Revolution Rebooted

Guatemalans have lately taken to the streets, not to perpetrate a new revolution but to defend the gains they are still owed from that original one in 1944.

At stake, their sovereign right to pick their leaders via suffrage, seemingly threatened imminently by a cabal of public officials and their faciliators.

In demonstrating their resistance to perceived abuses of power, chapines have had to traverse a narrow path, eschewing violence, and even though they are protecting a democratic decision already ‘banked’, there’s a need to avoid overtly partisan politics in this protest.

Such is the history of this country that many disadvantaged sectors have only a restricted range of options for resistance, and the favoured tactic thus far has been the roadblock.

Yesterday, a report was rapidly replicating online of the foreign-born owner of a micro-brewery at the edge of town — Cervecería 14 — who had purportedly confronted demonstrators aggressively, referring to them as “imbeciles”.

One can chuckle at this archetypal PR kamikaze attack, but it’s illustrative of some wider points. In the free world, of which this nation aspires to be a part, complete with a transparent, mature democracy, everyone is entitled to an opinion. I have friends here who oppose the blockades, largely because of the economic stranglehold they impose, and they should feel free to voice such views.

Yet the situation is both delicate and historically complex, and thus related interventions probably need to be shorn of all malice and fallacy, even if such speech is implicitly permitted up in el Norte.

Having experienced the Estallido Social in Chile up close, I can point to how there was some frenetic violence “on both sides” (there's that newly-modish term again) and extensive damage to private property, along with an us-n-them vibe which informed a gathering radicalisation of the revolt and expanding social confrontation.

This is NOT what most reasonable people wish to see happen here, and individuals with rather narrow vested interests, especially foreigners, would be best advised to respect the struggle undertaken by a majority of the people of this country and to share some of the sacrifices apparently required.

It's hard to pinpoint a contemporary example from around Latin America suggesting that tyranny is good for business in the long term anyway.

I am fairly certain the speaker above is María Mercedes Coroy, the actress known for Ixcanul, La Llorona and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (@mariamercedescoroy)

 

Although born in Tapachula, shew grew up on the flank of Agua in Santa María de Jesús. The traje típico seen here could be the clincher.

More than anything, what has distinguished the popular uprising of 2023 in Guatemala compared to say 1944 or indeed 2015, is the way that the national conscience has been nurtured and conveyed by the nation’s ancestral communities.

The Maya have a long history of near unconquerability. Before those earliest Spanish expeditions from Cuba reached what is now Veracruz, they were beaten off at several locations along the opposite coast of the Yucatán and Mayan resistance to the Conquest would persist in several forms into the Modern era, most notably the Caste Wars, ending 1915.