GUATEMALA: Rios Montt Loses Another Political Battle

By Fabiana Frayssinet Reprint | | Print |

Fabiana Frayssinet

GUATEMALA CITY, Jun 28 1995 (IPS) - The president of the Guatemalan Congress, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, lost another political battle after being banned from running as presidential candidate for the November general elections.

The Supreme Electoral Court (SEC) prohibited the general from running for the presidency because he had headed a de facto military regime.

Rios Montt had attempted to invalidate the reelection of the SEC judges and replace them with others affiliated with his party – the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) – who would allow him to run for president, opposition politicians charged.

The general had protested that the SEC had called elections for Nov. 12 without taking into account the results of the 1994 census, which had not yet been officialised.

“In defending the SEC judges, the Constitutional Court rescued the country’s beseiged institutional order, and made the clumsy Congressional coup-mentality plot fail,” editorialised the influential dialy ‘Siglo Veintiuno’ on Wednesday.

“The leaders of the FRG should begin to understand that the nation…is not willing to tolerate legal fiddling to satisfy sectarian or personal interests,” wrote ‘Prensa Libre’, the country’s most widely distributed daily.

This is not the first political battle lost by the former dictator, who is accused by human rights groups of being responsible for one of the most bloodily repressive periods in Guatemalan history, 1982 to 1983, when entire villages of indigenous peasants were massacred.

Last week, the FRG attempted to involve its principal rival, the also right-wing National Advance Party (PAN), in a scandal, by airing cassettes that revealed financial ties between that party and the government of Ramiro De Leon.

But the attempt backfired. The FRG was accused of having illegally wiretapped telephone lines to obtain the recordings.

“The FRG has undoubtedly fallen into desperation, faced with the uncertainty that surrounds the candidacy of its leader,” stated the daily ‘La Republica’.

That same desperation allegedly led Rios Montt to stage an attack with explosives against his own residence early this month, other analysts have claimed.

The general also failed in his call to the population to stage pacific resistance against the government, which was declared illegal.

Prior to May, Rios Montt, an evangelical minister, was poll favourite for the upcoming elections.

More recent opinion polls, which the FRG has called fraudulent, put him in second place after the National Advance Party.

The FRG has 41 of the country’s 80 seats in Congress, compared to the 26 held by the PAN.

In the upcoming elections, Guatemalans will vote for president, vice-president, 80 legislators, 20 deputies for the Central American Parliament and more than 300 mayors.

So far, 28 parties have registered, while the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity has said it will vote for a “democratic front” that has not yet been formed.