President-elect calls for unity and proposes alliances
Guatemala City, November 7, ec/mb/jm (AFP): Right-wing general Otto Pérez, elected president of Guatemala on the promise of a 'firm hand' against the crime which is overwhelming the country, called this Monday for the forging of agreements in a congress fragmented into different factions and in which his Patriotic Party holds a third of the seats.
Pérez, a military counterinsurgency specialist during the years of the civil war that left 200,000 dead, won the second electoral round with 53.7 per cent of the vote against right-wing businessman Manuel Baldizón, who promised to impose the death penalty and who received 46.3 per cent of the ballots.
The president-elect, who inherits a country heading for bankruptcy, said that he would ask the legislature for fiscal reform that could raise tax revenue from 10 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 14 per cent, an increase that opposition parties, including his, denied to outgoing president Álvaro Colom.
“I am optimistic and I am setting out that I would hopefully like the tax burden to reach 14 per cent. This is an effort that we have to make,” Pérez asserted, adding that he would have to administrate a budget with a projected deficit of 3 per cent of GDP.
In the same breath, Pérez declared war on the drug cartels operating in that country. “I would say to those drug-trafficking groups that they are going to find a president determined to regain control of the territory,” he declared.
“We will talk to the factions which are disposed to prioritize, put the interests of Guatemala first and leave personal interests aside,” he said.
Pérez, a military man accustomed to speaking bluntly, a habit acquired over 34 years of barracks life, will have to weave multiple parliamentary alliances, given that he only has 54 of the 158 seats in the unicameral Congress at his disposal.
The second parliamentary force is the outgoing social-democratic governing party of the Une-Gana (Unite-Win) coalition, which with its 47 seats aspires to put the issues of malnutrition, poverty and employment in the centre of debate once more.
The Guatemalan electoral campaign was centred on the obsession with insecurity, occasioned in good measure by organised crime and and drug trafficking which has translated to 48 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, or six times the global average.
Roxana Baldetti, who becomes the first woman vice-president in the history of this country, attested that they were receiving “a destroyed, indebted country, a country that like never before in history, nor in the worst moment of internal armed confrontation, had crime levels that it has today.”
Violence even displaced as a campaign issue Guatemala's gigantic social debt, characterised by the 50 per cent of the population in poverty – among them 1.3 million children under five years and – with 15 per cent malnourished and two million illiterate.
“Allow us different ideas, let us unite around the points of agreement that we have to work jointly and get Guatemala out of this so lamentable crisis which we are experiencing,” Pérez begged.
But despite the appeal from “the general” as his followers call him, defeated candidate Baldizón avowed that he had now become “the leader of the the opposition.”
“The challenge for this government is to restore financial order to the state, because the outgoing government is going to leave some budgetary deficit levels at the most critical levels in history,” Phillipe Chicola, one of the directors of the powerful Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Finance Associations (CACIF) told the AFP.
The president-elect should replace Colom on January 14, who, lacking in resources, failed to resolve Guatemala's gigantic social debt or to combat the drug-smuggling which uses his country as the route for 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.
Translated by James Tweedie (tweedie.james@gmail.com)