Jeff Abbott
Marvin Reyes
Marvin Reyes performs in Guatemala City with his Trump effigy on August 27, 2019.
Marvin Reyes keeps an eye on the street in downtown Guatemala City, waiting for the stoplight to turn red. When it starts flashing yellow, the thirty-five-year-old street artist adjusts the Donald Trump effigy that hovers around his waist with sewn legs draping over his shoulders—making it look as though he is sitting on the shoulders of a squat version of the U.S. President—and walks into the crosswalk to begin dancing.
“You have never seen Trump dance in the United States, but he dances here in Guatemala,” Reyes says with a smile as he walks into the street. “He dances well.”
With a portable speaker around his neck, Reyes moves to the rhythm of the blaring cumbia music in front of the halted vehicles. Just before the stoplight turns green again, he walks past the windows collecting change from the drivers. He supports his three children with what he earns each day.
Reyes attempted to migrate to the United States in 2010, but was abandoned in Mexico by a coyote, whom he had paid roughly 25,000 quetzales, or about $3,300 U.S. dollars, to bring him to the United States. While in Mexico, he learned to be a street performer, returning to Guatemala to try and make a living at it. For a time, he covered himself in body paint and worked as a living statue of a soldier, moving every time someone deposited coins in his bucket. Five months ago, he began donning the Trump outfit.
“There are people in favor of Trump and people against Trump,” Reyes notes, explaining his choice. And the U.S. President provides ample fodder for political satire in Guatemala and throughout the region, where mocking the Caudillo, or Latin American trope of the strongman leader, has a long history.
The Caudillo has returned to the forefront of Latin American politics. The far-right governments of Iván Duque in Colombia, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Jimmy Morales, the outgoing president of Guatemala, and incoming Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, have all displayed authoritarian tendencies. On the left, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela are also marked by their images as strongman leaders.
And now, for the first time, these leaders can look to a fellow wannabe strongman in power in the United States. Donald Trump’s authoritarian style and policies have energized the right and the far right across the hemisphere.
But the Caudillo is anything but funny. The history of authoritarian rule in Latin America is filled with examples of autocratic rule, extreme violence, and tragedy. Many Latin Americans see Trump as the harbinger of a new far right in the Americas, and the instigator of a resurgence of the old authoritarian and violent undercurrents that have held sway in the hemisphere since independence from Spain and Portugal in the 1800s.
“Now that President Trump is President and that Republicans are in office, we have noted a shift to the right, with everything that implies,” says Fernando Linares Beltranena, a Guatemalan lawyer and rightwing congressional representative with the National Advancement Party (Partido de Avanzada Nacional, or PAN).
In an interview with The Progressive in his office in Guatemala City’s Zone 10—an upscale embassy district—Linares Beltranena adds that Guatemala currently has “a very good relationship with the Trump Administration on account of the immigration cooperation agreement.” He is referring to Morales’s recent decision to sign a safe third country agreement, which would require asylum-seekers from other countries to apply for asylum in Guatemala rather than the United States.
“This strengthening of relations with Trump filters down into members of congress,” Linares Beltranena says. “They see that the tide is changing, favoring the right wing.”
Throughout Latin America, rightwing populist administrations have sought favor with the Trump Administration. The U.S. President has empowered the convergence of far-right forces—including evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, business interests, and proto-fascist forces that have long existed—who are maneuvering to take advantage of economic instability to achieve power.
“It involves the link between far-right oppressive forces in the state with fascist forces in civil society,” says William Robinson, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has researched the rise of the far right in Latin America. “Trumpism is a form of twenty-first century fascism.” It is a philosophy, he notes, that “cements with the interests of trans-national capital.”
After nearly a decade of what has been called the “pink tide,” in which the progressive left won election after election in Latin America, the far right has returned to power. Robinson, in an interview with The Progressive, says increased social spending cannot undo centuries of oligarchic power and the expansion of global capitalism.
“The left has lost hegemony,” Robinson reflects. “The institutional left demobilized the mass base of the social movements or co-opted their leaders. The right moved on the offensive. When the economic crisis hit, the left did not have the social forces to ward off the return of the right.”
As rightwing politicians have gained traction in countries across the region, imitations of Trump’s language have become more prevalent. Accusations of “fake news” are regularly being levelled against media critical of far-right administrations.
“We’re fighting the wildfires with great success,” Brazilian President Bolsonaro wrote in a tweet thanking Donald Trump for his support following the widespread fires in the Amazon jungle. “Brazil is and will always be an international reference in sustainable development. The fake news campaign built against our sovereignty will not work.”
In Guatemala, President Jimmy Morales utilized the term “fake news” to attack national media over their coverage of the tragic eruption of the Fuego volcano in June 2018, which killed hundreds and left an unknown number of people missing. Yet as Marielos Chang, an independent political analyst in Guatemala, points out, this generates further divisions.
“[Morales] has replicated the communication strategies in order to generate further polarization and divisions in society,” she tells The Progressive. “It was beneficial for the people on the far right that Donald Trump was elected.”
Meanwhile, the United States has revived the Monroe Doctrine, which holds that the United States has the right to intervene in Latin America to prevent other countries from gaining influence. That squares with the thinking of some of the region’s far-right leaders, for whom the communist threat of the Cold War era remains, along with such other growing threats to the social order as equality for women, members of the LGBTQ community, and indigenous peoples.
Latin America’s far-right governments are slowly rolling back advances in human rights, including further limits on access to abortion services.
In Colombia, the mobilization of rightwing and conservative forces within Catholic and evangelical churches, allied with far-right former President Álvaro Uribe, led to the devastating “no” vote against the peace accords in the country’s national referendum in October 2016. Voters voiced concern with many elements of the accords, especially what was viewed as the inclusion of gender politics that would promote LGBTQ rights.
Colombia’s fragile peace unraveled in late August of this year when some members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) declared they were once again taking up arms against the Colombian state. The rebel commanders pointed to President Iván Duque’s failure to comply with the peace accords as part of the reason for the return of the revolutionary forces.
“This is the continuation of the rebel fight in answer to the betrayal of the state of the Havana peace accords,” one of the FARC commanders, whose nom de guerre is Iván Márquez, says in a video uploaded to YouTube. “We were never beaten or defeated ideologically, so the struggle continues.”
Duque’s far-right administration has sought to limit the ability of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, or JEP) to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice. And, responding to demands by the Trump Administration, it has stepped up the war on drugs, which tends to have disastrous consequences for rural farmers.
Throughout the hemisphere, as far-right administrations look to maintain control and limit oversight, attacks on the rule of law have become common.
President Morales held Guatemala’s first public military parade in more than a decade on June 30, 2019, just a few days before President Trump was set to preside over the first public military parade in the United States since 1991. That parade—which was postponed from 2018 and ultimately occurred this past Independence Day—prompted a public outcry.
Guatemalan special forces, known as Kaibiles, stand at attention during the first public military parade in over a decade on June 30, 2019.
Guatemala City was tense on June 30, as rival marches set out from two parts of the city. I watched supporters clap and cheer as hundreds of soldiers dressed in combat gear, including snipers in full camouflage, known as ghillie suits, marched down the Avenue of the Americas, through the affluent neighborhood of Zone 14 toward the military base in nearby Zone 10. Soldiers chanted their unit anthems amidst the near constant applause of those lining the route.
Across town in Zone 1, activists set out on the annual march in memory of the victims of the Guatemalan civil war. Between 1960 and 1996, the Guatemalan military carried out more than 600 massacres of indigenous communities as part of the counterinsurgency against Marxist and leftist rebels during the darkest days of the thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict. To be indigenous was to be considered to be part of the insurgents, according to declassified CIA cables from 1982.
Despite the tensions, the day ended without incident.
The advent of Donald Trump in the United States opened the door for the far-right administration of Jimmy Morales to launch attacks not only on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, or CICIG), but also on the independent judiciary. Conservative activists and rightwing politicians, including Linares Beltranena, argue that the judiciary has become a tool of the left.
“[The CICIG] took an ideological bent to persecute the right,” claims Linares Beltranena. “Only members of Congress on the right were incarcerated, not so with those on the left.”
The widely popular CICIG closed its doors on September 3, after the Morales administration and other ruling elites launched a campaign against the United Nations-backed anti-corruption body, prompting great alarm.
“This is a tremendous regression,” Brenda Hernández, a human rights activist in Guatemala City, tells The Progressive. She reflects the concern of many on the streets of Guatemala.
In August 2018, Morales stood in front of sixty high-ranking military officers to announce that he was not going to renew the mandate of the CICIG. In the months that followed, Morales took a series of actions against the CICIG, including attempting to expel its lead investigator, Iván Velásquez Gómez, from the country. Velásquez became known in his home country of Colombia for going after paramilitaries. In 2013, he became the lead investigator of the anti-corruption body in Guatemala.
The attacks against the CICIG hinged on the prosecution of Ivan Bitkov, a Russian man convicted of using a false Guatemalan passport, following a joint investigation by the CICIG and the Guatemalan public prosecutor’s office. Bitkov found support in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and from Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, both of whom declared that the CICIG was being manipulated by Vladimir Putin to persecute dissenters.
These accusations proved unfounded.
Morales’s decision to sign the recent safe third country agreement is widely seen as a kind of payback for the Trump Administration’s silence on his attacks on the CICIG. Under the Obama Administration, there was a clear message of support for the anti-corruption efforts. Chang, the political analyst, argues that this has limited the political effectiveness of the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala.
“Before, with Ambassadors Stephen McFarland and Todd Robinson, there was more leadership, and there was always a clear position in terms of the struggle against corruption and support for the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala,” Chang says. “Since the start of Donald Trump and the change of the ambassador, there has been a neutrality in respect to the position of the interests of the United States.”
The State Department, led by Mike Pompeo, has continued to send mixed messages. Key ambassador posts throughout the hemisphere remain unfilled, and career diplomats have resigned. For the far right, Trump’s less intrusive U.S. State Department is a welcome change.
Back on the streets of Guatemala City, Reyes and other residents express fear over what the re-election of Donald Trump would mean for the region.
“Our fear is that he will get four more years,” Reyes says between performances. “If Trump stays, what more will he do to immigrants?”
The possibility of a shift in foreign policy, or the continuation of its current dysfunction, hangs over the region. This is especially critical for countries like Guatemala, where the far right will continue in power, following the results of last June’s presidential election.
“The foreign policy of [Guatemala] will be determined by who wins the election in the United States,” Chang says.
Many fear that the authoritarianism embraced by Morales will grow worse following the August 11 election of Alejandro Giammattei, a far-right former director of the national prison system who won a runoff election. The president-elect, who will take office in January, campaigned as being tough on crime, even declaring that he would consider gang members terrorists, return the military to the streets, revive the death penalty, and take a zero-tolerance approach toward protests that block highways.
Giammattei has voiced concern about the safe third country agreement and claimed he would form a new anti-corruption body. Yet his bigoted posture on LGBTQ rights, as well as accusations that he oversaw extrajudicial executions while he was director of the prison system, have raised concern, especially given the rise of the far-right administration of President Bolsonaro in Brazil, who has repeatedly made racist, sexist, hateful, and violent statements.
“Guatemala has its own Bolsonaro now,” Hernández sighs.