The Emperor of Rome, in order to keep Roman citizens and slaves distracted and demobilised, applied for a long time the imperial policy of “bread and circuses for the people”.
By Ollantay Itzamná
Bacchanalian festivals or circuses that lasted up to 100 consecutive days, where lions battled with gladiators, in order to prevent “popular awakening and uprisings”.
In Guatemala, the North American Emperor and his Guatemalan oligarchy, divided into more than one side, apply this millenary Roman circus policy, taking advantage of the electoral situation. In the current electoral circus, it is no longer lions and gladiators facing each other to the death (as in Rome), but the promoters and benefactors of the bicentenary racist Creole state who are shaking each other to death in order to take over for four years for their corrupt administration.
The aim of the Empire, to recreate this circus, re-edited from 2015, is to avoid at all costs that the plurinational revolt of the dispossessed and starving peoples burst nothing less than the gateway to its backyard as is Guatemala. After all, it has already lost control of Mexico, Central America (except Guatemala), Colombia… All that remains is Chile and the dictatorship of Peru.
If the Empire loses Guatemala, the Bear (Russia) and the Dragon (China), without firing a single shot, will reach the entrance of the White House in search of the increasingly old falcon.
In Guatemala, there has never been democracy, nor democratic elections.
To legitimise their circus in the vision of the hungry people of Guatemala, the Emperor and his operators have installed two powerful fallacies: “Democracy is in danger”, “the popular vote must be respected”.
The truth is that for the great dispossessed majorities of Guatemala there has never been democracy. Proof of this is that, in an indigenous country, indigenous men and women were never eligible for election, let alone became governments or public officials in two centuries of the Creole Republic.
The bosses call and organise the electoral processes (through their caporals), making sure that uncomfortable candidates or parties do not participate in the electoral processes. Remember the case of the Workers’ Party of Guatemala (last century) or the case of the MLP (in the recent elections).
The issue is not so much that the Empire and its racist oligarchies (corrupt and less corrupt) rehearse circuses or promote fallacies. The issue is that pro-green, indigenist, feminist, peasant or urban Guatemalans celebrate and replicate these and other false premises.
Where are the plurinationals or the Mayans who used to cry out the phrase: “from resistance to power”?
From the theatre or circus of the “anti-corruption fight” of 2015, promoted by the US, to the 2023 electoral circus, the existential conditions of Guatemala, far from improving, worsened for the great majorities. According to official data, in 2015, 59% of Guatemalans were living in poverty, and by 2022 that percentage had risen to 63%.
On that occasion, a prophetic voice resounded from the communities and peoples organised in resistance in Guatemala: “Let’s go for a process of a Popular and Plurinational Constituent Assembly (ACPP)”. But, on that occasion, qualified progressives and indigenous people said: “we must move forward progressively”. “Let’s make reforms, then we go towards plurinationality”. And that is how the processes of structural change in Guatemala were neutralised.
It is the same thing that is happening now, in 2023. Qualified progressives and indigenous people are calling for indigenous people and plurinational peasants to join the Semilla party project. Even knowing that this party project is part of the North American circus, with the aim of completely nullifying genuine plurinationalism in Guatemala.
It seems that the plurinationality that in recent years had gained space in the narrative of some NGOs or indigenous leaders, now, in the made-in-USA electoral circus, is being painted over as a superficial varnish, showing what in essence is the aspiration of “qualified subalternity”: striving to be like the colonial boss, indifferent to the agenda of the peoples.
Why is Semilla not committed to plurinationality in a multicultural country?
Bernardo Arévalo (son of former president Juan José Arévalo), not only knows the bitter history of US interventionism in Guatemala that cut short his father’s political project, but also, having a degree in social anthropology, he knows the reality of the internal colonialism suffered by the peoples of his country and the urgent challenges of plurinationality.
Despite this, however, he not only relies on Washington to win the upcoming second round of elections, but also completely ignores the reality and agendas of Guatemala’s indigenous and peasant peoples.
In Guatemala, it is not necessary to do doctoral studies to identify that one of the main causes and mechanisms of dispossession, impoverishment and public corruption was and is the process of privatisation of public goods and services. However, reviewing privatisation contracts is not contemplated in Arevalo’s government programme.
Semilla, in his government programme, at most refers to individual rights with “cultural relevance”. No collective rights of peoples incorporated in international law are present in Semilla’s ideology. Much less collective political rights. Not to mention indigenous territories or the proposal for a plurinational state.
This mutilation of reality in the government programme of a “progressive” lawyer is neither gratuitous nor ignorant. It obeys a constitutive and transcendental mandate that comes from its progenitors: to repel at all costs the possibility of the dissemination and materialisation of the idea of post-neoliberal plurinationality in Guatemala. In other words, Semilla is a condition of possibility for the total annihilation of the proposals for plurinationality and the horizons of Buen Vivir in Guatemala. I would like to be wrong, but that is where we are heading.
Ollantay Itzamná is a defender of Mother Earth Rights and Human Rights from Abya Yala.
https://ollantayitzamna.com/
@JubenalQ