Jimmy Morales’s decision to shutter a Union Nations-backed anti-corruption body.
The mobilization was organized by the Campesino Development Committee, a group that represents the interests of small farmers in twenty of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments, and is supported by religious organizations, student groups, and members of the LGBTQ community.
That morning, police mobilized units from across the country to contain protestors and keep them reaching the Guatemalan congress. Also on hand were a wing of Guatemala’s special forces, known as Kaibiles, who patrolled the streets carrying M16A1 rifles.
“It feels like we are returning to the 1980s,” Miguel Angel Manuel Alvarado, a member of the Achí Mayan Ancestral Authorities of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, tells me, referencing the most violent part of a thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict that killed more than 200,000 people. We stand inside a restaurant near one of the police roadblocks, patrolled by five soldiers wearing the distinct maroon beret of the Kaibiles.
As people protested in the park, congressional deputies were inside congress debating a series of reforms to laws put in place after a corruption crisis gripped the nation in 2015. The new changes would extensively undo measures to combat corruption within the government.
“We should not be forced to migrate another country. Our government should have a plan to generate better employment and provide a just salary.”
Twenty-seven-year-old Selvin Ixkat, who grew up in the town of Mazatenango, Suchitepéquez, on Guatemala’s southern coast, knows how corruption can hurt families in Guatemala. He blames it for the limited options he has in Guatemala, and for why he migrated to the United States this past January, seeking the means to support his wife and one-year-old son.
“We should not be forced to migrate another country,” Ixkat says. “Our government should have a plan to generate better employment and provide a just salary. But corruption means that the officials have a high salary, and the minimum wage for a worker does not cover the costs.”
He continues, “We are paying for public services that we do not receive. The corruption in the state forces people to migrate, and this puts our whole family at risk. It pushes us to leave.”
Ixkat made it to Texas, where he was captured by U.S. Border Patrol agents and incarcerated. “We were treated brutally,” he recalls. “We were treated as if we were criminals or murders. We had our hands and feet cuffed.”
After being locked in what is known as “the Ice Box” because of extreme air conditioning, and starved for eight days, Ixkat was transferred to a general prison, where he was held for fifteen days prior to being deported back to Guatemala in February. Since then, he has continued to work with the Campesino Development Committee, which he had the joined as a teenager. Today, he says, “We are demanding a state where we all can live.”
Since the end of the war, the privatization of public services and rising food prices have driven the cost of living steadily upward for Guatemalans. Recent estimates suggest a family of five would need to earn 3,600 Quetzales (470 U.S. dollars) per month in order to make ends meet. The current minimum wage is 2,900 Quetzales (390 U.S. dollars).
In comparison, Morales is the highest paid President in Latin America, earning 146,950 Quetzales per month (19,200 U.S. dollars).
As Manuel Alvarado sees it, corruption “is the cause of much of the poverty and violence. Many youths graduate from school and there is no work, so they migrate to the United States.”
Experts and relief organizations warn that Morales’s decision to end the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala threatens to push even more people to consider migration. A recent New York Times article notes that the number of Guatemalans being captured at the U.S. border has steadily risen even as the total number of migrants being nabbed has slowly declined.
Since 2007, the commission, in concert with the Guatemalan Public Prosecutors office, has fought rampant organized crime, corrupt politicians, and drug-traffickers with some success. It gained international recognition in 2015 when it uncovered a criminal network operating within the government of Otto Pérez Molina.
Corruption continues to infect every aspect of Guatemalan society.
The commission succeeded in lowering Guatemala’s astronomically high impunity rate. Its removal could propel the country into a prolonged political crisis.
Corruption continues to infect every aspect of Guatemalan society: The highways remain in poor condition; the few public hospitals often lack sufficient beds or medicines; and the public education system lacks necessary resources.
“There have been no projects completed in our community,” Manuel Alvarado says of the lack of investments in public infrastructure. “There is a hospital that Otto Pérez Molina was building that was never completed.”
A 2018 Prensa Libre reported hundreds of uncompleted public works projects across Guatemala. Of these, nearly half were in the departments of San Marcos and Huehuetenango—the two with the highest levels of migration to the United States.
The current threat to the International Commission Against Impunity looks to worsen the security and stability of Guatemala, pushing thousands to leave the country, many traveling to the United States seeking to provide for their families.
Ixkat, for his part, no longer sees that as an option. “I’m not planning on going back to the United States ever,” he says. “We are struggling to improve our country.”