The people have risen up, and according to Alida Vicente, a Pokomam leader from Palín, a municipality in the department of Escuintla, Guatemala, will not take “even one step back.”
The major news networks are ignoring or minimizing the scale of the uprising of the indigenous and mestizo people, despite the fact that the mobilization in towns and popular neighborhoods is growing every day, demanding the removal of corrupt officials and confronting the most rotten of the business elite and narcopolitics, which is determined to prevent the inauguration of the elected president Bernardo Arévalo.
What began as a citizen's repudiation of malicious litigation and in favor of the result of the vote at the polls, is becoming a historic claim against the corrupt and abusive minority.
“Guatemala is not their farm,” says Alida Vicente, and unlike the urban and middle-class leadership of the October 1944 Revolution, the current uprising is led by indigenous women and men, subject to the mandate of their bases and their assemblies.
This is an important indication that the old model of regressive modernization known as La Patria del Criollo, according to the title of the book by historian Severo Martínez Peláez, is coming to an end.
The elite continues to behave like the occupier, ruthlessly crushing any attempt at social reform and citizen democracy.
It is clear that beyond malicious litigation and the removal of corrupt officials, Guatemalan narco-feudalism is facing a coalition of poor people from the city and the countryside, as well as people from the middle classes, professionals and university students, who yearn to return to the path of the nationalist revolution of 1944.
That of course includes many of the two million Guatemalan workers in the United States who are prevented from voting and whose remittances sustain the national economy.
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