Military Rule Ending; ‘New Era’ Seen : ‘Guatemala Devil’ Dead, President-Elect Pledges

On the eve of elections to return this country to a civilian president, the streets of the capital roared with bonfires and firecrackers as Guatemalans celebrated the annual “Burning of the Devil,” a ritual to exorcise Satan from the path of the Virgin Mary.

Christian Democratic candidate Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, confident that he would win the presidency, spoke fervently that night about ending 31 years of military domination.

“The devil in Guatemala is the past, the inflexible . . . the one who raises ghosts against freedom and democratic participation,” Cerezo said. “Today we burn the devil, and tomorrow we inaugurate a new era in Guatemala.”

The 43-year-old president-to-be vowed to reform the country’s repressive government and to hold together its disintegrating economy. He was bold, elated--cocky, even--in a country where more than 300 of his party activists have been killed for saying less.

But this was the beginning of Cerezo’s moment in history, the culmination of 30 years of work for his centrist party and of his career of political participation. The ambitious Cerezo was about to be chosen to replace a despised military in the ornate National Palace but had yet to slip into the quagmire of national problems. It was a virgin hour.

Cerezo won the presidency by a landslide Sunday and is to be inaugurated Jan. 14 for a five-year term. As president, he will immediately be riding something like a razor’s edge, trying to manage a number of seemingly irreconcilable forces in a country short on patience.

The economy is in shambles. Cerezo must implement fiscal and monetary reforms likely to anger an ultra-rightist business community that already distrusts the Christian Democrats, whose colleagues in El Salvador nationalized the banks. When the outgoing president, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores, tried to impose tax reforms last April, the business community forced him to repeal them.

Half of the country is out of work or barely scraping by in marginal jobs. Many of those who work earn the equivalent of about $1.50 a day. Unions and unorganized workers, who feared that they would be killed if they made too many demands under military rule, now have high expectations with Cerezo.

A Political Opening

Cerezo’s election is taken as a sign that there is a political opening in Guatemala, and the very people who supported him as a symbol of change may well use the opening to strike, demonstrate and demand that the armed forces be held accountable for the thousands of civilians who were killed in the counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrillas.

The tenacious guerrilla movement of an estimated 2,000 rebels is largely contained in the northern highlands now, but it is far from eliminated.

Many of Guatemala’s Indians once supported the guerrillas. Sunday, however, many of them voted for Cerezo, although he has not yet proposed a solution for problems such as landlessness that led them to the insurgency in the first place. Half of Guatemala’s population is Indian, separated from the Spanish-speaking, Western-attired Guatemalans--who are called Ladinos--by language, racism and exploitation.

Need for U.S. Money

Cerezo also faces growing tensions in the rest of Central America, possibly caught between a military establishmnent that wants to remain neutral and the United States, which may want Guatemala to take a harder line against the leftist regime in Nicaragua.

Although Christian Democratic officials insist that they have no indication of U.S. pressure, Guatemala needs U.S. money, and in the cases of neighboring Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica, such aid has coincided with increasing unity against Nicaragua.

While the Guatemalan military has decided to relinquish the presidency to a civilian, it is not known how much power the generals actually will give up.

Cerezo has made it clear that he will not follow Argentine President Raul Alfonsin’s example by prosecuting the military for past human rights abuses. It is uncertain how much the armed forces support Cerezo’s plan to eliminate military-dominated regional planning committees, disband an Interior Ministry secret police force and reduce the military’s abuses.

A Volatile Package

For Cerezo, this package of problems is potentially volatile. If he attempts too many reforms too quickly, he could be ousted by the business community and the military. If he doesn’t make enough changes fast enough, he may be abandoned by the poor and middle classes who supported him.

Some Guatemalans say that his election is the last chance for peaceful change in Guatemala and that the fate of the country lies in the hands of an experienced politician with little experience in governing.

Cerezo is the first to admit that this is a critical time, but he says the responsibility is not his alone. He says that his party, which has never held power, will rely on consultation and consensus with the country’s various sectors.

Failure or Victory

“If we fail, democracy will be finished, and there will be war. If we are triumphant, we will have democracy, and it will be consolidated,” Cerezo said.

“I say ‘We,’ because it is not Vinicio Cerezo. It is a team of people who have been dedicated for a long time. I was just the one lucky enough to become famous only because I survived three of their attempts to kill me,” he said.

Cerezo survived three assassination attempts between 1980 and 1982, he said, when police and gunmen hired by the extreme right tried to kill him with a bomb, a machine gun and a bazooka.

Before that, Cerezo had proven himself to be a political survivor in university politics, against divisions within his own party and against fraudulent elections.

‘Going Against Current’

“He is used to going against the current,” said an independent politician in the capital.

“He was a leader of the Social Christian Student Front (at San Carlos University) when it was dominated by leftists. He was more conservative. He was formed as a politician in a minority position and became president of the association,” the politician said.

Cerezo is a modern, macho, pistol-toting Latin populist with a reputation for womanizing that he seems to nurture rather than dodge. He has blue eyes and a black belt in karate, and he carries a gun because “we live in Guatemala, and we will keep living.”

Friends say that Cerezo, the father of four, is as comfortable in a fancy restaurant as at a tortilla stand, as happy at a ballgame as at a diplomatic function. They say he is gutsy for having stayed in the country to oppose military rule when others fled, but his critics say that he has softened too many of his reformist ideas in order to win.

Political Awakening in 1954

Cerezo describes himself as a nationalistic, professional politician who has been preparing himself to lead the country since he was 12. He says his political awakening came in 1954 when CIA-backed insurgents flew into the capital in U.S.-provided airplanes to overthrow civilian President Jacobo Arbenz.

“I was in a tree watching and crying as U.S. airplanes were circling over the city. I didn’t have a very clear concept of what was happening, but I felt that we were losing the sense of freedom and right, and I decided we should work to recuperate that sense,” he said.

Asked how he felt he could turn to the United States for economic and military aid, Cerezo said, “They’ve owed it to us for a long time.”

He has been secretary general of the Christian Democratic Party, a candidate for mayor and a deputy in congress. Cerezo said that Sunday’s election was the first of five elections since 1970 in which he had worked or run for office and not felt persecuted. He describes his success now “as a dream, and I’m afraid I will wake up.”

A 30-Year History

Cerezo’s election is not just a realization of his dream. The Christian Democratic Party was born out of a student movement at San Carlos University in 1955 and throughout its 30 years has suffered internal splits, external attack, repression and stolen elections.

Rene de Leon Schlotter, 59, one of the founders of the party and likely to be Cerezo’s foreign minister, described several eras of fear and repression, particularly from 1978 to 1982, when the military under the government of Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia killed priests, students, union leaders and anyone suspected of sympathizing with guerrillas, as well as Christian Democrats.

Refugees in His House

“I had refugees from the provinces living here in my house,” De Leon said.

One of those, he said, was killed upon his return to the province of Chimaltenango in 1980, but today his daughter, Ana Maria Xuya, is one of 51 recently elected Christian Democratic deputies in a legislative assembly of 100, and one of the few Indians in the Assembly.

The Christian Democrats on Sunday also won 266 of 330 mayorships, giving them top-to-bottom control of the civilian government. Guatemalans, however, will be watching closely to see if the Christian Democrats can translate that control into civilian power, beginning with President Vinicio Cerezo.

Said a Guatemalan political journalist, “The future of democracy in Guatemala depends on the ability of Vinicio Cerezo.”