BlackNotBlack.com

Menchú Munched in Guatemalan Election

Newsflash from my former home: businessman Alvaro Colom was declared winner of Guatemala’s hotly contested presidential election. His main opposition was Otto Perez Molina, a former army general who had pledged to fight crime with an iron fist. Sunday's vote was actually a runoff between the two top contenders of a previous balloting. In that vote, way down at the bottom of the tally, was Rigoberto Menchú (pictured), a Mayan whose activism and writings won her the Nobel Peace Prize back in 1992, the Prince of Asturias Award in ’98, and won her exactly diddly-squat this year. I'm disappointed in my ex-countrymen, to say the least. Not that I expected Menchú to win, but I certainly hoped she'd garner more than 3% of the vote. I keep trying to spin it one way or another, but 3% is a humbling defeat and that's all there is to it.

Perhaps my understanding of politics is upside down, but personally I would sooner expect a general or a businessman to get 3% of the vote when facing off against a Nobel Prize winner. What’s more, Menchú is Mayan. When you consider that Guatemala is 41% Mayan (as of the 2002 census) her poor showing is especially mystifying. According to a poll conducted earlier this year by Vox Latina and published in Guate’s Prensa Libre, 71.2% of respondents felt that an indigenous person could be elected president. It happened in Bolivia, so the precendent had been set in another country with a sizable indigenous population. But within the privacy of the voting booth, a dramatically opposite story unfolded in Guatemala.

Political and social analysts have, of late, agreed that polls often produce spurious results. This was certainly such a case. It is a medium that deals in hypotheses, after all, not facts. Polls asking about people’s beliefs are particularly apt to disconnect from reality. The question presented in the Guatemala poll was worded thusly: Do you think an indigenous person can be elected president in Guatemala? Upon inspection, the query is more about high ideals than actual voting preferences. And of course the question says nothing about electing a female candidate. Having lived in Guatemala, it is easy for me to imagine that many voters were reluctant to back Menchú for this reason, ridiculous though it may be. It is also possible that, even in a country where there are more than a dozen political parties, brand loyalty prevented people from supporting Menchú’s shiny new coalition.

As for her shiny Nobel Prize—it clearly didn’t impress. In the United States, an honor like the Nobel is denounced by foam-flecked partisan commentators as a political ploy, but in Latin America these types of awards usually possess only positive value. Óscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, has a Peace Prize on his mantel, and its presence there helped get him elected. However, several details of Menchú’s life story came under scruntiny, and these led to some calls to revoke her Prize. In the end, the Nobel committee concluded, quite rightly, that a few inconsistencies in the inspiring tapestry of a life are not sufficient to revoke a recipient's Prize. And there is no besmirching Menchú's activism—her works are public record. I can’t offer any insight on whether the scandal-mongering hurt her campaign, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that when you get 3% of the vote, it didn’t help.

The good news for Menchú is that, at only fifty three years of age, she will probably be around for the next election. This year’s winner finally succeeded in his third try, and it’s likely Menchú will need at least that many to have a chance. Now that she has entered the political arena, her profile should continue to rise, and Mayans will probably become more comfortable thinking of her as something other than an activist and author. She will certainly need them to, because social division in Guatemala runs deep and it’s unlikely that even the smallest fraction of non-indigenous voters would cast a ballot for her.

Labels: guatemala, Rigoberto Menchu

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 3:37 PM