Out of all the candidates participating in last weekend’s presidential elections in Guatemala, there were four that caught the international public’s eye. Otto Pérez Molina, for his participation in 2007’s elections, his past as a general in the armed forces and obviously his successful campaign resulting in a solid win in Sunday’s first round, is the obvious talked-about candidate. Sandra Torres caught the public’s eye as the First Divorcee trying to bypass the constitution and subsequently being denied her candidacy by the Supreme Court. And then there is Manuel Baldizón, a rather shady candidate from the northern El Petén department, who came in second after Torres’ exit through a rather populist campaign promising a strict application of the legal but not implemented death penalty and handouts such as a 5% flat tax rate and a monthly bonus for workers.
The fourth candidate to gain a relatively high amount of international airplay was Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous Ki’ché and Nobel Prize laureate known for her activism against the military dictatorship and as the protagonist in the 1983 testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú, in which she related the horrors of the civil war in the early 1980’s to Venezuelan author Elizabeth Burgos. Menchú participated in both the 2007 and 2011 elections, garnering some 3% electoral support in both. This weekend she ran for the Frente Amplio, an alliance of small left-wing parties, mostly on poverty and indigenous rights issues.
Menchú is somewhat of a publicity darling in Western circles promoting indigenous rights and development aid. When I studied Latin American history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Menchú’s story was amply covered in a series of lectures on land reform and indigenous rights. As a UN Goodwill Ambassador, she still enters many lectures and discourses, is regularly invited to speak in social forums and many an article on the elections at least mentioned her candidacy. Very few journalists, analysts or Latin America watchers mentioned Eduardo Suger, the conservative candidate for the Creo-party who came in third. Nor did evangelist preacher Harold Caballeros or Mario Estrada get much attention.
Funny thing, seeing as how in Guatemala itself Menchú isn’t exactly considered a very prominent candidate. Her Frente Amplio hardly commanded 3% of votes in the recent elections, the same amount of votes Menchú won in 2007 as the candidate for Encuentro por Guatemala, indicating that Menchú actually lost support over the last four years.
Menchú’s marginal popularity in her own country has to with many factors. In Guatemala City Menchú is considered a candidate who runs on rural issues, while on the countryside a number of indigenous groups cannot identify with her either, because they consider her to principally represent the Ki’ché people. Moreover, Menchú’s focus on human rights and indigenous emancipation aren’t highly prioritized by voters in the country. The success of Pérez Molina’s message of Mano Dura (tough hand) on crime and number 2 Manuel Baldizón’s call for the implementation of the death penalty indicate that security and crime are far more important to Guatemalan voters.
Many analysts in Guatemala noted during the campaign that there is no real leftwing political movement of any significance in Guatemala. Sandra Torres was nominally leftwing, but might sooner be considered a populist using social programs to boost her profile with the rural poor. Manuel Baldizón mixes conservatism (death penalty and a hard stance on security issues) with populist proposals (tax cuts), Otto Pérez Molina hasn´t been much else than a law & order hardliner from the beginning, while Eduardo Suger promotes staunch conservative values. Even the more marginal candidates above Menchú in the polls, such as Harold Caballeros (an evangelical minister become politician) and Mario Estrada (former president Portillo’s man) cannot be considered leftist.
So is there any relevance in Guatemala to Rigoberta Menchú, besides her international role as a promoter of human rights? According to Miguel Ángel Barcárcel, a political analyst, she certainly does. “The left in Guatemala, small it may be, has never been united under one banner. Even though they only get about 3% of all votes and domestic media really don’t pay much attention to it, it is quite a feat in this country. Marginal as it may be, Rigoberta Menchú had a role to play in these elections.”