Last week in these pages, I published an excerpt from my new book RESISTING THE RIGHT, which describes how to stop the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and—in the worst case scenario—how to push back against a right wing autocracy should our efforts fail and MAGA Republicans succeed in regaining power.

The book surveys the various arenas in which that pro-democracy campaign can unfold, from protest and civil disobedience to economics, the press, religion, public health, the arts, and simple interpersonal interaction, among others. Notwithstanding the title, it also explains why “resistance” is the wrong word—and wrong mindset—for that effort.

I’ve recently learned of a case study in exactly that process, in Guatemala, whose people have, remarkably, evicted a vicious and entrenched right wing dictatorship by means of precisely those methods.

“Over the past six months,” writes the Montreal-based Venezuelan journalist Quico Toro, an “unlikely coalition of urban professionals and Indigenous people has pulled off something extraordinary,” ousting from power an oppressive kleptocratic regime that had kept the country under its boot for 27 years. “Guatemalans have made an audacious gambit to take their government back,” Toro reports, “And against all odds, they’re winning.”

I am not an expert on Guatemala; what I know about the country could fit in a thimble, with room to spare. Most of this information comes from a piece Mr. Toro wrote for The Atlantic called “How to Defeat a Mafia State.” But if his reportage is correct, at a time when many of us in the USA are contemplating the very real threat of a neo-fascist Christian nationalist regime seizing power in our own country, the Guatemalan model gives us hope, and shows how a determined populace can defeat even the ruthless and dug-in autocracy.

After a week when Vladmir Putin openly murdered Alexander Navalny ahead of another coronation election in Russia, and Donald Trump brazenly promised to deploy the US military within the United States to set up concentration camps on the southern border, and the Supreme Court of Alabama gave us a preview of the fundamentalist theocracy it would like to install, quoting Bible verses by way of declaring that a frozen embryo is a human being, we can use all the inspiration we can get.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

For 36 years, beginning in 1960, Guatemala endured a horrific civil war that took the lives of some 200,000 people at the hands of a military trained and equipped with US taxpayer dollars. “At the height of the violence,” Toro writes, “from 1981 to 1983, the Guatemalan army committed more than 600 massacres,” on behalf of what he calls “the same tiny white elite that’s controlled Guatemala since colonial times.” About 83% of those murdered were from the country’s Mayan peoples. Forcing those Indigenous people out of the country was an explicit goal of the military campaign, “which is why 1.7 million Americans today are of Guatemalan origin.”

After the war ended in 1996, the same officer corps that had committed and directed those atrocities took control of the government, forming what was colloquially known as the pacto de corruptos, or “pact of the corrupt.”

Despite the trappings of democracy—a typical trick of tyrannies—every aspect of Guatemalan governance was under the control of this junta, including all the major political parties, the courts, and the media. Elections were rigged to keep opposition candidates disqualified. Graft and corruption were endemic, with the money all flowing to those in power. Toro:

Guatemala was arguably an excellent example of what the Venezuelan writer Moisés Naím calls a “mafia state”—a country run by a criminal syndicate focused mostly on enriching itself…..

A nested set of criminal enterprises thoroughly colonized the state, infiltrating not just the government, but the courts, the election authorities, and crucially, the powerful office of the public prosecutor.

Of special note: one of the reasons the pacto was able to come to power was because of a broad amnesty after the war that allowed even the guiltiest and most blood-soaked actors to avoid consequences. South African-style truth and reconciliation was rejected in favor of a Spanish style “pact of forgetting.” As former US Representative Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who was a special adviser for the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, told The New York Times, countries that have suffered national trauma and “skip the accountability phase end up repeating 100 percent of the time—but the next time the crisis is worse. People who think that the way forward is to brush this under the rug seem to have missed the fact that there is a ticking time bomb under the rug.”

America: take note.

WHEN THE LEVEE BROKE

After almost twenty years of the pacto’s monstrous rule, popular disgust reached critical mass in 2015 when protests broke out over the outrageous corruption of President Otto Pérez Molina, formerly a general in the Guatemalan army.

During those protests, a tiny group of about twenty academics began meeting quietly to discuss what could be done. Toro describes a debate between one faction—led by a 22-year-old student leader called Samuel Pérez—that argued for forming a political party to challenge the pacto at the ballot box, and another—comprised of older dissidents—who argued for raising money abroad to finance “grassroots democracy-building initiatives.”

The former ultimately carried the day, creating a center-left party dubbed Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) that set about painstakingly gathering enough signatures, one by one, to get on the ballot—no mean feat for a movement that was largely white, urban, and intellectual in a country that Toro describes as mostly conservative, Indigenous, and rural, comprised primarily of small farmers.

One might think seeking an electoral solution in a country so wantonly corrupt and controlled by a criminal elite would be naïve beyond belief. It certainly seemed that way at first.

In 2019 Semilla won a mere seven seats in Guatemala’s 160-seat congress, garnering just 5% of the vote. Even that level of success was astounding.

Four years later, the party ran as its presidential candidate a sociology professor and former diplomat named Bernardo Arévalo who had led the opposing faction in those early dissident conclaves back in 2015. (He was also the son of the country’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, who took office in 1945 after a popular uprising overthrew Guatemala’s US-backed dictator Jorge Ubico.) Bernardo Arévalo, Toro writes, “was seen as an intellectual’s intellectual—mild-mannered, precise with language, moderate to the bone. He was also, alas, utterly obscure. A poll taken one month before the first round of the election had him pulling 0.7 percent of the vote.”

But that very obscurity proved to be a superpower.

The government had already found ways to disqualify all the other opposition presidential candidates. But Arévalo’s exceptionally low profile allowed him to slip through the cracks. Opposition voters rallied around him and last June he placed second in the first round of voting, stunning everyone, Arévalo and Semilla included.

In the runoff six weeks later, he was to face the former first lady, Sandra Torres, who was widely reviled. Shocked to find himself favored to win, Arévalo was subjected to lawsuits from the ruling party “challenging Semilla’s party registration on technicalities before judges they controlled.” It was another dose of the very corruption that had disgusted Guatemalans in the first place.

Let’s let Toro take it from here:

A judge closely linked to the pacto quickly handed down a ruling disqualifying Arévalo from the runoff. The move provoked outrage around Guatemala and a strong response from the United States and the European Union, which condemned it as a threat to democracy.

In fact, the pacto had blundered spectacularly: Nothing could have burnished Arévalo’s anti-corruption bona fides like their panicked attempt to sideline him. Pressure to allow him to run in the second round proved too much for the regime. The country’s top court reversed the decision and allowed Arévalo to stand. He won with a crushing 61 percent of the valid vote.

Like father, like son.

But in a funhouse mirror version of the US election of 2020, Guatemala’s powerful prosecutor general María Consuelo Porras, the equivalent of the US attorney general, brought repeated, spurious legal actions claiming Arévalo’s victory was a fraud. “People seethed at this slow-motion coup attempt,” Toro writes.

Hmmm. Déjà vu all over again.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE HIGH TECH CAVALRY

As we have observed, modern tyrannies are keen to use the mufti of genuine democracy—“free” elections, the illusion of an independent press, a kangaroo court system—as camouflage. (Putin’s is the leading example.) But those ploys can create openings that pro-democracy forces can exploit, as Semilla did. And when they do, the bastards usually drop the act, and their gloves. Which is exactly what happened in Guatemala.

It was at that point that by-the-book electoral politics on behalf of democracy passed the baton to something more visceral and outlaw, yet still non-violent.

It happened in a small city called Totonicapán, 120 miles west of the capital of Guatemala City, 98 percent of whose residents are from the K’iche’ Maya people, who had been brutally oppressed during the decades of war. A local NGO known as the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán launched what Toro calls “one of the most consequential campaigns of civil disobedience in Central American history.”

Totonicapán protesters flooded into Guatemala City, sparking copycat protests from other Maya groups and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans. Over the first three weeks of October last year, Indigenous demonstrators more or less shut down the country, blocking key roads around the capital and staging marches to demand that the prosecutor general and the judge who had originally disqualified Arévalo resign, and calling for the president-elect to be allowed to take office.

This was not some symbolic spasm of outrage, but a sustained act of disciplined defiance that carried on at length, making the government feel the pain. “People put their lives on hold for weeks to support the protests, sleeping out in the open at sites hundreds of kilometers from their home and living on handouts organized by local sympathizers.”

Then came the force multipliers, as the term of art goes, both in the form of modern technology and of international pressure.

“A little army of Semilla Gen Z activists documented the whole thing on TikTok,” Toro writes. “Their social-media game was exceptional, mobilizing support against the coup far beyond the K’iche’ Maya group that had launched it,” marking a “kind of cross-community cooperation—Indigenous rural Guatemalans teaming up across the ethnic divide with Spanish-speaking city people—(that) is rare in Guatemala.” (And not just in Guatemala, says I.)

And the anger of the people prompted action from the muckity-mucks.

Amid this outpouring of popular anger, the Biden administration led an international coalition in a diplomatic offensive. The US sanctioned Prosecutor General Porras for “Involvement in Significant Corruption.” The EU followed suit. That outside pressure in turn prompted Guatemala’s business elite, who were not leftists by nature, to side with Arévalo, an unprecedented move. The sight of the country’s top business leaders “calling for the same thing as radical Indigenous street protesters felt positively surreal—an unimaginable coalition between people long assumed to have nothing to say to each other.”

At this point, the pacto had truly become desperate to hang on to power by any means necessary, which by then were the only means available.

In another echo of the US in 2020, “(t)he pacto tried to derail the transfer of power right up to inauguration day, including a last-minute decision to bar Semilla representatives from leadership roles in congress.” Pacto congressmen delayed—and tried to stop—Arévalo’s installation in office, just as MAGA congressman tried to stop Joe Biden’s. After a tense, nine-hour delay, Arévalo was sworn into office in the wee hours of Monday January 15, 2024, as Guatemalans all over the country stayed up late to watch the historic moment on TV. The former student leader Samuel Pérez, now 31 and newly elected as the head of  the Guatemalan congress just hours before, himself administered the oath of office.

Back in 2015, Arévalo thought Semilla might never get off the ground for lack of Indigenous support. Today he owes his presidency to the Indigenous groups who mobilized to support him, especially the K’iche’ Maya of Totonicapán. The day after he was sworn in, Arévalo and his vice president took part in a Maya ritual to invoke the deities’ protection on his behalf.

GREEK TO ME

Toro writes that, “Semilla appears to have pulled off a master class in how to achieve a bloodless liberal revolution in the 21st century.” And how did it do that, against all odds? Through a stalwart combination of approaches and methods:

• Grass roots organizing
• Conventional electoral politics
• Use of the courts and justice system
• Civil disobedience
• High tech social media
• International pressure
• Economic levers

What Guatemala’s pro-democracy movement did not do was resort to force, or give in to a feeling of powerlessness, resignation, or despair. And perhaps above all, it did not surrender to its enemies’ self-serving and deceptive presentation of themselves as invincible.  

All these avenues of pro-democracy agitation are covered in detail in RESISTING THE RIGHT.

At the heart of this entire campaign was the discipline, strategic thinking, and dedication of Semilla and its leaders. But the party succeeded only because the masses of ordinary Guatemalan citizens rallied to its cause.

Because that’s what demos kratia means: the power of the people.

We in the United States can take a lesson from what the people of Guatemala did as we confront the threat of a similarly repressive right wing regime on our own shores.  “To beat back mafia states, democratic forces have to build coalitions across divides that feel permanent,” Toro writes. “Guatemalans are showing the way, with a mixture of political daring and prudence, pragmatic coalition building and moral zeal, as well as plenty of good luck.”

It remains to be seen if Semilla can hold onto power against a foe that has repeatedly demonstrated its ruthlessness, shamelessness, and overt criminality. It won’t be until October 2024 that the pacto-affiliated justices of Guatemala’s Supreme Court are off the bench, while the pro-fascist attorney general Porras will remain in office until the end of 2026, which as Toro notes, puts every Semilla minister “just one slipup away from jail.” Not to be a buzzkill, but it also remains to be seen if Semilla can maintain its integrity and principle now that it’s in charge. Many an idealistic movement has failed in that regard.

As Toro writes, “Their fight is far from over. But as of right now, Semilla is winning.”

We can too.

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Thank you to Quico Toro for his excellent article. I wish all my blog posts could be so effortlessly cannibalized from the reportage of others.

Photo: Agence France-Presse / Johan Ordóñez

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