PREVIEW / DEMOCRACY AT RISK : Guatemala in Rights Crisis on Eve of Vote

The most striking feature of Sunday’s presidential election, only the second time Guatemalans will have gone to the polls under an elected government, is not differences between the parties, or vicious rhetoric from the candidates. It is the death count. In Guatemala, negative campaigning means killing opponents.

Americas Watch, a New York-based human rights organization, says the election is being held while “the nation is in the grips of the worst human rights crisis since the military turned over government to civilians in 1986.”

Since July, when campaigning began in earnest, there have been at least 15 political murders. The victims, all directly involved in the campaign, included nine candidates or party leaders, three journalists and two political activists. The Guatemalan Congressional Human Rights office lists another 421 politically related deaths and disappearances so far this year.

There have been no arrests, let alone convictions. Human rights groups blame military units or death squads tolerated by the government for most of the murders. But President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo has dismissed some of the killings as “isolated” incidents with “origins in local issues,” or has blamed them on Guatemala’s tiny leftist guerrilla movement.

‘State Terrorism’

It is rationalizations such as this, viewed as an attempt by the unpopular Cerezo to downplay the human rights violence that has marked his five-year administration, that provokes public scorn and fright.

“We are returning to the dark past . . . when we lived amid virtual state terrorism,” said Cesar Alvarez Guadamuz, assistant director of the Congressional Human Rights Office.

At stake Sunday are the presidency, vice presidency, 116 congressional seats and 300 city halls. If, as expected, none of the 12 presidential candidates achieve a majority, a runoff between the top two finishers will be held Jan. 6.

If there is no military revolt--a risky assumption in a country that has held only three successful elections in its history--the Jan. 13 inauguration will be the first time an elected president has turned over office to an elected successor.

Top Contenders

Of the 12 presidential candidates, only four are important: conservative newspaper owner Jorge Carpio Nicolle of the National Centrist Union; right-wing businessman and former Guatemala City Mayor Alvaro Arzu of the National Advancement Party; one-time military supporter Jorge Serrano Elias of the Solidarity Action Movement, and Alfonso Cabrera Hidalgo of the Christian Democratic Party.

Cabrera is Cerezo’s handpicked candidate and a former foreign minister who is suspected by U.S. drug experts of involvement in the narcotics trade.

The latest public opinion poll puts Carpio ahead with 29% of the vote, followed by Arzu with 22%, then Serrano with 21% and Cabrera with 14%.

What that doesn’t show is the popularity of the candidate who isn’t there, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt.

The one-time leader of a bloody coup, a military dictator and architect of “the Guatemalan solution” for cleansing the country of leftist rebels by killing thousands of presumed sympathizers, Rios Montt is the nation’s most popular politician, according to the polls.

However, he was taken off the ballot by Guatemala’s courts because of a constitutional provision banning from the presidency anyone who had held power as the result of a coup.

Rios Montt’s attraction is based perversely on the bloodiness of his past. Some people are drawn by his call for an unrestrained law-and-order campaign against a surging crime rate.

True to his belief that democracy resides only in his person--”I am democracy here,” he said in a recent interview--Rios Montt has said the election is illegitimate and has called for his followers to nullify ballots by writing in his name. He has issued less than subtle hints that he might try to disrupt the voting violently.

One poll showed that 18% of voters intend to either leave their ballots blank or deface them. As a measure of the support for Guatemala’s infant democracy, this is alarming, particularly since it coincides with another poll indicating that half of the people prefer military rule, while only a third think democracy is the best system for the country.

‘Almost No Differences’

Among the presidential candidates left after Rios Montt’s disqualification, there is little to choose from in policy or ideological terms--”There are almost no differences among us,” is the way Arzu put it--and none has developed a strong personal following.

Given the politicians’ collective fear of the military, which forced Cerezo to cede much of his power to the armed forces after a series of coup attempts, and their shared right-wing economic views, there seems little chance of a change in the country’s two most crushing problems--human rights and one of the most unbalanced distributions of wealth in Latin America.