Guatemala’s leader to tackle poverty of Mayan population
GUATEMALA CITY - Alvaro Colom awoke Monday to the realization an entire country of poor and desperate people was depending on him.
Having won Guatemala’s presidential election Sunday night, Colom will inherit seemingly intractable problems when he takes office Jan. 14.
Guatemala is one of the most troubled nations in Latin America. Thousands of its citizens migrate to the United States in search of work each year. Organized crime has infiltrated many key government institutions.
“The people of Guatemala voted for change. We will do everything we can to give it to them,” said Colom, a 56-year-old engineer.
In a news conference and subsequent interview, Colom said his government would work to improve the lives of the country’s Mayan population. Long Guatemala’s poorest residents, the Mayans voted overwhelmingly for Colom.
“Historic debt”
“We have a historic debt with our indigenous people,” Colom said. “Our government will be one with a Mayan face.”
Colom said he plans to reach out to the millions of Guatemalans who live in the U.S. The government will work to provide more services to its citizens who live abroad, including assistance to families who wish to return the bodies of those who die far from home.
The Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles, which serves hundreds of thousands, will be expanded, Colom said. And he will back a measure to provide Guatemalans abroad with the right to vote in their homeland.
Colom won Sunday’s election in the rural villages where more than 20 Mayan languages are spoken, humble places where the people feel distant from their largely Spanish-speaking government.
One of his first meetings as president-elect, he said, would be today with the Mayan Council of Elders, a group of community leaders.
Colom met with the elders during his work as director of the government’s National Fund for Peace, a development agency.
He is also one of the few non-Indians to be trained in the rites of Mayan shamans.
In Sunday’s election, Otto Perez Molina beat Colom by a large margin in Guatemala City and its suburbs, home to one in four voters. But Colom won in all but one of the country’s 21 provinces.
Nationwide, Colom defeated Perez Molina 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent, according to final results released Monday.
Political analysts said it was the first time in Guatemala that a candidate had won a presidential election by carrying the countryside while losing the capital.
Perez Molina, a former army general, won the urban vote by calling for a “firm hand” against crime and said he would use the military to crack down on organized crime groups. Many feared a Perez Molina victory would mean a return to authoritarian government.
Guatemalan voters rejected his message. But analysts said Colom will face challenges as he attempts to rule this country of 13 million people.
“One day, the United States is going to stop the flow of migrants,” said Edgar Gutierrez, director of a human-rights think tank here.
“If Colom doesn’t develop a regional strategy that seeks an immigration reform in the U.S., and if he doesn’t invest in the problem of unemployment, he’s going to have serious problems.”
Rural investment
Colom, a self-described social democrat, said investment in the rural economy is needed to stop immigration. He said he would implement a little-used provision of the 1996 peace accords that ended Guatemala’s civil war, one that allows the government to buy property to redistribute to landless farmers.
The president-elect also proposed the creation of a fund tied to the millions of dollars in remittances Guatemalans send home each year from the United States.
Many community groups in the United States pay for schools and other projects in their Guatemalan hometowns with remittances. The government should match those contributions, Colom said.
“We have to close the spigot that is producing immigration,” he said. “Our dream is to generate the conditions so that people don’t give in to the temptation to migrate.”