Ellen shared with us news from Guatemala this week. Guatemala’s center-left political party, which won the presidency partly with votes from rural areas like Izabal, lost its presidential candidate for the fall election when Sandra Torres, recently divorced from the current president, was ruled ineligible to run. The 1990s Guatemalan constitution bans family members from succeeding as president and the court said that Torres – who blatantly got divorced from President Colom so she could run for president – was married to Colom for most of his term, and so it didn’t matter that they just got divorced. This virtually insures that the party of the right will win the presidential election. (Torres is pictured above on a banner carried last week by disappointed supporters.)
Already, Pastor Gerardo, in a rare mention of national politics, had indicated that the mission church in western El Estor, at El Chupon, that his church helped start, will lose its land, apparently if the party of the right wins the election. Late last week , the Guatemalan paper that Ellen reads reported – indirectly – that the beneficiary of such a land confiscation when not be a Canadian company, but instead a Middle Eastern company, which has just bought the Lake Izabal mining operation (pictured below).
The media has also reported other harrowing long-term news: the growing power of a Mexican drug cartel in Guatemala, including in Guatemalan politics (linked with rampant violence in Guatemala, including the recent killing of a famed Argentine singer); and the one-two punch of global recession and rising commodity (including food and energy) prices in Guatemala (as elsewhere) (coupled at times with bad weather).
--Perry
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