The people have risen, and according to Alida Vicente, a Pokomam leader from Palín, a municipality in the department of Escuintla, Guatemala, will not take "one step back."
The big news networks are ignoring or minimizing the dimension of the uprising of the indigenous and mestizo people, despite the fact that every day the mobilization grows in towns and popular colonies that demand the removal of corrupt officials and confront the most rotten of the business and of narcopolitics determined to prevent the inauguration of the elected president Bernardo Arévalo.
What began as citizen 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 your farm," says Alida Vicente, and unlike the urban and middle-class leadership of the October Revolution of 1944, 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 that ruthlessly crushes any attempt at social reform and citizen democracy.
It is evident that beyond malicious litigation and the removal of corrupt officials, Guatemalan narco-feudalism faces a coalition of poor people from the city and the countryside, as well as people from the middle classes, professionals and university students, who long to resume the path of the nationalist revolution of 1944.
That of course includes many of the two million working Guatemalans in the United States who are prevented from voting and whose remittances support the national economy.
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