The Guatemalan Constitutional Court upheld a decision to bar Indigenous human rights defender Thelma Cabrera from running for president, while upholding the candidacy of Zury Ríos, the daughter of military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
Thelma Cabrera is a Maya Mam environmental and human rights defender, who also ran for president in 2019, receiving an unprecedented wave of support. She got about 10% of the vote. Rodas served as human rights prosecutor in Guatemala from 2017 until last year, when he was forced to flee for allying himself with anti-corruption efforts.
Cabrera and Rodas took their fight to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C., last month. They also traveled to New York, wherespoke with them. I began by asking Thelma Cabrera for her response to being blocked from the election.[translated] The response as Indigenous people is that this ratifies what we’ve always denounced, that Guatemala is a corrupt state that’s been coopted by criminals.
So, the strength of the MLP, headed up by Thelma Cabrera, supplemented with what Jordán Rodas can contribute, with an experience based on defending human rights — and I aspired to be the director of the University of San Carlos, but this has caused them panic. They know that we’re the only real option for change. Everything else is just continuing with the same thing, just changing the face of a puppet. It might be a woman, it might be a man, but not like us.
The United States has given a lot of political oxygen over the years to the governments of Guatemala. And today, they have finally understood that corruption causes migration. They have begun to impose some sanctions — the Magnitsky list, the Engel list. But I think that they should act more quickly to sanction corrupt actors linked to the central government and the economic powers. Otherwise, the same problems are going to continue, for corruption is also a cause of migration.
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