A couple of weeks ago Marcos Antil, a Guatemalan businessman and migrant to the United States, made the case in the press for disrupting the status quo in Guatemala.
Disruption — a term that has moved from English into Spanish — is about abrupt change. Antil is not calling for violence, but rather to innovate by occupying the spaces the powerful have overlooked in their effort to maintain the status quo.
Not so long ago, a well-known intellectual from the Guatemalan traditional elite illustrated the opposite: she called for Cicig, the UN-backed justice and anticorruption entity, to act “discreetly” in cases involving business leaders from the national oligarchy. Even now she is derided for her call not to rock the boat while her own people were at the helm, even if corrupt. Antil’s path is very different. While still young he escaped Guatemala’s poverty through migration. And in doing so he also grew up in a context of effective competition, radically different from the narrow environment maintained by the Guatemalan business elite.
Today Antil’s call to action is increasingly relevant. The White House calls forcefully for addressing the “root causes of migration” in Central America, and the term (or at least the catchphrase) fashionably spreads like wildfire among Washington’s intelligentsia. Picture them — politicians, diplomats and talking heads— stake in hand, poking away as they search for these roots, while the fruits of migration, Antil himself a case in point, fall juicy and ripe on their foolish heads.
Picture them, stake in hand, poking away as they search for these roots, while the fruits of migration, Antil himself a case in point, fall juicy and ripe on their foolish heads.
But his call highlights that the key is in the economy. Not in the simplistic sequence of promoting trade, creating jobs, providing income and —hey presto!— retaining migrants. This will only lead down the path (or rather off the cliff) that US trade and international assistance representatives are already enthusiastically embarking on in Guatemala: doing more business with the same old partners. And thus ever to obtain the same results.
The key is in doing new business that can translate into new politics. Not only do you need to close new deals with new entrepreneurs, but their new money must be turned into new political power. Politics and the economy go together. The Guatemalan oligarchy understood this a long time ago: even as they beg for excuses they continue funding corrupt politicians and co-opting 58 boards of directors in Guatemalan public agencies to guarantee the perpetual efficacy of their policy of no change in anything, ever. And more recently it has been understood by their current challengers in organized crime: it isn’t enough to produce new wealth through drug trafficking. Some of the money must go to financing politics. And the outcome is obvious: they now own a machinery that includes political parties, legislators, public officials, lawyers and henchmen and is almost impossible to root out of the Guatemalan state.
No doubt, dealing with corruption is a task that must be resumed to overcome the US’s first strike (in the baseball sense), when Trump clumsily abandoned Cicig when it had to face the corrupt Morales government in Guatemala. It will at least help close the door on the past. But of greater importance in looking forward is building new political options. And this requires money. Otherwise, as the Guatemalan legislature’s leadership shows, there will always be new options for corruption, each one more crooked than the last.
Obviously the US should not and could not finance politics in Guatemala, even if the goal were progress and justice. But it can help build the conduits through which resources can flow between progressive Guatemalan entrepreneurs and business leaders on the one hand, and progressive young Guatemalan politicians on the other. Encouraging such rapprochement could help avoid a second US strike (again in the baseball sense) in Guatemala.
Perhaps the US’s role in Guatemala at this point should be providing therapy against fear. Guatemalan “dissident” business leaders need to overcome the dread that their reactionary peers instilled in them (documented in detail by Alejandra Colom and abundantly commented on in Plaza Pública). Above all — and the good news is this would work even if they haven’t finished their cup of relaxing tea — they must overcome their mistrust and invest in political alternatives to the usual pseudo-conservative politicians that blanket the political stage in Guatemala. To be clear, this is what will matter in less than 3 years: Guatemala will not improve if Guatemalan politics don’t change. And the politics won’t change unless people vote in large numbers for a full slate of new and clean politicians who are not part of the corrupt compact that has been in power at least since 1996, that collection of pretend political parties and candidates for sale to the highest bidder who have governed the country over at least its last four administrations. But make no mistake: without money no one except that same bunch of crooks is going to win any elections here. We have been warned.
Illustration: Ripe fruit – figs (2020, own image).
Original in Plaza Pública
