Video interview with Ruben Zamora, total part 1-4

English transcript total part 1-4

(Conducted July 25th 2003)

Part 1

We have had two days of disorder, two days of chaos, two days of absence of authority, of a very serious political vacuum.

The state and its institutions have been the intellectual architects behind these disorders, essentially General Ríos Montt, given his difficulties in being allowed to run in the elections. He generated these disorders – he brought people from the interior of the Republic, people from rural areas, people whose everyday life is about survival, people with no resources. I suppose they offered them breakfast, lunch and dinner and a couple of cents, a bit of money to come to the City without really knowing why, right, and a little something to show that it was a popular revolt, although a revolt in inverted commas. Coming into the City, they went to different places to generate problems, strikes. The fact is that they were guided by specialists, people with a lot of experience in state terrorism. These were the people that took them to different places to generate pressure – principally the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the mass media, and, oddly, they went to the premises, to the building owned by one of the strongest groups in Central America, financially speaking.

I think that this effort by Ríos Montt to force the law, including through popular revolt and intimidation and harassment of electoral authorities and judicial institutions derives from the fact that these elections have a very special, very unique significance for Guatemalans.

Guatemala has seen 22 years of criminal dictatorship, a dictatorship which since the year 1982 has turned the Guatemalan State into a State of Delinquents dedicated to assault Guatemalans, to rob their vehicles, to import stolen vehicles from the US and transport them to South Africa and other countries; to participate in drug trafficking.

They have turned Guatemala into ‘Little Colombia’. They are also into smuggling, they take part in kidnapping and in general all business – if one may call it that - related to organized crime.

This 22-year-old dictatorship has always had a democratic façade, because the various rulers have acceded to power through elections. However, a stronger power has always been the real power in Guatemala. This power is generally formed by chains or networks of relationships that are inter-linked among the different institutions of the State, for example Customs, Ports and Customs, Migration, the Army, Military Intelligence, above all, everything that has to do with the Army.

Basically, this power is made up of ex-members of the Military, very important and sophisticated people; this Board of Organized Crime also includes current high-ranking military officers. I have the impression - even if it is mere speculation - that the Minister of Defence - of the current and of previous administrations – has been an institutional part of this Board of Criminals.

So what happens with the current elections is that they all face problems, even if at first they came into power through elections, through democratic means. Thus we know who they are, we know their names, their last names. They are highly questioned, not just locally, but also by countries that are commercial allies of Guatemala, or political allies, countries that in some way have accompanied Guatemala’s development. A specific example is the US which surely will extradite these people if they lose power.

If there is something that worries them, it is their survival, not just political survival, but survival in liberty, of not ending up in prison. This is part of their problem. Another problem is that through a new government, they are planning to pass laws that at least partially concede aerial, territorial and maritime control to the US government.  That way, their ‘Little Colombia’ would be destroyed, it would have no trade, and this is really what is at stake.

As you probably know, Guatemala is a country where the economy does not benefit all, a country with severe social, economic and political exclusion, a country with misery and marginalization where the gap between the rich and the poor is abysmal. But dealing with all these problems would have to be postponed because in reality we are subjected, subordinated and kidnapped by this group of criminals that constitute the real power in Guatemala.

Part 2

I am not a lawyer, I am not a man of the law, but even so I think it is very easy to interpret, to determine and conclude that the participation of Ríos Montt in the elections is illegal. When the Constitution was written, it was left very clear that anybody who had accomplished a coup d’etat, whether civilian or military, would be barred from running for the presidency.  Supposedly, since the Constitution was written, we would have begun a democratic process that could not be undermined by a future coup d’etat. It is one of the only articles of the Constitution that may be applied retroactively, it was included specifically to bar people like Ríos Montt from acceding to power.

Personally, from a democratic spirit or point of view, I believe it is inappropriate that he should be allowed to run. In Guatemala, you would be surprised, there are about 76.000 laws, but many of these laws are senseless, they are laws without correct projection, laws that establish economic, political, juridical, and religious privileges, but even so, they are laws, and if we don’t like them, we would have to change them through legal means. The fact that we may not like a law must not imply that we just try to twist it and make it work as we see fit. This law is categorical, and quite simply, Ríos Montt or anyone else who may have committed a coup d’etat in the past must not be allowed to participate in the elections.    

In fact, on three or four previous occasions, the Constitutional Court which in the beginning had prominent lawyers outside the reach of party politics consistently ruled against the candidacy of Ríos Montt. This time it is different because of the seven judges in the Court, four of them have links to his political party, to his government, to him. They have held government positions, they have been his personal lawyers, and they certainly got to the Constitutional Court to defend his case.

Part 3a

Life as a journalist in Guatemala when one is committed to liberty and to trying to tell the truth, although the truth is always subjective and difficult to establish, has strong repercussions. I have worked in journalism for 14 years. Before launching elPeriódico, I founded a newspaper called Siglo XXI [21^st Century].

I was president of that paper for six years. In that newspaper which was launched in 1989, one of the first things we did was to open the editorial pages to the political Left-wingers in Guatemala, including the insurgent Left-wingers. I thought it was a way of beginning to see, to debate our differences politically and journalistically with different viewpoints and perspectives, and I thought it was better than to be shooting away in the mountainside!

Due to that approach, I had my first incident. I ‘received’ a grenade in my house and  one of my business associates, a stick of dynamite. Months later when I supported the Myrna Mack case in its initial stages in 1991-92, when I pushed the case of the assassination of Myrna Mack which together with a lot of people we turned into a paradigmatic case, I had cars following me, I received funeral flower arrangements in my house and in my office, they opened machine gunfire against my offices in Plazuela de Espania. In Zone 10, 30 bullets were fired against me.

On a later occasion, when we presented an investigation reflecting that the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the President’s Security Office participated in organized crime, I was shot at once again. It was an August 19, it was my birthday, I had gone into a restaurant, we are talking about the year 1994, and while I was having dinner, they put three grenades underneath my car and blew it up. These were probably the latest serious problems and personal aggressions that I suffered, although I still had to deal with people trying to hit me in the street, in restaurants.

However, there was a change in strategy on the part of the state, for example during the Arzú administration, from 1996-2000. Alvaro Arzú, let’s say in his approach of how to try terminate me was that he tried to push people to throw me out of business. I was one of ten partners in SigloXXI, and he succeeded in persuading my partners that it was inconvenient that I form part of the newspaper, and I soon saw myself outside of it. I decided to found another communication media, I have now directed it [elPeriódico] for six years. In this newspaper, we have never had any State publicity.  We have always been excluded from the State.

While Arzú was in power, he formed a commission of influential people from the private sector, people with publicity muscle, to assure that nobody would buy publicity in the newspaper. We had no publicity and we had financial problems because the then President did not want to see publicity in our newspaper. People with sympathy for us bought advertising space in advance but in the understanding that they would not see their announcements in the paper until after Arzú had stepped down from Government. Like Jorge Serrano [another ex-president], Arzú tried to publicly disqualify me. For example, he invited ambassadors from countries that are friends of Guatemala and explained to them that I was involved in drug trafficking, that I was a smuggler, that I had links to the mafia. I had to deal with all of these things.

From the current government, I have suffered serious televised campaigns of slander, including death threats on a TV channel that belonged to a Minister, in the shape of stories featuring a character that said we were conspiring to overthrow the government, that we were ‘state robbers’. They didn’t really reflect me, but people still knew it was me. After that they also sent me to the Inland Revenue Office, saying that my newspaper was evading taxes to the tune of 7,000,000 Quetzales [Guatemalan currency = 1Quetzal = 1DKK]

The newspaper is still losing money on legal fees at this stage. Thanks to donations from the international community and loans from international funds, we have survived. Their support has meant that people no longer believe in such rubbish, but we have also borne great costs. The pressure from Inland Revenue translated into additional costs for elPeriódico, in this year alone we have spent Q400,000 on lawyers’ fees to defend ourselves.

Ex-members of the Military linked to organized crime have also pressed charges against me. Impressively, they have come extraordinarily far with lawsuits without me even knowing about the cases! We have succeeded in dismantling them, but in any case it means spending more money on legal fees.

The Office of the Public Prosecutor also put us under pressure to follow up any investigation we made with a formal complaint before the respective tribunals. The first time they subpoenaed me, they did it on a public holiday, December 25 which is a global public holiday so that I couldn’t go. The police took me to lodge a complaint.

Well, we got through it, and among other things that have happened, eventually, on June 24 this year, at 9am, 12 people entered into my home. I have investigated a bit and I know that some were from the Presidential Security Office, others ex-members of that Office, a mixed group.  I also understand that the Public Prosecutor participated in the intellectual orchestration of what happened that day in my house.

So, 12 people came into my house and grouped the family into mine and my wife’s bedroom, they made everybody lie down including four people that work with us and the son of one of the people that have worked with us for 20 years. Each of us, no matter if 12 years of age or 46 like myself, all of us had an unsecured rifle and an automatic handgun pointing at us. For a moment we thought, well we all thought they were going to kill us. Then they took me outside the room, covered my family with a bedspread so that they could not see anything, and walked all over them. They kicked my 12-year-old son in the side, my older son who is 25 tried to defend him, but they whacked him over the eye with a gun and hit him hard on the head.

While all this happened I was outside, and they asked me to take off my shirt. Taking it off, they put a rifle to my chest and a gun to my face and said that they were going to kill me. I explained to them that I would not put up resistance, but asked that my children would not witness the act, as it would mortify them. After that they decided, well, they expressed that if I followed instructions then possibly I could get out of the situation alive. Then they told me to get naked, I never thought that they would put me back in the room with my children, naked they pushed me back in front of my children and my wife and the people that work with us – it’s hard for me to go on – they made me kneel and cross my ankles, my hands behind my back, they blindfolded me, and while in this position, they explained to my family that they were going to execute me and once more pulled the security on their guns. They kept us like that for about an hour and a half. They didn’t steal anything from the house. They just took four credit cards, one of which pertained to my business which I forgot that they had taken. Thank God they never used it. They took passports, driving licences and ID cards, they left us without ID papers. That was the last thing that happened.

Part 3b

They are all abroad [his wife and children]. My older son who was just finishing his Law studies, and the little one was finishing primary school, well they both lost the year. They lost an academic year and a primary school year, and we are not sure when we will all be together again. That’s what I can tell you.

We also had a manifestation here in front of the offices, about 70 people sent by the Ministry of Communications. It is a television monopoly through which they depreciate enemies of the Government. They threw Molotov cocktails at us, they threw stones, they tried to force the door open with a pole, and yesterday about 250 came back here, we stayed out in the street to show that ‘we are here waiting for you, peaceful, but with no fear’. I believe that this in part dissuaded the people from coming near. Something else that served to dissuade them was that the US Ambassador had talked to the President and demanded that police officers be placed outside.

They came several times to the street corner, they were looking at us, about 200 of them. The people of the buildings surrounding us were screaming, ‘they are coming!’

All the people on the block were in a psychosis as they tried to approach us three or four times that day.

Part 4

What happens is that in countries like Guatemala there is a serious, very serious problem, namely that there is no institutional balance or counter-balance. Let’s say that in the beginning of the 20^th century we had 22 years of dictatorship, explicit and clear dictatorship. We had another one from 1930-1944. What we have now is a dictatorship of four years because the President controls the Supreme Court, the Judiciary, he controls Congress, he controls the Office of the General Prosecutor and the Public Prosecutor, and it becomes a dictatorship of four years.

All that’s left is the Press as a little counter-balance. This is the role that we play, right? That’s all I can say.

Translation by Lone Hvass August 2003