by the El Reportero news services
Álvaro Colom
With 76 percent of votes counted, Alvaro Colom, of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza leads the 9 September presidential elections with 28.04 percent.
Significance: Otto Pérez Molina of the rightwing Partido Patriota (PP) is behind him with 24.59 percent, well ahead of Alejandro Giammattei from the ruling Gran Alianza Nacional (Gana) who 17.51 percent. This means that a runoff between Colom and Pérez Molina is certain on 4 November.
One surprise in the elections was the strong performance of some of the smaller rightwing parties. Eduardo Suger, of the right wing Centro de Acción Social (CASA) scored 8.11 percent; Luis Rabbé from the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG) (led by the controversial dirty war president, Efraín Ríos Montt) had 7.07 percent.
One big loser in the elections was Rigoberta Menchú, from the centre-left Encuentro por Guatemala (EG) who took only 3.02 percent of the vote, slightly worse than the opinion polls had been forecasting.
Neoliberalism in Latin America: what has survived
Otto Pérez Molina
The abandonment of neoliberalism in Latin America has become particularly strident since the tail-end of the 1990s, when Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. It is not, however, a new phenomenon: almost as soon as neoliberal policies – or ‘reforms’ as they were called by their proponents – began to be introduced, politicians began to campaign, if not for their outright rejection, at least for giving the policies “a human face”. Much of the ensuing disillusionment with politics and politicians arose from neoliberalism not delivering what it had initially promised, and from the failure of critics to give it that ‘human face’.
New threat to fiscal reform
The government is running into some last minute hitches over its ambitious and crucial fiscal reform package. The centrepiece of this is the innovatory Contribución Empresarial de Tasa Unica (Cetu). The last minute row, in the fi rst week of September, was over the introduction of a 5.5 percent tax on petrol.
State governors (predominantly members of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PRI itself, which wants to fl ex its political muscles after its successes in Yucatán and Veracruz – the country’s third most electorally important state – want to force changes to the government’s plan. The danger is that they will try to force too many changes which will create a majority in congress against the whole package.
