"The Guatemalan Attorney General should resign in Christian conscience"

Thursday, October 12, 2023
Roman Gressier


“There are at least four blockades separating us,” Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini wrote over an encrypted messaging app upon accepting this interview. “It would be better to do it over video chat. Don’t put yourself at risk.” These are convulsive days in Guatemala, with a hundred blockades of highways and streets around the country in protest against Attorney General Consuelo Porras’ abuse of power. Ramazzini’s diocese is in Huehuetenango is some six hours by highway from the capital. At the time of this conversation, dozens of riot police had been dispatched to the Peripheral Ring highway, one of the gateways west from Guatemala City.

Ramazzini has taken the side of the demonstrators. So, too, he says, are all of Guatemala’s bishops. On behalf of the Episcopal Conference, he has repeatedly condemned the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s (MP) obstacles to the electoral process and the transition of power that should culminate on January 14 with the swearing-in of President-Elect Bernardo Arévalo. Five days ago, he stood in front of the MP headquarters in the capital and, escorted by the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán and Indigenous Mayor’s Office of Sololá, addressed hundreds of demonstrators: “I can not turn a deaf ear to the cries of a people who for centuries have demanded that their voice be heard.”

The cardinal is a prominent defender of migrants’ rights —he was one of the founders in 1999 of Casa del Migrante, whose shelters pepper the path across Guatemala, administered by Scalabrinian missionaries— and vocal in the causes of campesinos and the defense of national resources. He was not always such an open critic of the administration of Alejandro Giammattei; he says that before the pandemic he unfruitfully tried to mediate between the government and communities in Huehuetenango amid a dispute over a hydroelectric dam — until Giammattei, he says, “made clear to me that he was the president and would do as he pleased.” Now, with more benevolence than many others concede to Giammattei, he accuses the president of being lukewarm in the current crisis.

With the country in its tenth day of a national strike, he again offers his mediation to the government. In this conversation he accuses the Foundation Against Terrorism of defending “a racist and exclusionary Guatemala,” marks distance from CODECA, whom he criticizes for their radicality, and highlights his friendship with some business leaders, despite their differences. “I have no basis to say whether they are responsible or not for the current crisis,” he says of the private sector, “but they bear much responsibility for the historical process of discrimination and marginalization of the most impoverished sectors of Guatemala.”

Is Guatemala facing the risk of a coup d’état?
That’s one hypothesis, because in this country you never know what could happen. It reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, 100 Years of Solitude, which tells of fantasies that could actually happen. The intent in saying the words ‘coup d’état’ is to send a warning: Don’t do it. If the military is considering it, don’t; it would be disastrous for the country.

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202310/centroamerica/27104/the-guatemalan-attorney-general-should-resign-in-christian-conscience

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