election week

This coming Sunday, the Guatemalan people will vote for a new president, new mayors, and new congress members.

This is the first time that we've been in the country during an election period. I don't know what we expected, but I'm pretty sure we had no idea about the sheer number of political signs, painted telephone poles, and rocks with political graffiti that would take over the landscape. I'm also sure that we didn't know how complicated the world of politics is in a country that is still trying to recover from the effects of a 20+-year civil war. Not to mention the far too many leaders (business, political, legal, and so on) who are corrupt and largely influenced (otherwise read as "owned") by drug cartels. We weren't prepared for the cynicism that flavors people's conversations and attitudes in regards to the political parties, nor the disbelief they cling to about whether anyone who takes office will actually be able/willing/honest enough to make any real changes.

Politics in Guatemala is not just messy the way that most of us North Americans think of messy politics. It's downright dangerous. In this election period alone, more than 30 politicians have been killed. Sometimes those murders have come at the hands of a political party that conspires to create violence only so that they can be the ones who wrap their cloaks around their necks, place their hands on their hips, and save the day by pledging to clean up the violence. At other times, the violence has been used as intimidation so that supporters of competing parties will be discouraged from voting at all.

Besides being perilous, it's nearly impossible to prove that any political party has a majority vote or that any candidate wins. I say this because there are nearly 25 different political parties. They don't all have presidential candidates in the race, but, still, there are so many divisions, so many choices that the general support for any certain party or any specific candidate is just not that strong.

In fact, most of the parties in existence now were not in existence 15 years ago. And most of the parties in existence for this specific election will not survive after the election. They are too small and too weak to hang on past one season of defeat. The parties on the political scene are constantly changing, and politicians quickly (and sometimes in corrupt ways) change alliances from one political party to another.

There have been numerous roadblocks and demonstrations, an increase in violence against tourists, scandals about top presidential candidates getting divorces simply so they can run in a race in which immediate family members of former presidents are supposed to be prohibited from running. The confusion, uncertainty, violence, and messiness are only likely to grow stronger as the week progresses. And if the elections don't go well and don't have a really clear winner, then all those negative issues will drag out for the next several months.

Anyways, I've never studied politics. I don't know much about each candidate. And I can't vote. Yet I long for the Guatemalan people to have a person in authority who is honest, who is fair, and who has a sincere desire to clean up crime and corruption and care for the people well.

If you think of us this week, please join us in praying for the elections and the leadership of Guatemala.

(Heather)