More Poll Numbers and Guatemala Links

According to a new poll from El Periodico and Borge y Asociados, Otto Perez Molina maintains a comfortable (30%) lead over his nearest competitors. Forty-nine percent of those polled intend to vote for Perez, 18% for Manuel Baldizon, 12% for Eduardo Suger, and 4% for Harold Caballeros.

Nuestro Diario's most recent poll has Perez with 46%, Baldizon with 21%, and Suger with 15%

It looks like a toss-up heading into Sunday's contest - Perez will win in the first round or he and Baldizon will advance to a November runoff.

Congress will be an interesting race especially because ~20% still don't know who they are going to vote for.

• Partido Patriota 33.1%
• LIDER 9.3
• UNE 6.8
• Creo 5.6
• Viva 4.6
• UCN 2.3
• Unionista 1.3
• GANA 1.2
• FRG 1.2
• PAN 0.6
• Winaq 0.5
• EG 0.4
• Victoria 0.3
• CASA 0.1
• None 12%

It looks like most of these political parties will disappear unless they win a departmental congressional seat.

Here are more links and things of interest.

Guatemala Elections: Mapping the Threat from Organized Crime

Manuel Baldizon has his own polling that indicates he is only 2% points behind General Perez

Nearly 80% think that their fellow citizens do not know who they are voting for.

Consumers of illegal drugs share the blame for drug-related violence and killings, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has told BBC Mundo.

Guatemala's next president will inherit a bankrupt country.

In recent years, the last six months have been more violent than the first six months. Therefore, Guatemala is more likely to see its murder rate equal or slightly surpass last year's rate. 

Finally, here's another extended campaign video from Rigoberta Menchu and the Frente Amplio. Menchu's support came in at 1.4% in the El Periodico poll and 1.8% in the Nuestro Diario poll.

The Frente Amplio and Final Polling Numbers

Bob Briton has an interview with the URNG-MAIZ's representative in Australia, Ovidio Orellana. In the interview, Orellana discusses how the forces on the left (URNG-MAIZ, ANN, Winaq, and MR) came together to form the leftist Broad Front, the party's concern with the social, economic and environmental effects of mining operations, and its concern with an administration led by General Otto Perez Molina. 

Orellana also discusses the importance of selecting Rigoberta Menchu Tum, an indigenous woman, as its presidential candidate. 

The decision taken by the assembly that the candidate for president has to be Rigoberta Menchú was a good one. It is important for the people of the country that the candidate should be an Indigenous woman. She has lived with heavy discrimination and racism her whole life and, as is well known, in 1992 she won the Nobel Peace Prize. She is an important figure. So she was nominated as the presidential candidate with Aníbal García as vice-president.

Unfortunately, I still don't think that selecting her was a wise decision. In the poll just released by Siglo XXI and Vox Latina, Menchu has so far been able to capture 1.1% of the national vote. That's well below the 3% she received in 2007 and is really disappointing following Sandra Torres' removal from the race. The Frente Amplio must have expected some bump in support from those on the left and in the rural areas of the country that had initially supported Torres' candidacy.

In today's poll, Otto Perez Molina's support (45%) dropped eight points from July's poll, but he still leads by a comfortable margin over his nearest competitors. Manuel Baldizon (22.5%) of LIDER has picked up much of Torres' support and now has separated himself from Eduardo Suger of CREO (18.4%) for second place. While Perez can win a first round victory with over 50% of the vote, it still looks likely that a runoff will be needed to decide Guatemala's next president.

In terms of breaking down some of the poll numbers, Perez leads in support among 

• those between the ages of 18-35 (47%), 
• those with lower education levels (only primary - 57%), 
• women (46%) 
• urban areas (46%), and 
• ladinos (46%).

Baldizon leads in support among the indigenous (38%), but it's unclear what support Perez has among the same population.

While anything can happen in the next few days, the smart money is on a runoff between Perez and Baldizon in November.

No to General Otto Perez Molina

JUICIO Y CASTIGO PARA OTTO PEREZ MOLINA (URNG Facebook)

Manuel Baldizon is also warning about a return to dictatorship should the Guatemalan people elect Otto Perez Molina of the Patriotic Party.

Meanwhile, Francisco Mauricio Martinez at Prensa Libre has several additional examples as to why it has been a disappointing campaign in Guatemala in Illegally in Search of Power. His take is pretty consistent with mine from yesterday (A Trying Campaign in Guatemala).

A Trying Campaign in Guatemala

I really can’t say that current electoral campaign is a step forward for Guatemalan democracy.

In  terms of the presidential candidates, front runner Otto Perez Molina of the Patriotic Party is an alleged war criminal from the country's civil war years and a person who retains close ties to hidden powers in the postwar period. I always thought that given what we’d read about Perez, he would have been on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala’s (CICIG) radar. Now, there’s a good chance that he’ll be president.

The candidate person with the second most electoral support, Sandra Torres of the National Unity for Hope (UNE) and Grand National Alliance (GANA) coalition, is constitutionally barred from competing because her relationship with President Alvaro Colom violates Article 183 186 (corrected) of the constitution preventing close relatives of the president from running for the presidency. Torres and her family are still rumored to be tied to drug trafficking and money laundering. 

UNE and GANA are two of the country’s largest political parties and account for approximately one-third of the congress’ seats. The two parties have no presidential candidate and their short-lived electoral alliance will likely end in eight days. I wouldn't be surprised if one, if not both, were not around in 2015.

Given that Sandra Torres cannot compete, Manuel Baldizon of LIDER is now running as Perez' main competitor. Baldizon is a politician who offered $61,000 to other members of congress to switch to his new political party LIDER. Offering cash to switch parties is not illegal, but it’s not something that inspires confidence. It speaks to the general weakness of the country’s parties and overall party system. 

Baldízon and his family are also tied to drug trafficking and organized crime in the Peten. Those are still illegal. CICIG anyone? While Baldizon does not believe that he is the messiah, he is perfectly willing to pretend that he is in order to capture votes in next week's contest.

In terms of the country’s political parties, there's not a lot of good to report. Political parties have not devised sophisticated political platforms that are likely to address the country's problems. That's somewhat forgivable as the platform is more of a list of priorities and wish lists rather than a blueprint for governing. 

In addition, the parties didn't bother to adhere to the official start date of this year's campaign. The major political parties could care less about campaign finance laws. They don't report who's providing their campaigns with financial contributions and several have spent well over what is allowed by law. 

Some parties don't even know their candidates. To be fair, approximately 32,000 Guatemalans are running for office next Sunday! I'm not sure if that includes twenty-one mayoral candidates of the leftist Frente Amplio that were rejected because of technicalities.

One of the only good things to characterize this year's campaign is that it is less violent compared to the 2007 campaign in spite of what many of us feared would happen. Even though one mayoral candidate from San José Pinula succeeded in killing two competitors, the overall campaign has seen fewer campaign-related deaths (36) compared the previous election (68). So far, calm prevails in those municipalities that officials were most worried about leading up to next week's vote. 

That's something, but I think that Guatemalans were hoping for more.

Kaibil Sosa to be Extradited to the US

Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes's attempt to block his extradition to the United States failed. On Friday, a Canadian court ruled that he should return to the United States to face charges of lying about prior military service on his immigration application.

Alberta's Chief Justice in Neil Wittmann ruled that Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, 53, should be sent to the US for trial on charges of false statements made in government application forms to become a naturalized American citizen.

Sosa, who was arrested last January while visiting family in Alberta, is also wanted by the Guatemalan government on more serious charges.

In the 1980s he was a member of the military force known as the Kaibiles. In December 1982, Sosa allegedly led a patrol of about 20 men whose mission was to retrieve stolen arms, but instead massacred the entire village of Dos Erres. Most victims were killed with a sledgehammer and women and children were raped before being slain.

Witnesses reported that Sosa tossed a grenade and shot at victims who were thrown into a well, some still alive.

Sosa has thirty days to appeal the decision. Given the recent convictions of four other men involved in the Dos Erres massacre, there's little reason that the US should prosecute Sosa on immigration charges. Send him back to Guatemala to face the more serious charges.   

Guatemala Links

InSight Crime has two pieces on Guatemala Political Party Branded 'Narco' by US: WikiLeaks and Guatemala Anti-Drug Operations Force Refugees into Mexico. Colom insists that the people were evicted peacefully under a judge’s orders.

Keith Slack has Guatemala’s presidential election: A golden opportunity to end mining conflict at Oxfam.

Danilo Valladares discusses some of the positives and negatives of the Colom government’s social programs in All Candidates Jump on the Social Programmes Bandwagon. As the title suggests, all presidential candidates have committed themselves to continuing the programs in some form if elected. What’s not clear is which candidates support the continuation of these programs because they believe that they are important and are working and which candidates support the continuation of the programs because they are popular and might help them at the ballot box. In some ways it doesn’t matter, the programs will continue. On the other hand, the programs might not be a priority for some administrations.

The departments of Chiquimula, Alta Verapaz and Escuintla Launch Anti-Weapon Drive whereby “warlike toys will be collected, destroyed and exchanged for educational ones.”

And in Canada, Accused Guatemalan war criminal [Jorge Vinicio Orantes Sosa] fights extradition to US. Sosa was allegedly involved in the Dos Erres massacre. Should he be deported to the US, he could face up to 15 years in prison for committing a variety of immigration offenses.

Álvaro Arzú (Unionist Party) still leads in the Guatemala City mayoral race, but his competitors Alejando Sinibaldi (Patriotic Party) and Roberto González Díaz-Durán (CREO) are not far behind.

Finally, Guatemalans and foreigners are worried about the uptick in crime and insecurity in Antigua.

Murders increase in El Salvador

According to an article in Inside Costa Rica, 40 people were killed over the weekend in crime-related activities. Unfortunately, the Civilian National Police report that the number of people murdered between January and August 2011 exceeded the same periods in 2009 and 2010. 

During roughly the first nine months of this year, 2,755 people were murdered. That number exceeds the 2,731 murders that occurred during the same period in 2009, "the most violent year of the previous decade, with a total of 4,296 people killed."

Obviously, that's not a good sign. However, it's not necessarily the case that 2011 will be more violent than 2009. It depends on how the last four months play out compared to the last four months of 2009. And even though 24 more people were killed during the first eight months of 2011 compared to the first eight of 2009, the rate per 100,000 is roughly the same once you compensate for population growth. That's not good enough, but it's a little food for thought.