We're making a lot happen in a short period of time, but we have to, there's an urgency to this election in Guatemala where most people, including myself, are up against the wall of choosing between the menos peor, the least worse.
Guatemala may be both repeating and making history during this year’s September 11 election, the fourth election since the Peace Accords in 1996 and the most expensive. In a race that pits former First Lady Sandra Torres, who divorced her husband and current president Álvaro Colom in order to be eligible to run, against Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general denounced by human rights experts for his alleged ties to genocide in the 1980s. The plot thickens and the answers are more difficult to find.
Last week more than twenty thousand supporters ralled in Guatemala City to back Sandra Torres’ right to run for office and for the constitutional ban on immediate family members running for public office to be lifted. This week she's suing the Guatemalan government while Pérez Molina leads in the polls. Seasoned voters shake their heads that in the same week Pérez Molina gains the advantage four soldiers are sentenced to 6,060 years of prison each for their role in the more than 200 people who were killed in the northern village of Dos Erres in 1982 at the height of Guatemala’s civil war.
It's a country of contradictions and of young people -- 70 percent of the population is thirty years old and younger, flexing new online muscle. They've created their own groups online to educate and support one another during this at times disillusioning electoral process. Some of the groups we've found and are conducting outreach to are:
“Pilas con tu voto”
“Ni tiranos que escupan tu faz”
Cambio X Guate
Elecciones 502
Política para Jóvenes
VotoXGuate
ProLideres
Esto Es Guate
Politica Stereo
Others work directly with The Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, Asociación Renacimiento, ARGOS Association, organizations that are trusted within the indigenous rural communiites in Guatemala. The trek for many of them will be long, it will involve various buses and a trip that many of them have never made to Guatemala City. But the fact that they want to come is hope itself.
Posted by HablaCentro Comunidad on 08/07/11
