Citizen Martínez

The budget just approved in the Guatemalan congress really ought to have set aside a carpet-load of cash for the History department at USAC, just so that there can be future generations of historians of the numerous kind around here who might cherish this document in the manner that it so obviously deserves.

 

 

 

The nature and timing of yesterday's deployment of the Magnitsky law against Miguelito reveals a number of things...

The Yanks understand this individual's unique position of significant insignificance (or is it insignificant significance?) in the political ecology of Guatemala.

Specifically they knew what he was up to three years ago during the pandemic, yet waited for their moment.

This is very much the moment, because of his salient profile, and because, in spite of everything he has written below, it is not really about him at all, but about sending an unmistakeable message to those who are not yet household names.

The US Government has de facto control of the global financial system and it can do whatever it wants no matter how big a tantrum Dr G's concubine throws.

He ought to have known that summary justice without trial is the way this was going to pan out.

Yesterday I started Anthony Beevor's Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-21, and after a chapter or two I have reflected that what really intrigues me about this pivotal moment in Guatemala's own history is how flimsy the incumbent regime's relationship with public opinion appears to be.

Tolstoy thought it was the "icons and cockroaches" of Orthodox belief which were preventing the Russian people from appreciating their situation. And in modern Russia, atop which sits the mother of all kleptocracies, Putin and his associates still pump out the nationalist propaganda (carefully dosed with icons and cockroaches) to provide at least a measure of cover for their greed and opportunism, and to some extent have come to believe some of it themselves.

Miguelito's position is entirely narcissistic. He's a citizen, not a comrade. A fellow citizen in only the most indirect of ways. When he says that Guatemala is first, second and third in his worldview, this is a place devoid of actual Guatemalans.

There is not even the merest semblance of an effort to clog up the righteous popular demand for justice and transparency with some mucilaginous creed. There is not even the merest semblance of an effort to clog up the righteous popular demand for justice and transparency with some mucilaginous creed. This lot hold their countrymen and women in such contempt that they cannot even be bothered to bamboozle them.

The Right has even forfeited the support of the Catholic Church...if not those other opportunistic, venal materialists on the evangelical fringe.