Mr. Mayor, at your service, ”Alejandro Giammattei Falla told Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen on a resurrection Sunday in 1989. A mutiny was going on at the Pavón Criminal Farm. It was one of the most serious prison crises registered so far, and Giammattei was the head of the Municipal Fire Department. He arrived at the Palacio de la Loba to ask Mayor Arzú to intervene.
The chief mayor agreed, with a warning:
"Come on, but I was very careful, you don't get in without the authorization of the security forces because the inmates could grab you."
At noon the telephone rang in the Municipality of Guatemala. Giammattei speaking. The prisoners had grabbed him. He had offered himself hostage - his version - while the authorities negotiated an agreement with the mutineers.
"You have me here."
"I told you they were going to grab you," Arzu said, according to his biography.
"Yes, you, and they say they will kill me and that the great devil."
The mutiny culminated with a dozen dead. The firemen withdrew from the place. The hostage was released and no one could know that years later, in that same penal farm, another of the key moments of his political career would occur in which there would also be more than half a dozen dead.
Pavón served, twice, to put it on the political stage. But after this first, he disappeared from it for a little over a decade: for more than ten years he wandered through work environments and circles related to the State and high business (for example, the Coffee Bank), until his connections and that moment in Pavón they took him to occupy, during the Government of Oscar Berger Perdomo, a position for which, he admits, he had a "remarkably scarce" knowledge: he was offered to be director of the Penitentiary System, and he accepted because, he maintains, he has never been someone to run away from the challenges
The offer made by the then Minister of the Interior, Carlos Vielman Montes, was not "seductive," but he agreed convinced that he could clean up corruption in the Guatemalan Penitentiary System (SP). He says.
The strange hostage
The idea of the hostage flies over the political trajectory of Giammattei, not only because many agree that the Sunday of resurrection of 1989 in which he wanted to intercede in a mutiny and ended up in the hands of the prisoners triggered his career. Also because until now he had always agreed to lead parties that he did not actually lead, parties that raised him as a banner or banner.
Candidate for mayor and presidency for several parties, rather than as a leader, he served as an inconsequential main actor of films held by the secondary.
He has been held hostage by groups in which he was not much more than an untamed ego, whose internal organs lacked control, or the candidates or deputies or whatever.
Hostage of organizations that were not his own or for him, but they saw in him a public projection capable of elevating them and empowering those behind them, the true leaders.
Giammattei has been, in a way, an astronaut who arrives, fulfills his mission and then retires for four years from the disappearing landscape of politics, until further notice.
But his mission is not submission either.
If all this is true, it would still be a very strange hostage: an impetuous hostage, intuitive and aware of his condition, a hostage that has allowed or even intended to become a hostage, and that has its own ends, and that overcomes and even captures and take advantage of those who seemed to take advantage of him.
An electoral scene
On July 21, Giammattei arrived in zone 18 for a rally. The activity was on a par with the clinic of the Guatemalan Social Security Institute (IGSS) in El Paraíso II. Everything started to be assembled from four in the afternoon. At six o'clock, the candidate, accompanied by a martial band of high school students, made his way from the bottom, walked through the crowd and took the stage. It took almost ten minutes to arrive between taking the steps timidly with the crutches, and taking pictures with people.
"Take a picture with the next president of Guatemala," said the cheerleader from the stage. I asked them to lift their finger, as the candidate in advertising, and to wave the banners for the photos.
It was an orchestrated choreography.
Giammattei arrived alone with his team. There was no trace of the vice president. They have not been seen together since June 16. Giammattei is not accompanied by anyone, that is, no figure. And if he does, he doesn't present it. No newly elected deputy, at least of his party, or mayor to give him the support. In Santa Rosa and Jalapa, Napoleón Rojas and Jaime Lucero, from the National Change Union (UCN), supported him, a party whose ideology called the US embassy "narco."
When Giammattei spoke, he concentrated his speech on not returning to the past (the past for him is, of course, the UNE government) and tried to compete with Sandra Torres in his own territory: social programs. He promised breakfast and dinner in pre-primary and primary school; keep schools open (the name of an old UNE program); make women the center of the family and the economy (which suddenly the UNE has also adopted).
There were shouts of support.
They came, mostly, from people in the party or related to it. The loudest applause, from mothers, came with the mention of the improvement of schools.
When the candidate began to say goodbye, most people in the party moved to make a line that ranged from the stage exit to the car. The step was difficult. A nomad reporter got a space and when he tried to ask members of the party they pulled his hair. It may seem a minor detail, but come on it has been hostile to the press: little access to the candidates, the team, and even the agenda, and quite aggressiveness.
Then, a man climbed into the stands of the stage with his family. «Giammattei, Giammattei! We are people, ”he shouted. The candidate approached to take a picture. A lady came to cross him and give him a blessing. Then he said goodbye to the members of the party who did not prevent him from passing with a "thank you".
The candidate got in his car and left.
All this did not last more than twenty minutes.
"The women are going to tell their children: Look, duck, I don't know if you are going to learn, but go to school, because at least if you are fed up they will give you there well," said the presidential candidate during a rally in Alta Verapaz, counting the benefits of its social proposal.
[Up to a point, Giammattei's career has developed by jumping into positions for which he had a "remarkably scarce" knowledge, but with a willing disposition, or landing as a leader in matches in which he was not much more than an occasional skydiver . And yet, his career has also been something else for five years: that of a man with a fixed gear, obsessed with an idea or a goal that engulfs everything else. Send, rule, whether it was a capital, or a country.]
And for that, for the first time after multiple failures with games he didn't create, he has set up his own.
In his 12 years of presidential candidate he has not sought a seat, that position that has served other former presidents to sharpen his image.
Alejandro Giammattei Falla has a clear objective: the Presidency of the Government.
This is the first time that the candidate, at 63 years old, reaches a second round of elections.
The birth of a vocation
Since the 80s, Giammattei already enjoyed contacts in the high civil service. He was 29 years old, he was almost out of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of San Carlos, he suffered from lateral sclerosis, he was moving in a wheelchair, and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal had appointed him general coordinator of the elections in 1985. ensure that the ballots were on election day, and the polling stations and boards would work like clockwork.
Wait, general coordinator of the elections? Nor did it seem like an obvious appointment, but there was something that impressed John Schwank.
At that time the TSE was in the Reformation. John Schwank was in charge of that hiring, and he did job interviews in his second level office. When Giammattei arrived, recalls former Minister Gabriel Medrano, they went to let him know. Schwank asked to be brought up. The house had two stairs that led to the offices of the authorities. They replied that it would not be possible, since the applicant was prostrated in a wheelchair.
They believed that.
Minutes later, Giammattei was in front of Schwank.
"I don't know how," says Medrano, "but Giammattei went up to John's office. Obviously he was hired immediately.
They say he is tenacious, strong, brave, effective, bright, explosive, volatile, unpredictable. Some of them are easily testable: their tenacity, their explosiveness, their unpredictability, and, under a certain ambivalent light, their bravery. Most interviewees know of some anecdote in which Giammattei has lost his temper, but he also remembers some effective measure, not always orthodox, that has illuminated to get out of a problem.
How to motivate people in the center of receiving votes in general elections. How to organize the budget of the Penitentiary System to better use resources.
According to Medrano, Giammattei was a guy with immense energy. Despite the wheelchair, it moved from top to bottom in the Industry Park. «There was a bell that rang every time the results of a table arrived. He screamed, went with each person and motivated them to continue with the activity, ”he says. Words of encouragement, jokes, gestures.
Then, I could change in a matter of seconds: it was a volcano.
Actually, reducing to the determination shown before Schwank the reason why Giammattei was hired can be misleading: his relationship with Judge Arturo Asturias Herbruger was old, familiar, and so good that, when Asturias assumed the vice presidency after Jorge's self-coup. Serrano Elías, in 1993, invited Giammattei to be his private secretary. From there, Giammattei sought to promote support programs for micro and medium enterprises and a border development program, following the logic he had learned years before, when he directed the microcredit area at Banco del Café (Bancafé).
That work at Bancafé had given him, in addition to that knowledge, some essential contact. There he had met, for example, Eduardo González Castillo, son of the founder of the Bank and, during the Berger government, secretary of the Executive Coordination of the Presidency.
A match to suit you
The party Let's go for a Different Guatemala is an amalgam that mixes old spaces in which Giammattei has been and the people who come with him. There are members of the extinct Grand National Alliance (Win), contractors and others working on the sidelines, and links with the old military guard.
Perhaps that is why, Vamos was consolidated as a party quickly and is, to a large extent, heir to Jaime Martínez Lohayza's Wins, which in 2015 left its structures and its bases unattended to leave with Democratic Freedom Renewed (Leader). Those organizational remains and leaderships were there, latent and crouched, waiting for someone to activate them. Giammattei's group came to rescue them from abandonment.
Carlos Waldemar Barillas Herrera is one of the most obvious continuities. Barillas, a former deputy of the Wins remembered for having paid in 2005 for travel to Paris with a false invitation to a seminar, is the departmental secretary of Guatemala de Vamos, took third place in the list for deputies of the district, and failed to reach a curul
Thanks, in part, to that it was mounted on that previous structure, in two years Vamos became the force with the greatest territorial presence in the country, above the UNE: 22 departments and 121 municipalities. Several members of the party say that for one or two years they spent weekends in the house of the departmental secretaries to go to give training, workshops, and get affiliates.
There are party members who do not fit into the category of friends or colleagues of Giammattei: they are the ones that respond to other power groups within the party.
It is pointed out, for example, of representing the interests of the business sector to its vice president.
Guillermo Castillo Reyes, this assumption does not make him laugh. "My 28 years as an official weigh more than the five years I've been as Executive Director of the Chamber of Commerce," he replies. The candidate's curriculum in public is broad. He has been a magistrate in the Court of Appeals, Deputy Minister of Labor and Welfare during the government of Óscar Berger Perdomo (2004-2008), manager of the Technical Institute for Training and Productivity (Intecap), and has also worked in the Ministry of Agriculture , the Public Ministry (MP), and the Office of the Attorney General (PGN).
He was at Intecap when he agreed with Giammattei, who ran the Penitentiary System (SP). "We work training programs for prisoners, as well as bakery, pastry, jewelry," he says. "After that I lost track of him until three years ago he came to tell me that he wanted to make a different political party." The lawyer says that two or three candidates for vice president were considered. They were oblivious to the game, and they never finished curdling. Meanwhile, he traveled to the departments to work with the bases.
A little over a year ago Giammattei changed his mind and told him that he wanted someone from the group to accompany her.
"I asked who I was thinking about." He said: "in you."
At first I was not very convinced. That says. Then he yielded to exercise provisionally, while looking for someone else. But they did not search.
Castillo Reyes was proclaimed candidate for the Vice Presidency in October 2018.
Remember that on the day of the assembly, Giammattei wanted to talk to him. They went to sit in a small space of the Industry Park and the candidate asked them to sit and beg God for them and their way. «I asked him to send me a signal, if this was for me, and if it wasn't, too. I still don't receive anything ». His tone is serious, but he jokes.
Castillo Reyes is a companion of atypical formula. Do not lavish too much in public events with Giammattei: each one, he says, has different tasks. When dividing cover more. If they win, he assures that they would maintain a similar dynamic because there are situations in which the vice president is not competent or it would be a waste of time to be.
Although this is the first time that Guillermo Castillo Reyes has elected to a position of popular election, it is his second experience in a political party. Before, he was in the National Solidarity Party (PSN) more than ten years ago, one of the parties on which the Grand National Alliance was built with which Berger won the presidency.
The doctor's circle
[Giammattei loves being called a "doctor." She is one of those kind of people who fly her university degree as if she instantly conferred class, or a certain noble nature. Giammattei loves being called a "doctor." "Doctor" Giammattei say his posters, and his announcements, and his messages, and his corifeos.
With 25 years he directed the Cedros Hospital in Lebanon Guatemala. Later, he was the supervisor of health services and responsible for the refugee camps in the areas of internal armed conflict. He had already been diagnosed with lateral sclerosis.]
In the circle of the party are: Luis Enrique Ortega Arana, son of retired general Francisco Ortega Menaldo, a habitual suspect. He failed to be a deputy.
Camilo Dedet Casprowitz, a senior advisor from the Gana and PSD circle, worked in the Ministry of the Interior during the government of Otto Pérez Molina. A brother of his was in charge of purchases of the Presidential General Staff. He will go to the Central American Parliament.
Alberto Pimentel, main shareholder of Fersa, SA, and another company linked to it is Energy Efficiency Projects, which has received contracts for 100.7 million quetzals for the implementation of public lighting. According to Nomad, he has financed the campaign in kind. Sounds like future Minister of Energy and Mines.
Mario Azurdia, former governor of Sacatepéquez during the time of the PP and responsible for the suspension of FIFA.
Shiley Rivera, former Creo-Unionist.
Daisy Guzmán, couple of the current deputy Raúl Romero.
María Castellanos de Pineda, wife of the governor of Santa Rosa and mother of the current deputy Marco Pineda.
There are eleven State contractors, at least, in the list of candidates for deputies. One of them is Josué Lemus, exUNE who could not take up the seat in 2016 for being a contractor and was elected by the Quiché district.
In October 2005, Giammattei received a call from González and the Interior Minister, Carlos Vielman: he was offered to take charge of the Penitentiary System, following the escape of 19 prisoners from the high security area of the Granda Model of Rehabilitation Canada . The day after the call, Giammattei recounts in his book, Vielman informed him of the details: the system was in crisis due to institutional corruption, insecurity in criminal centers, crimes in them. Giammattei listened in silence. "I have never been attracted to a comfortable position, free from hindrance and easy to play," he wrote.
On November 7, 2005 he took an oath as director of the SP. His last public office in the State. There he devised a plan to regain control of prisons. I would start with what I considered the most co-opted of all: Pavón. The matter, as everyone knows, did not end well.
The then vice president, Eduardo Stein, describes Giammattei as a very "creative, effective, and hardworking person." Remember that rarely coincided with him. “President Berger was the one who carried the security agenda. I attended some meetings to be aware, ”he says today as he recalls some successes of Giammattei that few more remember: the proper use of the budget, ideas such as rotating guards every six months or the approval of the Penitentiary System Law.
What everyone remembers is that Pavón ended up being a catastrophe: seven inmates executed extrajudicially, and the Interior and Police dome, with Giammattei included, prosecuted for it.
On September 25, 2006, the prison guard, members of the Army and the National Civil Police (PNC) entered the criminal farm to, in the words of the now candidate, "regain control." However, a case presented by the Public Ministry (MP) in 2010 indicates that the purpose of the investigation was to extrajudicially execute several prisoners.
Giammattei was accused of unlawful association and extrajudicial execution, as were other officials such as Vielman and the then director of the PNC, Erwin Sperisen. Giammattei was imprisoned for three months in the Mariscal Zavala Military Brigade, from August 2010 until he was granted a substitute measure. A court dismissed his case in 2011.
Pavón: a catastrophe denounced by human rights organizations and the press and the most progressive sectors of society, and defended, cheered, by its most repressive and authoritarian members.
A catastrophe, and a trampoline.
In an unexpected turn of events, Eduardo González, who was emerging as a presidential candidate of the ruling party, was defenestrated when his bank was intervened by a series of offshore maneuvers, his replacement, months later, had a traffic accident, and the party He was without a viable figure.
And there was Giammattei, the man who challenged the criminals.
Pavón opened another door: that of his first candidacy for the Presidency.
The chance that favored his choice
Giammattei can sometimes be charismatic, makes jokes, is direct, of an abrupt chant, and says what he knows his audience wants to hear. It is also volatile and closed to questioning. All this, his conservative ideological court, and the apparent withering growth of his party from nowhere, means that, on Twitter for example, his detractors have seen in him a very clear line of continuity with the current president Jimmy Morales.
Maybe not everything is true, but that's why Jimmyttei has nicknamed it.
For Pavón, whose echoes he does not finish getting rid of despite the favor of the court, the pun is less benevolent: Yammaté.
The Great National Alliance (Win) seemed to be one of the strongest political projects of democracy. He had bases, work team, a strong bench in the Congress of the Republic and the support of the business elite. Eduardo González wanted to be the next president and the winds seemed favorable. He was the executive coordination secretary of Berger Perdomo. The press of the time described each step he took as a step towards the Presidency.
The bankruptcy of Bancafé, after the intervention of the central bank, changed everything.
La Gana was left without her first choice. And an accident overturned the second: Agriculture Minister Álvaro Aguilar. There was talk of the indigenous leader and former mayor of Quetzaltenango Rigoberto Quemé Chay, and the businessman Francisco Arredondo. According to reporters of the time, Giammattei inherited the communication and campaign teams of Aguilar, and was accompanied by Vice President, the sugar factory Alfredo Vila Girón, at that time Secretary General of the Wins.
Giammattei already had some electoral experience, but not of that level: in 1999 and 2003 he had tried to take away the metropolitan mayor's office from Arzuism, represented by Fritz García-Gallont and Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, and in both of them he had been defeated.
The Pavón case and the force of being the official candidate pushed him to third place, his best result so far. He is proud and mentions him in every event he attends, in every speech, and in the interviews he can.
In 2011 and 2015 Giammattei also wanted to be president. With the Center for Social Action (House) and Strength. He arrived at Casa when the winner of Jaime Martínez Lohayza became engaged in a coalition with the National Unit of Hope (UNE). A Fuerza was invited by Mauricio Radford.
On June 13, three days before the first round, Giammattei presented his work team at the Holiday Inn hotel, which has served as his tent.
There were the current deputy Raúl Romero Segura, an old friend of the candidate who accompanied him in Fuerza in 2016, and possible Minister of Social Development, and Álvaro González Ricci, former deputy and still a member of Commitment, Renewal, and Order (I think), who He was responsible for coordinating the economic part of the plan and to whom two years ago Giammattei was offered by the Ministry of Finance (“he is a person who complies,” he explains. “If he gives you his word, he does. He told us several that we were going for this or that, and even when they came to want to move things he said no, that he had given his word. ”)
Everyone then surrounded the presidential when he spoke, then went out to take pictures, to talk to the press, to tell what they had done to contribute to the 222-page document. The end of the play was evident: to appear transparent and signal other candidates not to do so.
A few weeks later he would be asked who or how he paid for his hotel expenses. His response set a jocular tone: "al cardzo". The finances of his campaign, as he declared in June 2019, were like this: he had received 840,139 quetzales and spent 255,899 quetzales in contributions of money. In kind, it received 938,622 quetzals, and spent 930,922.
A fulfilled prophecy
In recent weeks Giammattei has returned to spaces where he feels comfortable. For example, the municipality of Guatemala.
During a press conference with Mayor Ricardo Quiñónez, Giammattei felt at home. He said it when he stood in front of the podium.
"I feel at home."
It is not clear if it was a boost to the mayor, to the Muni, or an attempt to connect his past with the prestige of an institution that still maintains the favor of the capitalist, obviously his voter, or something completely spontaneous. But Giammattei, who had listened attentively to the mayor, had his eyes flooded with tears, open, and his gaze fixed on the window in front of him.
It is not possible to know what went through his mind in those moments, but you can describe the vibrant emotion that his voice was going through when he spoke and greeted some of the people he worked with for almost two decades in that building. Because Giammattei was, in 1985, the director of the Department of Urban Public Transport.
"My plan was to make a train through the apartment," he said, and then embarrassed the mayor when he urged him to show everyone the presentation he had taken.
At the end of the round of questions with the press, Giammattei was guided to the back of the room to meet the council. Several people from his past greeted him, happy to see him again. Giammattei's ties with the municipality were forged 34 years ago and would become stronger during the administration of Arzú Irigoyen (1986-1990) and that of Oscar Berger Perdomo (1991-1999), when he was general manager of EMPAGUA.
Six years ago, Giammattei prophesied in his book a second round between him and the UNE, it is not known precisely whether against Sandra Torres. He said the Pavón case was an orchestrated attack because he represented a possible threat that would prevent the re-election of the official party. Now, a criticized survey gives him the victory by seven points.
In the first round he obtained 608,083 votes, compared to 1,112,939 of Sandra Torres. The Rururitan vote is key for both candidates. In the case of the UNE, consolidating or increasing it will be essential. Come on, on the other hand, you need to encourage the discouraged urban voter and try to reach the urban areas that dominated the MLP, the UNE, and to a lesser extent the Humanist Party.
Only once, who won the first round lost the second. Jorge Serrano Elías snatched the victory from Jorge Carpio Nicolle in 1990.
On August 11, 2019, Alejandro Giammattei won the second round of the Guatemalan elections. This profile was originally published by Plaza Pública, through the Rafael Landívar University of Guatemala, on August 4, 2019.
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