"The Iron Fist" surging towards win in latest Guatemala Election

[Flash Walken]

Hector Montenegro took a break from election campaigning in Guatemala last week - to bury his murdered teenage daughter. Her killers had pulled out her fingernails, tied her hands behind her back, slit her throat, then stuffed the corpse into the boot of a taxi with two other victims of similarly brutal attacks.

The distraught congressional candidate for the leading party was in no doubt that 15-year-old Marta Cristina was the latest victim of a particularly violent election campaign, even by the standards of a country that endured a bloody 36-year civil war.

"I am sure that her killing was politically motivated," said Mr Montenegro, 71, a veteran activist for the poor and elderly. "I am used to the threatening phone calls, the insults, the people calling me a communist. But what sort of animal could do this to a teenage girl?"

Forty candidates or senior party officials have already been murdered during the campaign - a grim tally that does not include supporters or relatives such as Mr Montenegro's daughter. With two weeks to go before the September 9 poll, the death toll makes this the bloodiest election in the country's history, as drug lords, crime gangs and political rivals seek to buy power, settle scores and intimidate enemies.

The anti-American populism that has featured prominently in other Latin American countries, promoted by the oil wealth of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, plays no part in Guatemalan politics. The economy depends on the $3 billion in remittances sent home each year by Guatemalans living in America. Both Mr Colom and Gen Perez Molina are pro-American.

Rather, this election is about violence and corruption. The chiefs of the police, prison and tax services all acknowledge that their organisations are riddled with corrupt officials and crimes are rarely prosecuted. The government recently turned to the United Nations for help in supplying legal experts in various fields in an unprecedented attempt to jump-start its stalled justice system. In the most notorious recent example of its failings, four police detectives were arrested on charges of murdering three Salvadoran congressmen - only to be shot dead execution-style inside their supposedly maximum-security prison cell.

Mr Marroquin can vouch personally for the dangers involved in taking on corruption and drug money - he survived an assassination attempt backed by former senior UNE members whom he had booted out in a clean-up of his own party. "I can tell you that at the presidential level, we are clean. But can I assure you that everyone running for mayor for UNE is clean? No, I cannot," he said.

By far the most attacks have been suffered by UNE and the smaller party of Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel Peace laureate and campaigner for the rights of indigenous Mayans, who is running a distant fourth in the presidential polls. Mr Marroquin said his party had been targeted because of its frontrunner status and its refusal to accept drug money.

Indeed, in the murky and dangerous world of Guatemalan politics, Mr Montenegro, a UNE candidate for congress, has his own suspicions about who is to blame for his daughter's murder. "Who has most to gain from the creating insecurity in the country? The candidates who say they will bring security back to the country, of course," he said.

A former teacher who belonged to a Left-wing rebel group during the long insurgency, Mr Montenegro said he thought he had seen the last of the death squads and killings when the civil war ended.

But as the rain from the outlying flanks of Hurricane Dean rattled the corrugated iron roof of his single-storey house last week, the diminutive figure put his head in his hands and wept as he remembered his daughter, who left his office on the day she disappeared with her usual affectionate parting words: "Bye-bye, shorty."

background on Molina, former student at the 'School of the Americas':

Assassination, 1994: Chief of the G-2 (military intelligence) and on the payroll of the CIA, Perez Molina was in charge in 1994, when the General Staff was implicated in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro Elías Ogaldez. (Allan Nairn, The Nation, 4/17/95)

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[Table 5]

jesus. thats just effed up.

[mykalberta]

Sweet - I will be forced marched down there next July for 2 weeks.

Damn me and my lack of will power.

MYK