Today, Explained - Guatemala’s corruption conundrum

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

There are nearly twenty candidates vying to be president of Guatemala. Some are being investigated for corruption by the country’s watchdog court, the CICIG. But corruption isn’t the only problem facing Guatemala right now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this broadcast of Today Explained comes from the good people at KiwiCo. KiwiCo is offering the good people who listened to Today Explained the chance to try them out for free, to redeem that offer and learn more about the KiwiCo projects that are made for kids of all ages, by the way. Visit KiwiCo.com slash explained. I'm Daniel Alarcón of Radambulante filling in for Sean Ramos-Firm. Guatemalans are gearing up to elect their next president this Sunday. The only problem is their candidates keep getting disqualified, arrested, and threatened. There are something like 20 candidates for the presidency, you know, more parties than you could possibly count.

Jonathan Blitzer has been covering it for The New Yorker, and he says this election really comes down to one thing. Basically, as I've sort of tried to report on it and as I've come to understand it, the election as a whole boils down to this very pointed question about corruption and anti-corruption efforts in the country. And there has been an internationally backed and US funded anti-corruption body that's been extremely successful called the SISIG, which has for the last several years brought forward hundreds of prosecutions against corrupt politicians from all political parties. And recently, within the last two years or so, the president of Guatemala has started to attack this anti-corruption body, largely

because he and his family have come under investigation. This is the comedian. This is the comedian who no longer tells funny jokes. Jimmy Morales. And Morales has systematically attacked and tried to dismantle this body. And he's been more or less kept at bay by the courts, but only to an extent. And so he has really chipped away at the authority of this body.

And so when you look at the elections later this month, there are, of all of the candidates, really only one major candidate who had supported this anti-corruption body. Her name is Thelma Aldana. She had been the attorney general for four years in Guatemala and was the lead prosecutor in a lot of these anti-corruption cases. So 70% of the country supports this anti-corruption body. They see it as the answer to all kinds of major systemic problems in Guatemala. Thelma Aldana has based her candidacy around extending the mandate of this group called the SISIG. And almost immediately after she declares her candidacy, she comes under attack. All sorts of interests align against her.

All these members of the political class, business elites, have kind of had it in for her because she's prosecuted them, their families, their friends. And the short of it is they kind of conspired to knock her candidacy out of contention through a series of sort of legalistic maneuvers claiming that she was under investigation, that investigation just qualified her. And so two weeks ago, three weeks ago, she was knocked out of contention. And just like that, the election is completely upended. It seems the elections are a referendum on, if not the Sisi specifically, but on the corruption fight more broadly. If that's the case, the leading candidate is this woman, Sandra Torres. Where does she stand on all this?

She is opposed to the Sassig, in part because she's under its investigation and because she very much has towed the establishment line that the Sassig has overreached. And so just like that, with the disqualification of Aldana, this kind of major question at the center of Guatemalan politics kind of gets deferred. And that's what I think makes the elections on the 16th so curious because it's unclear actually whether any of the leading candidates, Torres being the leader among the kind of mainstream candidates at this point, it's unclear if any of them will get enough of the vote to win the first round. And so what will probably happen is there'll be a second round. Someone like Torres has a lot of name recognition. She's the former first lady. She's been very much kind of in the public domain for years. And so that helps her generally.

She has a lot of support in rural areas, much less so in the cities. But one striking thing about her is that for all of her name recognition and for right now her ostensible lead in the polls, she has a high unfavorability rating. So that kind of complicates to this question of how she'll do. So it really kind of is a toss up. And the striking thing before coming over here, I looked at the latest polls, and Torres has, last I saw, you know, she's in the lead among the candidates with something like 20% support, which is just astonishingly low. So I don't know what will shake out of all of this. I really don't. Now, one of the things that you mentioned is that 70% of the population is sort of in support of the SISIG.

So it would seem that popular support would make it politically untenable to pull off attacks like this on the legitimacy of the SISIG and on the candidates that support this anti-corruption fight. Why is that not happening? No, it's a really good question. It's – I think it just has to do – this is going to sound like a cop-out, but I think it has to do with just how insulated a lot of these politicians and business interests are from public opinion, from public scrutiny. I mean there is such a broad swath of politicians who are opposed to this anti-corruption body that there is – in Guatemala, the phrase that's used is pactos de corruptos. And that's the idea is that there's sort of this pact among politicians to fend off this kind of analysis and scrutiny. Sandra Torres, who I should say, I mean, there are merits to aspects of her campaign. But as someone who's also under investigation right now, just to give you an example as to, you know, why politicians might not feel more responsive to broad public support for the SASEG, the SASEG has brought charges – or brought an investigation into Sandra Torres.

And so her stance on the SASEG is it's overreached. It's abused its authority. They're kind of going too deep into the lives of all of these politicians. And so I think basically when presented with the choice of doing something that's broadly popular with the electorate and saving their own political skins, even though there might be some – there's a little chafing between those two possible outcomes, I think these politicians seem to have chosen their immediate political futures. So Aldana and the SICIG accomplished a lot. I think it might be interesting if you could just go through sort of like the major accomplishments of Aldana and the country in 2015 that caused both of their resignations and also opened the door for Jimmy Morales to run for higher office. And his platform was, you know, neither corrupt nor a thief. And that was very much sort of the mantle that he claimed as a candidate. So those were the highest profile cases. I mean, a president and a vice president essentially being found to have engaged in bribery schemes, customs, fraud and theft, illicit campaign dealings.

So that was kind of the major event. This was Perez Molina. That's right. That's right. And Roxana Baldetti. And so there have been since then, I mean, quite literally hundreds of other prosecutions of politicians, national politicians, business leaders. The main thrust of the Sisiq's investigations has tended to kind of capture people who have used the private sector as a kind of outlet for public graft.

And so that's kind of been the general thrust of it. And over the years, reporting in other countries, I'm sure you found a similar thing. I mean, in Central America, you're in El Salvador, Honduras, and everyone is telling you, the SASEG, if only we could have the SASEG in our countries. I mean, I actually mostly learned about the SASEG through reporting in other countries. It was so aspirational. Everyone talked about having something like the SASEG. So it kind of always loomed large for me just as a reporter hearing about it and hearing about it and hearing about it. But that's been its mandate. And the U.S. until very recently has always been very supportive of that agenda. Until? Until essentially 2017, until the Trump administration took over.

And what happened then was a combination of things, a concerted lobbying effort from members of the Guatemalan elite who essentially tried to make inroads with congressional Republicans and convince them to start to criticize the SASEG, to withdraw funding, to question its kind of investigatory excesses.

And then simultaneously, the Trump administration and the State Department kind of recalibrated its vision for Central America and specifically for Guatemala because Jimmy Morales proved himself to be a willing ally of the Americans when it came to the question of moving the embassy, the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move widely condemned by much of the world, where I think there were like maybe two countries that followed suit to show their support for the Americans. One of them was Guatemala. Jimmy Morales immediately got praised by members of the Trump administration for showing that level

of support. At the time, Nikki Haley, the US UN ambassador, traveled to Guatemala to thank him personally. He kind of had truck with also with members of the administration because they're all evangelical Christians. And he is as well. He he is and that's very much been a part of his political identity so there was a certain kind of general affinity to between between Morales and Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley and obviously Mike Pence and so that began to recalibrate the American interests in Guatemala with regard to the SISIG. After the break, it's not just corruption driving Guatemalans to flee, it's climate change too. I'm Daniel Alarcón of Radio Ambulante filling in for Sean Ramos Firm. This is Today Explained. This is the middle of the show where I'm going to tell you a bit more about KiwiCo.

I asked around the office if anyone's kids were using KiwiCo, and Liz's son Desmond, who is nine years old, is totally unrelated to the show. He's just a big KiwiCo fan. Apparently looks forward to the KiwiCo crate every month. Like it's a highlight of his month. She said it's like a low-key Christmas every month. I haven't been a kid in at least a couple of years, but I could really go for a low-key Christmas every month.

Desmond has gone in a year from needing lots of help with the projects to doing the projects on his own. So Liz is seeing big leaps in learning and independence that she's really excited about. KiwiCo is offering today, Explain listeners, the chance to try their projects for kids of all ages out for free. Right now, visit KiwiCo.com slash explain. That's K-I-W-I-C-O.com slash explain. That's K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained. The reason I'm so invested in the Guatemalan elections as a journalist is primarily because there is a massive immigration crisis at the U.S. border. And most of the people showing up at the border, most of Guatemalan asylum seekers at the U.S. border. And there is, in fact, a humanitarian crisis at the U.S. border.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan child has died in U.S. custody. He is the fifth migrant child to die after being detained in U.S. custody since just December. There are major problems with how the U.S. immigration system works generally and specifically with regard to asylum. And a big part of the current situation has to do with Central Americans fleeing Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, but principally Guatemala and Honduras. And just to give you a sense of the numbers, in 2018, there were 50,000 Guatemalans in families who were apprehended at the U.S. border seeking asylum. That was double the number from the previous year. Within the first five months of this year, and there's a bit of a lag because the statistics come out kind of in a

staggered way, but in the first several months of the current fiscal year, there were already 60,000 families from Guatemala apprehended at the border. Exponential growth in the number of migrant families from Guatemala seeking asylum. Absolutely. And so you have – at this point, the numbers have been really astonishing. I mean every – the last few months, there've been over a hundred thousand families apprehended at the Southern border. Again, the majority of them are coming from Guatemala. And so as a reporter covering immigration, I mean, just to be frank, at a certain point, it feels sort of random and futile to just be covering the situation of the border. In many

ways, that's the end of the story. There is so much going on before any of these people even arrive at the border. And if we're not invested in what that story is, then nothing is really going to change it. But one of the major root causes of migration, in addition to mass poverty, hunger, violence, is political corruption and what that does to a country. And so I think that's one of the reasons why these elections loom so large for the Americans. Right. So what you're saying is that impunity around issues of corruption is one of the major drivers of migration from Guatemala right now. Exactly. And first of all, there have been detailed empirical studies over the years linking impunity to immigration. I mean, there is a direct link when people see their politicians commit illegal acts and go unpunished. They have an almost immediate reaction to think, OK, there's no hope for me here. This is not a country that's invested at all in my needs. So that's the first sort of just general thing.

But secondarily, a lot of this corruption has to do with misuse of public resources. And so one of the things that you see as a result of the entrenched corruption in the political establishment in Guatemala is that the regions that have the highest rates of poverty, that have the highest rates of emigration are not receiving the most public funding. That public funding gets routed to particular districts where politicians are connected with private businesses, have vested

interests in making sure that federal appropriations go their way. And so you have at a moment of actual crisis in the country, money isn't going to the regions, aid money isn't going to the regions that need them the most. And when it does go to those regions, and there have been other studies that document this, when the money does go to those regions, a majority of it, generally at least 55 percent or more, get caught up and siphoned off in these corruption networks. And so if you're someone living in the western highlands of Guatemala and you're going hungry and you need basic government services, healthcare, education, food assistance, and more than half of the money of the scant resources that are getting directed your way from the federal government are being skimmed off the top, you're really left with few options but to leave. One of the things that I found very interesting about your reporting, and I haven't seen really

reported in other places with quite this depth, is the driver that is climate change. And I was wondering if you could tell me what it's like in the highlands of Guatemala and tell me how that's changed the calculus for a subsistence farmer living in these areas in terms of survival and in terms of like how they make the decision whether to stay or to go. I was in the Western highlands of the country,

which is one of the regions both most affected by climate change and that has had the highest rates of emigration most recently. And I was just astonished by how widespread the understanding was in just small communities that climate change was making their lives basically untenable. So what you see is temperature variations on a daily basis. So you might wake up one morning and there'll be a frost.

That might kill off your crops that you've planted. The next day might be unseasonably warm. One of the consequences of these kind of rapid swings from cold to hot at unexpected moments is that there are more pests in the soil, whether bugs or fungi. And that means that people have to spend more money on fertilizer, pesticides. And simultaneously to all of that, rains are not coming at the predictable times.

So not only is the overall amount of precipitation starting to go down, but when it rains, it rains unpredictably. So for example, for people who are planting corn or maize, they rely generally in the Western Highlands on rains coming in May. In the last few years, those rains haven't come in May. They've come much later, closer to kind of late July. And then when those rains do come, they come all at once. And that also destroys crops because the soil isn't capable of absorbing that much water. For example, a family might have been able to grow potatoes in maize that would feed them for nine months of the year.

Now the amount of food they're able to produce in one harvest covers two months. And so increasingly what people have done is they've briefly tried other things. So in some cases, in some places where I was, communities were chopping down trees and selling the firewood because it was just fast cash for them. That, of course, exacerbated all of these other climactic problems because now you had less tree cover, the soil was less able to retain water, and so that kind of sped up the cycle of climate-related struggles. You have other families who leave rural areas altogether and migrate within Guatemala to cities, hoping that there'll be some form of work there.

Generally, that's a kind of holding station before they then just leave the country altogether. And other people, of course, just emigrate straight away. And I don't know how else to say it other than you see the absence in these communities. There is a conspicuous absence of people in a lot of these places. You mentioned the numbers, which really are startling in terms of Guatemalan families arriving at the border. I'm wondering if in the election, is migration and out-migration something that's discussed as an issue. Like, what are we going to do to make this country a place where people don't want to flee? is such a fact of life now in Guatemala. It's essentially synonymous with the idea of a failed state. And I think everyone sees immigration, the inevitability of immigration, as a kind of comment on where the country's politics are and how corrupt and inefficient the government has been. Voting with your feet, essentially.

That's right. That's right. I mean, the only thing I would say in response to that is I don't even know that people leaving is meant to be a show of frustration with the political system. It's desperation that's driving them. But effectively, yes. I mean, there's just they have no alternative. Right. It's a mass opting out. Yeah. I've always been really sort of stingy about using the word exodus in my reporting to describe emigration from Central America. But honestly, the way these numbers have kept up over the last few years and the way they've been picking up recently, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a mass exodus from these countries. I think the statistic I saw was that in the last few months of 2019, there were over 300,000 Central Americans who were apprehended at the U.S. border. And of those,

165,000 of them were Guatemalan. But on the whole, it's mostly Guatemalan and Honduras. Those are the two main countries that people are leaving. And in the first four months of 2019, fully 1% of those two countries was apprehended at the U.S. border. That's in four months. Bananas. Which is, I mean, which is why I do feel like what we are seeing is in fact an exodus. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I'm Daniel Alarcón of Radio Ambulante filling in for Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show's listeners and especially the show's listeners' kids to not just make a project but to make a difference in what they're doing and what they're learning to redeem an opportunity to try that all out for free.

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