Video interview with Ruben Zamora, part 1

English transcript part 1 - 6 min 31 sec

(Conducted July 25th 2003)

We have had two days of disorder, two days of chaos, two days of absence of authority, of a very serious political vacuum.

The state and its institutions have been the intellectual architects behind these disorders, essentially General Ríos Montt, given his difficulties in being allowed to run in the elections. He generated these disorders – he brought people from the interior of the Republic, people from rural areas, people whose everyday life is about survival, people with no resources. I suppose they offered them breakfast, lunch and dinner and a couple of cents, a bit of money to come to the City without really knowing why, right, and a little something to show that it was a popular revolt, although a revolt in inverted commas. Coming into the City, they went to different places to generate problems, strikes. The fact is that they were guided by specialists, people with a lot of experience in state terrorism. These were the people that took them to different places to generate pressure – principally the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the mass media, and, oddly, they went to the premises, to the building owned by one of the strongest groups in Central America, financially speaking.

I think that this effort by Ríos Montt to force the law, including through popular revolt and intimidation and harassment of electoral authorities and judicial institutions derives from the fact that these elections have a very special, very unique significance for Guatemalans.

Guatemala has seen 22 years of criminal dictatorship, a dictatorship which since the year 1982 has turned the Guatemalan State into a State of Delinquents dedicated to assault Guatemalans, to rob their vehicles, to import stolen vehicles from the US and transport them to South Africa and other countries; to participate in drug trafficking.

They have turned Guatemala into ‘Little Colombia’. They are also into smuggling, they take part in kidnapping and in general all business – if one may call it that - related to organized crime.

This 22-year-old dictatorship has always had a democratic façade, because the various rulers have acceded to power through elections. However, a stronger power has always been the real power in Guatemala. This power is generally formed by chains or networks of relationships that are inter-linked among the different institutions of the State, for example Customs, Ports and Customs, Migration, the Army, Military Intelligence, above all, everything that has to do with the Army.

Basically, this power is made up of ex-members of the Military, very important and sophisticated people; this Board of Organized Crime also includes current high-ranking military officers. I have the impression - even if it is mere speculation - that the Minister of Defence - of the current and of previous administrations – has been an institutional part of this Board of Criminals.

So what happens with the current elections is that they all face problems, even if at first they came into power through elections, through democratic means. Thus we know who they are, we know their names, their last names. They are highly questioned, not just locally, but also by countries that are commercial allies of Guatemala, or political allies, countries that in some way have accompanied Guatemala’s development. A specific example is the US which surely will extradite these people if they lose power.

If there is something that worries them, it is their survival, not just political survival, but survival in liberty, of not ending up in prison. This is part of their problem. Another problem is that through a new government, they are planning to pass laws that at least partially concede aerial, territorial and maritime control to the US government.  That way, their ‘Little Colombia’ would be destroyed, it would have no trade, and this is really what is at stake.

As you probably know, Guatemala is a country where the economy does not benefit all, a country with severe social, economic and political exclusion, a country with misery and marginalization where the gap between the rich and the poor is abysmal. But dealing with all these problems would have to be postponed because in reality we are subjected, subordinated and kidnapped by this group of criminals that constitute the real power in Guatemala.

Translation by Lone Hvass August 2003