The disgraceful and bloody history of Alejandro Maldonado Aguirre
Marco Fonseca

The arrival of Alejandro Maldonado Aguirre (AMA) to power in Guatemala as the new interim president is, in a sense, the arrival to power of Mico Sandoval himself, the old leader of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) party, the anti-Communist party of organized violence and death squads, from the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, AMA became a member of the MLN starting in the 60s, became deputy to Congress from the MLN between 66-70, then was Minister of Education for the “butcher of Zacapa” and fraudulently elected president Carlos Arana between 70-74 and was ambassador to the UN between 74-76 representing the dictatorial government of General Laugerud García. He then went on to defended the murderous regime of Lucas Garcia (78-82) as its ambassador to the UN when the United States under President Carter and the whole world were condemning that oppressive military regime for grotesque human rights violations.

In 1984-85 AMA was one of the deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly to write what effectively became the center-right Constitution of 1985 that is still in force today. This is the constitution that set the state for the «transition» to minimal (polyarchical) democracy and neoliberalism and the constitution he would spend enforcing until 2015 first as Constitutional Court judge – highest in the country – since the start of the «democratic transition» between 1986 and 1991. Although AMA will briefly become ambassador to Mexico for the governments of Serrano Elias, Espina Salguero and Ramiro de León Carpio and will also briefly deputy to Congress for the Unionist Party (PU) of conservative President Álvaro Arzú, he will return to the CC between 96 and 2001 and again from 2006 to 2015 to play the role of its president with an extremely conservative record. It was in this period, for example, that he helped to pass «the resolution that prevented the extradition of General Efrain Rios Montt to Spain” to face charges of genocide (Source: https://goo.gl/QGg6JM).

The crowning achievement of this establishment judge, this defender of impunity, is that in 2014 AMA and two other CC magistrates canceled the veridict of genocide against former military dictator Ríos Montt and thus denied justice to thousands of Indigenous people of Guatemala.

Today, as some people have suggested, the party that represents AMA’s interests most closely is the FCN party of comedian presidential candidate Jimmy Morales who is now polling second, on the even of elections, just behind another conservative candidate in these elections.

It is highly unfortunate that today AMA occupies the interim presidency of Guatemala. Do we have to just accept all this?

Under these conditions we do not want elections
For the right of citizens to annul elections
# RefundaciónYa

Marco Fonseca holds a PhD in Political Philosophy and Latin American Studies from York University. He is currently contract faculty in the Department of International Studies, Glendon College, York University.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.