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Editor's Note: Vaclav Masek Sánchez received his master's degree at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) of the University of New York (NYU), where he is currently an assistant instructor. His academic research focuses on political histories in Central America.
(CNN Spanish) - Although recent social convulsions are concentrated in South America, the effervescence in Guatemala, Honduras and especially Nicaragua would point to the region being the next to reach a turning point.
In some areas, the scenarios in each country would represent an aberration for any Latin American currently involved in a struggle for democratic ideals and for equality. But the gross political leadership continues to test the indignation capacity of Central Americans.
And it is that the facts in the region, which have already been a status quo for most of the decade, refer to passages of literary fiction.
In Guatemala, the outgoing government, which will be remembered as one of the worst in history, continues to enjoy the long transition period to save its own skin by performing circus gestures in the legislature.
As if the wait has not been destructive enough for the few advances made in the last decade, a group of deputies from multiple benches — a disastrous amalgam of bursts, dinosaurs and incompetent — intends to amend the laws to protect themselves from any investigation against them . In passing, they would leave a legal vacuum for organized crime to operate freely. Scammers, extortionists and deputies, the only winners of the impunity regime that is reestablished de facto and de jure in the country.
Meanwhile, the bill left by the Jimmy Morales administration is an intergenerational social debt. The rate of chronic childhood malnutrition increased, between 2018 and October 2019, in 18 of the 22 departments of Guatemala.
Children in the interior of the country are starving and if they survive, they work since they were little in the countryside. In the worst case, they take their lives from labor pressures, as did Fredy Oswaldo Xicol Caal, a 9-year-old boy, at a coffee farm in Baja Verapaz.
In El Salvador, where the rates of violence continue to decline and the president's approval remains outstanding, suspicions begin to emerge. What has Bukele done to achieve this? The homicide rate in the country has progressively decreased since the young president took over and implemented the Territorial Control Plan, which will invest US $ 31 million in police operations in El Salvador.
And as the chronicler Óscar Martínez mentions in his recent column of El País, Salvadorans ask the security cabinet “mano dura, minister; hard hand president. ”
With just five months, Bukele's government is indescribable from a technical point of view. Clearly, he opposes the Bolivarianism of the past decade and courts with Washington, managing to agree with the Trump administration a modest extension for Salvadoran Tepesians. Its level of conservatism will be evident in issues such as poor protection for the LGTBQ community, farmers and human rights defenders.
In Honduras some wonder if theirs is a country controlled by drug trafficking and the military and if the narco-state has gone from being a concept that circulated through circles labeled cynics to be a reality in full light. And, although the president does not face charges, his brother was found guilty of all charges presented to him including transporting drugs to the United States.
Meanwhile, the government of Juan Orlando Hernández granted an unusual millionaire contract to the army, granting him the power of agricultural developer inside. The leading role of the armed forces returns.
In Honduras, the protest flame faints, but does not go out. The recent sentence to 7 people for the murder of environmental defender Berta Cáceres left a bittersweet taste. His family criticizes that those who believe they are the real responsible for his death remain in the street.
The murder of journalist José Arita, who was waiting for four hitmen at the exit of the Canal 12 station in Puerto Cortés, is agitated. And to think that only 7 of the 84 murders of journalists have been resolved since 2001, as stated by Dagoberto Rodríguez, president of the Honduran Journalists Association.
In Nicaragua, people have been fed up by orteguism, whose emancipatory project of the last century was transformed into a dictatorship in 2018 by the personalistic cares of its power dome. This past November 15, the government arrested at least 11 people for bringing water to the mothers of political prisoners on hunger strike in a church in Masaya.
While focusing on internal repression, Ortega closes Nicaragua to foreign scrutiny. After denying admission to the OAS special commission in September, this time it was his turn to be rejected by Juan Pablo de Laiglesia, Secretary of State of Spain, a country that seeks to sanction the repressive regime economically.
And by the way, Ortega confirms the General of the Armed Forces, who in 2025 would turn his fifteenth year as commander in chief of the Army. Meanwhile, the church in Masaya that shelters the mothers of political prisoners was dramatically besieged by police forces.
It is worth asking why we seem to care so little that the military is operating in the highest sectors of government or that military personnel occupy positions that in democracies are normally kept for civilians. Is this "normal"?
Or have we also normalized the incursion of drug trafficking in public administration?
Does it seem "normal" for congressmen to prescribe amnesties while the child population literally dies of hunger?
The indecency of those who profit from criminal sympathy disguised as a government is comparable to the shamelessness of those who cling madly to power and repress civil society. The fight against impunity cannot be another incomplete chapter in the dire history of our region.
While many trade union and peasant movements, human rights defenders, environmentalists and water protectors are already on the street, when will the wealthy Central Americans and the urban middle class rise? The former government spokesman, Fernando Barillas, described Guatemalan citizens as "unaffected and absent" because of current events. The 2015 milestones, where Guatemalans brought their government out loud, now look far away.
Women have been the first to take the streets of the country, demonstrating against gender violence carrying out the performance originated by the Las Tesis Collective in front of the Government Palace of the capital.
And the other Central Americans, when are we going to leave fear and indifference behind?
This reality dates back to a fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, who said in a story that "something very serious is going to happen in this town."
What if it happens and nobody does anything?
Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua