Profile : In Guatemala, a Leader Who Tackles the Abuses : President Serrano has moved to rein in the military, long immune to prosecution. But he faces a dangerous course.

One day last month, Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano flew to the Pacific coast port of San Jose Escuintla to have lunch with the commander of that city’s naval base and the captain of a visiting American warship. By all accounts, Serrano was relaxed and jovial, the center of attention.

Two hours after his helicopter had returned him to the capital, Serrano ordered the arrest of the amiable base commander, Navy Capt. Anibal Giron Arriola, and six of his men, for the Aug. 9 murder of 11 truck drivers and customs agents allegedly engaged in smuggling.

On the surface, the arrests were a major statement by the president of his independence from the country’s traditionally dominant military and the impunity the armed forces have long enjoyed--no matter the crime.

Over the last three years, Guatemalan military, security and private right-wing death squads have killed or kidnaped people at a rate of three a day, with almost no one arrested, let alone punished. It is a level of human rights horror unparalleled in Central America and has brought a virtual end to U.S. military aid to Guatemala.

While the level of deaths and disappearances actually has increased under Serrano, most observers here think he is the first president to try to stop the abuses and punish those committing the murders--something he said was accomplished in arresting Giron.

The reality was a bit harsher. It took three increasingly specific orders for Serrano to get military officials to actually take the accused naval officer into custody, and the result was a short-lived but determined revolt by some of Giron’s men.

The incident showed that for all his reputed determination, the 46-year-old president, eight months in office, still faces a very complex and dangerous course where his every step will probably be opposed by previous supporters used to getting their way. It will be a severe test for a man who friends and foes say dislikes opposition.

“To be fair,” says Jorge Skinner Klee, the head of one of Guatemala’s oldest and most powerful families and a leader of the opposition in Congress, “Serrano is trying to do things. He is rather sophisticated and understands the modern state.”

“The problem with Serrano,” added Skinner Klee, “is his authoritarianism. He wants to be a dictator. He is stubborn, has a mean streak and is very vindictive.”

But to a European diplomat who is close to the president, the stocky, balding Guatemalan leader is “a very thoughtful, very determined, very well-intentioned man. He has made a good start in trying to rein in the army and bring peace to his country.”

The son of one of Guatemala’s most powerful Catholic politicians, Serrano has switched both his religious and political allegiances more than once.

As a young man he joined the centrist Christian Democratic Party, which was the the country’s only cohesive opposition to a series of military governments that had ruled the country for more than 30 years. But by the late 1970s, he found the Christian Democrats too leftist. He helped found a right-wing think tank and in 1982 was named a member of the three-man Council of State under the rightist Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. By 1985, when Guatemala held its first democratic election in more than three decades, Serrano ran for president as a front man for Rios Montt. He was crushed in the first round, receiving only 15% of the vote.

Meanwhile, Serrano was also becoming more fundamentalist in his religious convictions. He first converted to the Baptist faith and then to a Pentecostal sect while a graduate student in the United States. After the 1985 election defeat, Serrano switched to an even more fundamentalist evangelical group.

All the while, Serrano was cultivating influential political contacts throughout the United States and Central America. Thus, this onetime rubber stamp for a bloody dictator became an official observer to ensure the legitimacy of elections in Panama and Nicaragua.

Serrano formed his own political party and, playing down his once proclaimed closeness to the deity, ran for president again, winning a lopsided victory last January on a pro-military, pro-business and anti-American platform.

But for those who predicted an administration that would coddle the armed forces, overlook their bloody human rights record and involvement in corruption, and continue baiting the Americans, Serrano proved a surprise.

He quickly proclaimed four goals, Serrano recalled during an interview outside his office in the Presidential House: social and economic justice, an end to the 30-year civil war, an end to military and government-sponsored human rights abuses and an improvement in the democratic system. “My message was not a single step backward. There will be no impunity,” he recalled, switching back and forth between Spanish and near-perfect English.

To back up that challenge to a military unaccustomed to control, Serrano fired the commander whom he inherited when he took office and installed a more supportive officer.

This was followed by not only the Giron arrest but also the capture of several other military officers and men accused of killing an American owner of a country inn in what had been one of the sharpest points of contention with the United States.

“I am really commander in chief of the army,” he said during the 90-minute interview. “I make my own decisions . . . and certainly I am taking responsibility.”

During the presidential campaign, Serrano repeatedly criticized the United States for allegedly interfering in Guatemala’s internal affairs by attacking the country’s human rights record and cutting military aid.

He joined with senior military officials in saying that Guatemala would rather go it alone than give in to U.S. demands. But his emphasis has changed since taking office.

He immediately acted in the case of the murdered American hotel owner and increased Guatemalan cooperation in the U.S. campaign to control narcotics trafficking. And he cut back his anti-American slogans, so much so that he is scheduled for an official visit in Washington later this month, complete with a meeting and dinner with President Bush, who he hopes will look more kindly on his government.

“I am not anti-American,” he said in the interview, “I feel at home when I go to America.” While the United States is a great power and Guatemala only a small country, he said, “in dignity we are the same.”

Serrano has also appointed members of opposition parties to his Cabinet, including an attorney general who opened an investigation into high-level military and government corruption and began regular meetings with opposing congressional leaders.

This all draws accolades from diplomatic officials and opposition political figures, who even give him credit for playing down his religious convictions. Although he still has weekly prayer sessions in his office, sources say, they are low-keyed and private. “For the time being,” said Skinner Klee, “he has laid off his aggressive evangelicalism.”

But even his supporters worry that he is trying to do too much, alone. “He doesn’t delegate authority,” said one aide who asked not to be named. “It isn’t that he doesn’t trust others, but he wants to get things done. But he is learning he has to have help.”

Edmund Mulet, another prominent social figure and congressional opponent of the president, said in an interview that Serrano “is stiff and stubborn and inflexible. But he is coming to terms with reality in his dealings with political leaders and the Congress.”

When asked if the president is sincere, Mulet, who was imprisoned by the government when Serrano was on the Council of State, referred to the split with Rios Montt, the dismissal of the hard-line defense minister and a program to tax landowners for the first time. “Even if he wasn’t sincere, he has gone too far to back away,” said Mulet.

There is no clear reason why a man who spent much of his adult life in league with the very forces he now seeks to control and weaken should suddenly take these people on. And Serrano is not given to introspective conversations.

But his European diplomatic friend offers one explanation: “He is a modern man, and he understands that in today’s world if he wants to be recorded as an important historical person, someone who improved conditions, he had to move to the center.”

Biography

Name: Jorge Serrano

Title: President

Age: 46

Personal: Born the son of a politician in Guatemala City. Earned a master’s degree in engineering from Stanford University. Began his political activities in 1970s, joining Christian Democratic Party. Broke with party in late 1970s and formed a right-wing political think tank that was later implicated in an attempted military coup. Lived in exile in Texas in 1981, then returned in 1982 to be a member of civilian agency set up by military government to carry out army edicts. Born a Roman Catholic; converted to evangelical Protestantism. Lost presidential bid as avowed evangelical candidate in 1985. Landslide choice for president in 1991 national elections after downplaying evangelical connections, moving his political stance to the center-right. He and his wife, Magda Bianchi Serrano, have five children.

Quote: “I have to be strong. If I am not strong, I can’t do what needs to be done.”