Guatemala\'s Predicament: Electoral Democracy without Political Parties (PDF)

Capítulo 4

GUATEMALA’S PREDICAMENT: ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY WITHOUT POLITICAL PARTIES OMAR SÁNCHEZ-SIBONY Texas State University

1. INTRODUCTION When one travels to Guatemala, the local cognoscenti often remark that two of the main problems that stand in the way of a better future for the country are the absence of parties and the absence of a tax state. What is less remarked upon is that these two problems are intimately related: the dearth of bona fide political parties with staying power, a claim to popular representation, and organic links with society, impedes the enactment of public policy that could potentially advance the general interest (such as revenue-enhancing tax reform). Because political parties in Guatemala are little more than empty, uprooted organizations created to serve the interests of particular political entrepreneurs and rejected by voters in brief spans of time, they cannot act as effective mediating actors between state and society. For the same reasons, they do not possess the power to contravene the material and non-material interests of the country’s poderes fácticos (de facto power brokers) so as to enact public-regarding policies. In short, to understand why little of substance has changed in Guatemala since its sui generis transition to electoral democracy thirty years ago, it is imperative to come to grips with the nature of Guatemala’s party non-system and its component units, as well as the causal pathways via which this feeble and chaotic party universe undermines nearly every worthy public-regarding political endeavor, including state-building. This chapter seeks to provide a panoramic view of key elements characterizing Guatemala’s party universe, some causal factors underlining its severe under-institutionaliza-

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tion, and some of its dire consequences for the implementation of the Peace Accords and for the (in)significance of elections.

2. CHARACTERISTICS OF GUATEMALA’S PARTY NON-SYSTEM 2.1. The non-representative and uprooted nature of its (taxi) parties An article of faith in the political science literature holds political parties to be indispensable for democracy. Political parties fulfill crucial functions that cannot be well substituted for by other institutions: the representation of societal demands, the aggregation of interests, the mediation between state and society, and the training of cadres for public office. If these functions go unfulfilled, the quality of democracy will inexorably be fatally affected. Guatemala lacks veritable political parties, such that they do not fulfill any of these essential tasks. Instead, Guatemala possesses political parties only in the minimalist Sartorian sense of entities that field candidates for public office, but little more: they are electoral vehicles or taxi parties. Political scientists employ the notion of taxi parties to refer, somewhat informally, to their two most essential characteristics: firstly, they are vehicles used by political entrepreneurs to get from point A (postulating candidates) to point B (a parcel of power); secondly, these entities’ true partisans are so few in number that they fit in a taxicab. Taxi parties do not, by definition, represent social collectivities (social movements, ethnic groups) or corporate groups (labor, business, etc.). In consequence, they cannot be bona fide mediators between state and society, an indispensable task for the adequate functioning of a democratic regime. Virtually all of the parties in Guatemala that have been important (though never systemic) at one point or another since 1985, have been created to serve the aspirations of a particular political entrepreneur —whether individuals hailing from the economic elite, such as Alvaro Arzu and Oscar Berger, descendants of political figures, such as Alvaro Colom, or former military top brass such as Efrain Rios-Montt or Otto Perez Molina. (The Guatemalan Christian Democratic party, now extinct, stands as the exception

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that proves the rule, a party with links to its European party cousins). Guatemalan parties are therefore, highly privatized entities that respond almost exclusively to their creators and financiers.

2.1.1. Under-representation of indigenous population in party politics Perhaps no other fact is more revealing of the non-representative character of political parties in Guatemala than the reality that they have been oblivious to the particular interests, demands and grievances of the Mayan population. In the campaign trail or in written party manifestos, themes such as racism, discrimination, political and economic exclusion, land reform, and other issues of relevance for Mayan populations, are generally absent. The presence of indigenous citizens in parliament hovered between 5 and 8 percent in the early years of democratic rule, only to climb to between 10 and 15 percent in more recent times, well below their demographic weight in the country (Pallister, 2013: 122). Indigenous Guatemalans are also absent from government cabinets. Even Alvaro Colom, who campaigned on a promise to be a government “with a Mayan face”, only appointed one indigenous member to his cabinet (ASIES, 2008). While the indigenous community was essential in delivering Colom’s 2008 presidential victory (the first time a candidate has won by amassing the rural vote), it represented less than one-fifth of UNE’s congressional delegation. In the realm of public policy, “substantive indigenous concerns” where largely ignored “in the form of funding and legislative attention”, much in line with previous governments (Isaacs, 2010: 117). Colom’s campaign was the first by a major party to pay substantial rhetorical attention to indigenous grievances and demands, but once in office the UNE treated the indigenous community as a clientelistic base ripe for co-optation (particularly as a trampoline for First Lady Sandra Torre’s 2012 presidential aspirations). There was little by way of political investment in building a leftist programmatic linkage with indigenous constituencies. This reflects a broader pattern of conduct. Existing and past Guatemalan political parties have recruited indigenous politicians as an instrumental arrangement that aims to garner more votes in particular indigenous-populated communities (see

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Copeland, this volume), not as an effort to broaden the programmatic agenda or substantive pluralism of said parties. The first time an indigenous candidate ran for President in Guatemala occurred as recently as 2007 (Rigoberta Menchu), much later than similar episodes in Latin American countries with large indigenous populations1. At first blush, the continued political invisibility of the Mayans is puzzling, on account of the political influence and prominence of indigenous groups in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador. As Raul Madrid (2012: 147) points out in his comprehensive work on ethnic politics in Latin America, “Guatemala would appear to have many of the conditions necessary for the success of an indigenous party”. Institutional barriers to entry into the political system are low. Political barriers to entry are also low: because of the extremely low level of institutionalization of the party universe, there is a massive market of floating voters available for political socialization. The indigenous movement, however fragmented, had taken active role during the protracted Peace negotiations and scored sizable victories at the negotiating table. In short, some important politico-institutional facilitating conditions exist for Mayan party-creation and greater involvement in party politics at the national level. But these conditions have not yet materialized into a noticeable indigenous imprint in the party universe, such that the indigenous attain spheres of power commensurate with their demographic weight (42 percent of the population). While indigenous social movements have gained some representation at the municipal level, Pallister (2013) shows that the availability of avenues for local representation, the laxity of rules of political competition (which allow civic committees to field

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She received a paltry 3 percent of the nationwide vote. A plethora of reasons explain this outcome. The most important factor is probably that Menchu does not preside over a grassroots indigenous movement, unlike Evo Morales or the leaders of Pachakutik. Her Winaq party was a city-based organization lacking grassroots and rural support. She faced discrimination and a dearth of finance for the campaign, and failed to address a number of issues important to the indigenous community in the campaign trail, such as land reform. Her association with the Berger government (she served as its goodwill ambassador) may have also hurt her electoral performance.

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candidates), and the lack of integration of national and local politics, have had the effect of “reinforcing the localism and fragmentation of indigenous social movements”. The end result is a dearth of interest, and a massive collective action problem with respect to the task of building a national political party. An obvious difference with Bolivia and Ecuador is the legacy of political violence and fear bequeathed by the counterinsurgency state’s mass repression and genocide against Guatemalan indigenous communities (Brett and Bastos, 2007; Little and Smith, 2009).

2.2. On the irrelevance of ideological party identity Since 1985, when the transitional election took place, Guatemala’s party universe has been dominated by right-of-center parties, from the Christian Democrats to the Partido Patriota. A good many leading conservative politicians in Guatemala trace their partisan roots to the anticommunist Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (the “party of organized violence”) that collaborated closely the military rule, including former Presidents Jorge Serrano, Ramiro De Leon Carpio, and Alvaro Arzu. Transitions to democracy in Latin America were undertaken in an institutional and historical environment that favored parties of the Right (Cleary, 2006), but nowhere is this truer than in Guatemala. Leftist parties were proscribed until the Peace Accords were signed. Only starting in 1999 did left-of-center parties partake in general elections, as the rebels of the URNG, the new FDNG, and indigenous leaders, gained entry to the political system as legal players. This forcibly late participation further delayed their maturation as electoral organizations. The electoral competitiveness of the Left is surely constrained by an uneven playing field, given that conservative forces control most of the mass media and access to finance. But similar conditions also obtain in Central American neighboring countries where the Left is now in office (i.e. the Sandinistas in Nicaragua since 2006 and the FMLN in El Salvador since 2010). A better explanation for the Left’s meager electoral competitiveness must be found in the particularly asymmetric nature of Guatemala’s civil conflict (that is, it was not a military stalemate which convinced the armed forces to come to the negotiating table) and the concomitant devastating predicament of the Left and its natural societal

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allies (organized labor, leftist intelligentsia, human rights groups) after decades of state repression. Besides these essential historical antecedents, the main parties of the left have proven particularly maladroite in making the transition to electoral politics, for reasons that country experts have yet to fully uncover2. What can be said is that the left-ofcenter parties that did contest elections (UNRG, Frente Democrático Nueva Guatemala, Alianza Nueva Nación, and others) showcased atavistic programmatic platforms, were beset by internal infighting, and were led by electorally unappealing candidates. At first blush, it may appear as paradoxical that after a prolonged internal conflict that pitted the political Right (incarnated in the military and the oligarchy) versus the Left (incarnated in the guerillas), the supply of partisan alternatives does not offer voters clear ideological differentiations. Given the electoral irrelevance of leftist parties (UNE excepted, which may be placed as left-of-center but many consider centrist), the relevant party supply has been dominated by party units on the right-of-center side of the ideological continuum. However, with a few exceptions (i.e. UNRG), it is difficult to sketch meaningful or precise ideological profiles of the various party formations, in good measure because of the paucity of campaign statements on the economic orientation of parties, the emphasis on non-ideological valence issues, and party subservience to their creators or leaders, who single-handedly shape the character of the party. Taxi parties are, after all, created not to serve an ideological vision but, rather, the power ambitions of particular political entrepreneurs and their coteries. LAPOP surveys mapping the ideological placement of Guatemalan voters also show, contrary to what is observed in Nicaragua or El Salvador, that they are very weakly polarized: most are clustered around the ideological center, with a tilt towards the right (Azpuru, Pira and Seligson 2006). Insofar as political beliefs are shaped from above, by the political class, these surveys reflect the inability of the Left to socialize a critical mass of voters into a

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Leftist intellectual and former revolutionary Gustavo Porras provides interesting insights on this question in his autobiographical book, Las Huellas de Guatemala (F y G Editores), 2009.

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leftist value-system and a progressive programmatic agenda, despite the objective reality of an enormous mass of poor and working class voters excluded from the gains of the prevailing economic model. Otherwise stated, the organizationally feeble and quite feckless left-of-center parties have proven incapable of politicizing on-the-ground conditions of acute social class differentiation and abysmal income inequality such that those conditions map into party politics. Admittedly, party building is not an easy enterprise given Guatemala’s post-conflict political environment. The same environmental obstacles that stand in the way of building a conservative party such that it becomes an institution also imperil party-building efforts on the Left of the political spectrum. Yet, the Guatemalan Left, as the Left in the rest of Latin America, does enjoy one a priori structural advantage at election time, namely, objective socioeconomic conditions of poverty and inequality. In the final analysis, discussions about the nominal ideological profile of Guatemala’s party universe can be quite misleading, given the insubstantial nature of the parties. True to their condition as taxi parties, these entities lack ideological substance or an identifiable programmatic agenda that guides them. At best, they formulate a vague agenda at election time, but once ensconced in government, they govern without reference to it. Incumbent parties in Guatemala are only in partial command of a weak state overwhelmed with manifold enormous challenges it is ill-equipped to respond to. Political parties in Guatemala may nominally be conservative or progressive, but if they are socially uprooted, if they have no organic linkages with society, their ability to command political authority vis-a-vis other political actors (particularly the poderes facticos) shall be enormously limited. In other words, the dominance of nominally right of center parties is less important in explaining the depressing post-authoritarian trajectory of the country than the reality that political parties are not central players in shaping political outcomes. Simply put, Guatemala’s political parties are not the backbone of the country’s political life: they are largely epiphenomenal in that they lack political autonomy and independent clout qua organizations. They are instruments that serve purely particularlistic interests, those of their founders and financiers. This particular predicament does not quite hold in other Central America republics, where some politi-

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cal parties evince a moderate to high degree of institutionalization and possess more leverage in shaping outcomes. The list is long: the PLN in Costa Rica; the Partido Panamenista in Panama; the Sandinista party in Nicaragua; ARENA and FMLN in El Salvador; the Partido Liberal and the Partido Nacional in Honduras. Guatemalan parties may win ephemeral electoral mandates and temporarily hold high office, but none has been able to truly represent citizens and thus speak for them. This inexorably limits political parties’ power and authority in their interactions with society —whether labor, business or social movements.

3. THE KINGDOM OF PERPETUALLY HIGH ELECTORAL VOLATILITY OR THE ABSENCE OF SYSTEMIC PARTIES Any standard definition of the term “party system” includes intertemporal regularity in identity of the main party units in the polity. Notwithstanding the fact that conceptual stretching in the application of this term is common, not all party constellations across countries constitute bona fide party systems, because some constellations flaunt this necessary condition. Guatemala constitutes a paradigmatic case of what elsewhere I have conceptualized as a party non-system (Sánchez, 2009b), that is to say a party universe without systemic parties, and therefore without stability at its very core. Since 1985, no Guatemalan party has been able to establish itself as a systemic party, because all political formations that were at some juncture electorally important (evincing a large parliamentary presence) became marginal (or extinguished) within two or three electoral cycles. A brief perusal of the country’s party universe through time illustrates this. In the 1985, the Christian Democrats and the UCN emerged as the largest parties; two electoral cycles later (1995 election), these two parties were marginal, while the PAN and the FRG became the main party referents; two electoral episodes thereafter (2003 election), the GANA (a coalition of PMR-PSN) and the UNE became the main parties; in turn, after only two more electoral contests (2011 election), the Partido Patriota and LIDER emerged as the leading party units. In the process, the country has witnessed an enormous rate of party deaths and party births (i.e. those that lose or attain representation in Congress). No other country in Third Wave Latin America has

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been as big a cemetery of political parties as Guatemala (Sánchez, 2008; Jones, 2011). This predicament stems from the fundamental uprootedness of all Guatemalan parties: because they lack a critical mass of true party loyalists, their popular support is tenuous and extremely vulnerable to economic and political performance. The country is afflicted not only with a perilously high level of demand volatility, but also very high supply volatility, that is, an ever-changing party menu from election to election because the creation of new parties as well as party splits and party mergers (Sánchez, 2008). A consequence emanating from a political universe of floating voters (i.e. those without party attachments), is high party universe and parliamentary fragmentation, which imperils governability. Every election offers a bewildering array of party choices, including many new ones (ASIES, 2004), and elections do not often deliver clear electoral mandates, because of high vote fragmentation. The chaotic nature of Guatemalan party politics is further accentuated by elite behavior. Because there is a low degree of internal democracy amidst parties, and the cost of political defection is low due to the scant value that party labels possess, ambitious politicians have incentives to defect in order to launch their own electoral vehicle. Manuel Baldizon, who defected from the UNE to launch his own taxi party (LIDER) to contest the 2011 presidential election, is only the latest prominent example of this phenomenon. The ephemeral nature of political parties, the fact that their electoral fortunes rise and fall with remarkable rapidity, has a logical consequence: those individuals who want to remain in the game of politics (or want to be affiliated with parties that wield some clout or can leverage access to resources) are incentivized to jump from party to party to avoid sinking into political oblivion. Changing party labels becomes a matter of individual political survival. In consequence, many politicians in Guatemalan have belonged to two or more political parties throughout their careers, including most former Presidents. Because no party has been able to develop an identity or brand that can attract a core base of voters on a consistent basis, political society has been bereft of party labels with intrinsic electoral value. Another manifestation of the negligible value politicians attach to party labels can be seen in the rampant transfugismo (party-switching) that afflicts the Guatemalan Congress, aided by permissive rules for such a practice (Fortin

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2010). Guatemala showcases one of the highest rates in Latin America at which lawmakers switch political parties within the course of a legislative term (in between parliamentary elections). For example, only a year after the 2012 parliamentary election, the UNE and GANA alliance had lost 34 of its initial 48 legislators, while Baldizon’s LIDER had swelled its parliamentary caucus from 14 to 40 lawmakers! This made of LIDER the largest opposition force in Congress, a position it had not attained via the ballot box. Parliamentarians’ perceptions about the near-term ascendancy or decline of parties, as well as access to resources, constitute prime factors that explain the party-crossing en masse afflicting Guatemalan politics. Extensive transfuguismo subverts the democratic process and popular sovereignty, for it rearranges the allocation of seats in Congress that emanates from electoral outcomes (as the manifestation of popular will). In sum, there is as little loyalty to Guatemalan parties on the part of voters as there is on the part of politicians. In the Latin American region, only Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador qualify in the present time as party non-systems, the most extreme form of party universe under-institutionalization. While some degree of volatility in democracy is quite healthy, particularly when it reflects the mapping of new political cleavages or the incorporation of new popular demands in the party system, the perpetually high level observed in Guatemala is, by contrast, a reflection of a fundamental disconnect between citizens and the political system. In sum, Guatemala lacks bona fide political parties as well as a veritable, recognizable party system. This raises an inevitable query: what factors can explain why this Central American republic showcases a democracy without parties?

4. SOME CAUSAL FACTORS UNDERGIRDING A PARTYLESS DEMOCRACY 4.1. The unbearable legacy of conflict The inability of leftist parties in Guatemala to be electorally competitive can be attributed in large measure to the legacy of the 36 year civil conflict, during which the aptly named “counterinsurgency state”

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zealously persecuted and brutally repressed any organization associated with left-of-center ideas. A very high proportion of the country’s progressive leaders and intellectuals were jailed, killed or forced into exile (Schirmer, 1998; Jonas, 2000), depriving the political Left of much of its most precious human capital and organizational skills. The devastation of autonomous civil society during the conflict also bequeathed a landscape devoid of robust socially representative organizations with which to build organic linkages. The pieces of the puzzle to build corporatisttype party linkages with society have been lacking. Absent functional programmatic or corporatist linkages, only clientelism remains as a (less desirable) tool to build party-voter links. This inauspicious landscape for party-building has been particularly damaging for the political Left, which possesses less material resources to engage in clientelistic linkages than the political Right. (Research shows a strong correlation between campaign spending and electoral performance in Guatemala). And yet, as the empirical record shows, a clientelistic approach has proven insufficient for parties (leftist or Right-wing) in their quest to become systemic, that is, to achieve some measure of inter-temporal stability in their vote share. More generally, 36 years of brutal repression on the party of successive military governments bequeathed a legacy of fear towards any type of political engagement and activism, given the dangers it entailed. Civil society had been purposely devastated by the time the military, which had turned the country into a pariah nation-state, decided to initiate a transition towards civilian rule. The dire predicament of associational life in the Guatemala of the 1980s rendered inherently difficult the development of party linkages vis-à-vis organized civil society. Civil society organizations, in their quest for more inclusive political and economic institutions, face more resourceful and powerful opponents. Threats and assaults against human rights groups, labor unions, journalists and nongovernmental organizations, are a daily phenomenon and have increased in the post-Peace Accords era, in what is a sustained and ferocious backlash against defenders of economic fairness, accountability, and justice writ large. Political activism remains a very perilous endeavor in Guatemala, which has inescapably damaging consequences for the strength of civil society. These historical factors have rendered

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party-building an elusive enterprise for the few Guatemalan politicians’ intent on constructing societally rooted parties. Political parties in Guatemala continue to be purely electoralist-minded, and to rely on oldfashioned clientelism. Few have attempted to build more durable forms of party-voter linkage, and none has been successful.

4.2. The lack of business sector investment in party-building An accepted tenet among scholars of party politics is that, in the absence of conservative parties representing the private sector, democracy becomes more unstable, because organized business is more likely to become an anti-systemic player when democracy yields electoral and public policy outcomes that threaten its interests (Middlebrook, 2000). In post-transition Guatemala this has scarcely been a problem because industrial and landholding interests represented in the powerful CACIF enjoy direct, untramelled access to the state, unmediated by political parties. The state enjoys rather limited decisional (or financial) autonomy from organized business. Secondly, the weakness of Guatemalan leftist parties dramatically reduces the threat they pose to conservative interests, and thus lowers the incentive to invest in the building of a right-wing party to offset such a (virtually inexistent) threat. Finally, the rotation of parties in the executive at every electoral cycle hides the unchanging reality that many members of successive government cabinets come from the business aristocracy, including many ministers and even Presidents —such as Alvaro Arzu or Oscar Berger. Those firms and industries represented in the CACIF have therefore seen little need to build a political party to protect their interests (Lemus 2012). In fact, they have used their control over the mass media to systematically discredit political parties in the court of public opinion (relentlessly hammering home the corruption and fecklessness of party formations), in what constitutes a rational, if narrow-minded, political calculus: the lower the level of institutionalization of political parties, the greater the political leverage that accrues to business. In short, Guatemala’s private sector has unmistakably contributed, both by commission and omission, to perpetuate the country’s partyless electoral democracy.

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5. SEVERE STATE WEAKNESS AND “INCUMBENT DISADVANTAGE” State power in post-Peace Accords Guatemala has been declining both in absolute and relative terms. Absolute decline can be detected in the increased infiltration of clandestine networks in the workings of the state, rendering it less autonomous and capable (particularly in the security realm) (WOLA, 2003; Brands, 2010); relative decline is unmistakable in that anti-systemic non-state actors have grown in power in relation to that of the state. Let me illustrate the phenomenon of absolute state weakening with one revealing example. The murder in February 2007 of three Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), carried out by four Guatemalan policemen, was widely reported in the international press for good reason: it highlighted the extent to which criminal networks had infiltrated the Guatemalan security apparatus. In response, the minister of the interior and the national police chief were fired, alongside 1,900 police officers suspected of links with criminal syndicates. The presence of mafias entrenched in the state has fomented a generalized climate of impunity, for the consequence of such infiltration is that key state institutions do not carry out their public duty of combating crime. The incapacity of the state to provide the most basic security and rule of law functions is manifested in a plethora of statistics. The year 2013 registered 6075 Guatemalans killed, or about 16 each day, a figure that is much in line with homicide rates of recent years. The homicide rate doubled from 23 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 1999 to 45 in 2006, reaching 108 in Guatemala City, equivalent to twice the rate in Baghdad’s at the time (Guatemala Times, 2010). As commissioner for the governmental Presidential Commission for Human Rights Frank La Rue has pointed out, “there are [in the post-conflict era] more deaths due to violence than there were during the armed conflict (El Pais, 2007)”. Only 2 percent of crimes are investigated, less than half reach a court of law and the possibility of conviction is minimal, not least because Fiscalia (General Attorney’s Office) agents do not have the adequate training and resources necessary to reach guilty verdicts. The judicial system (at all levels) is similarly overwhelmed, under-

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resourced and unprepared to handle endemic crime. It is also under constant threat by crime syndicates. The result of rampant impunity is that Guatemalans increasingly take justice into their own hands. These uncomfortable numbers on crimes and impunity have led some political analysts to declare that Guatemala constitutes a failing state. Scholar and former Vice-President of Costa Rica, Kevin Casas Zamora asserts that “the capacities of the Guatemalan state to enforce the law and exert effective control over its territory are well below what is needed to face up to the dire security challenge that is being foisted upon it. Guatemala is experiencing a silent institutional collapse” (Casas-Zamora, 2011: 2). Similarly, high-level government official Gustavo Porras and a key negotiator of the Peace Accords, warns that “the road towards a failed state in Guatemala is open”. The inability of successive government to reduce levels of indiscriminate violence and crime is all too conspicuous; the statistics for homicide rates, torture, and sexual violence continued to climb in the decade of the 2000s and into the 2010s3. A prominent source of absolute decline in state infrastructural power is the wide-ranging network of poderes paralelos or “parallel powers”, as they are known in Guatemala. These parallel powers are ensconced within the state itself (Keen, 2003; WOLA, 2003). The rise of parallel powers in Guatemala has its origin in the operations of the counterinsurgency state during the long civil war. Many policemen and military personnel, operating in a climate of total impunity, began to enrich themselves by building structures of criminal networks involving all manner of illicit activities, from arms trafficking, to the organization of paramilitary groups, to the building of links with narco-trafficking barons and cartels (Beltran and Peacock, 2003). In addition, the shrinking

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Under the Perez Molina government these statistics were no better than those of predecessor governments, despite the fact that Perez Molina had made of violence reduction the main focus of his electoral campaign. Both 2012 and 2013 registered over 6,000 homicides per year, an average of 16 a day, in line with the average of recent years. The lack of improvement occurs even as the police force has increased the size of its ranks by 30 percent in the past few years (El Confidencial 2014). Again, state weakness and pervasive infiltration in key state agencies militate against an improved security panorama.

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in the size of the Guatemalan army (one of the very few Peace Accords provisions that has actually been implemented) had the unintended effect of swelling the ranks of young men without a job and pay, a ready source of recruitment for criminal organizations (Brands, 2010). Governments have to implement public policy through the machinery of the state that they inherit, not the state apparatus they wish was available. In Guatemala’s case, that means state institutions that are severely under-resourced, burdened with inadequate human capital, ridden with inefficiencies, beset by corruption, and infiltrated by parallel powers with their own agendas. As former Guatemalan Finance Minister Juan Alberto Fuentes (2011) illustrates in his recent and insightful book Rendicion de Cuentas, even presumed “islands of excellence” within the apparatus of the state showcase significant deficiencies. Guatemala also displays the smallest state in Central America, and one of the smallest in Latin America. Not only are tax revenues as a percentage of GDP famously low, but the state is organizationally puny in other dimensions: there is only a state body for every 150,000 individuals, compared with a public agency for every 17,000 citizens in Costa Rica, one for every 38,000 residents in El Salvador or one for every 55,000 in Nicaragua, for instance (Ramirez Corver, 2011). In the Inter-American Development Bank ranking of public bureaucracies (Functional Capacity Index), conducted in the mid-2000s, Guatemala scores near the bottom in Latin America, much as it does in a Merit and Civil service Development Index (Zuvanic, Iacoviello and Rodríguez, 2010). All comparative indices reveal that Guatemala evinces a severely undersized, under-resourced, and incompetent public sector, virtually incapable of fulfilling the functions of a modern state. Honest and competent Presidents, cabinet ministers and public servants, which Guatemala has not entirely lacked, are hampered in their efforts by an exceedingly feeble state apparatus. Another weakness of the Guatemalan state lies in its excessive politicization. A study by the IDB calculates that an extremely high percentage of public posts in state bureaucracy, 17.5 percent, are appointed according to political criteria (rather than meritocratic criteria), whereas the second highest such figure in Latin America belongs to Brazil, with 8.6 percent and Bolivia, with 8.1 percent (OEA, 8). Guatemala lacks anything

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resembling a professional civil service, further weakening the capability of the state to design and implement public policy. Guatemala’s extreme state weakness has imperiled party institutionalization and the consolidation of a bona fide party system by way of virtually condemning successive governments to massive failures of performance. The inter-temporal fate of incumbent parties has been remarkably similar. After a few months in office, regardless of the size of the initial electoral mandate, levels of public support for the President and his party decline significantly, and often precipitously4. The chief reason is straightforward: notwithstanding variations in the quality and probity of different governments, severe state weakness seriously hamstrings their ability to deliver basic public goods (security, justice, jobs, and others). Incumbent parties thus repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises, burdening the country with serial malperformance in office. Voters, witnessing a lack of progress on the issues they most care about, withdraw support en masse from the incumbent party they had voted for. The manifestation of this dynamic is unmistakable: no party has ever won re-election since civilian elections were held in 1985, a phenomenon that is rare in post-1978 (Third Wave) Latin America. The rate of electoral attrition for parties in power is enormously high, as has been amply documented (Jones 2011; Sanchez 2009b). This phenomenon can be labeled as one of “incumbent disadvantage”5: holding the reins of government proves electorally disadvantageous to political parties. The manner in which state weakness translates into political, security and economic malperformance is straightforward: implementation of even the best-designed public policy plan will be subverted by underresourced, corrupt, inefficient, unprepared, and infiltrated state institutions and public agencies, such that results are consistently lackluster

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The Otto Perez Molina government (2012-16) is following the trajectory of its predecessors. After sixteen months in office, its approval rating had dropped by twenty percentage points (from 68 to 48 percent). No less than 70 percent of those polled opined that the country was heading in the wrong direction (EL Periódico, 2013). I am in debt to Carlos Melendez (personal communication) for this term.

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or worse. The security and economic challenges facing the country are greater than Guatemala’s incapable state can handle —a predicament that has worsened with the rise of the drug trade throughout the Central American corridor. This stark reality obtains regardless of what political party wins an election. The upshot is that incumbent parties are consistently punished via retrospective voting for failing to improve security and economic conditions. Feckless, incompetent, and corrupt governments meet the same electoral fate (i.e. non-reelection) as do parties-inthe-executive that are, by all accounts, comparatively more competent and probe. For instance, the FRG failed dismally in its re-election attempt after the FRG’s notoriously corrupt Portillo administration, but the same fate befell the UNE’s re-election attempt after the comparatively cleaner Alvaro Colom’s administration (2008-2012). Both governments, as all others, failed to deliver on the issues voters care most about. Similarly, after less than twelve months in office, the Perez Molina government (2012-2016) was beset by “diverse expressions of discontent with its performance”, as its “range of [unfulfilled] electoral promises were having an impact on the public perception of the government” (Rosal 2013, 216). Once again, acute malperfomance in office is making a rapid dent on an incumbent party’s popularity. While many Latin American states are weak (i.e. rank low on stateness) few display the level of electoral attrition seen in countries like Peru or Guatemala. Robust party brands, incumbent-tilted electoral playing fields, entrenched clientelistic networks, robust corporatist linkages, or a combination thereof, significantly shield many incumbent parties in the region from the electoral consequences of malperformance in office. By contrast, Guatemalan parties face elections in naked fashion, bereft of such important buffers against electoral calamity. In particular, because they are devoid of valuable party brands and loyal partisans, they depend almost exclusively on legitimacy of performance at election time —particularly security and economic outputs. Such high vulnerability to performance criteria has wreaked havoc with the stability of the party universe. No Guatemalan incumbent party has delivered improved public goods or palpably better performance on a whole range of important indicators, in large measure because severe state weakness virtually condemns incumbents to malperformance. The

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empirical evidence of the past thirty years shows that being catapulted to the national Executive renders political parties “radioactive” in electoral terms, for each successive government is publicly perceived to be as incapable as the previous one. Without a sustained process of statebuilding, Guatemalan political parties shall be condemned to iterated failures of performance in office, and will be unable to build a reputation for efficiency (or indeed, probity) in governance. Unfortunately, there is something of a self-perpetuating dynamic at work that makes escaping from this predicament exceedingly difficult, for state-building requires sustained effort across governments, itself predicated on some degree of inter-party consensus; state-building also benefits from the existence of political parties endowed with the clout and political capital to successfully confront political actors (including organized business and organized crime) with a revealed interest in the status quo of severe state weakness. The instability and severe under-institutionalization of the party universe means that neither of these important conditions for state-building obtains.

6. SOME PERNICIOUS CORRELATES OF THE ABSENCE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED PARTIES 6.1. The non-implementation of the peace accords Understanding the ephemeral and unrepresentative nature of Guatemalan parties is essential in order to comprehend the general absence of compliance with the historic Peace Accord reforms (Sieder, 2002; Stanley and Holiday, 2002; Seligson, 2005). The 1996 Peace agreement aimed to remake the country anew by addressing the profound roots (inequality, poverty, discrimination, absence of liberties) of the civil conflict. As we have seen, the extremely high level of electoral volatility, a consequence of party uprootedness across the political spectrum, means that those parties that are important (in their share of parliamentary seats or because they hold the presidency) at a given juncture do not remain important for long. Therefore, agreements struck between ruling parties and social actors cannot be upheld for a reasonable period, and neither can agreements struck between parties themselves. Where veritable po-

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litical parties are absent, social forces confront each other nakedly and, ceteris paribus, the prevalent balance of power in society is more likely to be perpetuated than would otherwise be the case. Political theory posits, and the empirical record shows that, in a democracy, institutionalized parties are important “weapons of the weak”, in their struggle for voice and politico-economic change (Huber and Stephens, 2012). In the absence of such parties, the underprivileged are bereft of an important instrument via which to push for more inclusive political and economic rules of the game. Guatemala’s poderes facticos, particularly the mighty CACIF (the main peak business association), have been able to easily outwrestle and overpower governments that have attempted to introduce reforms the CACIF opposed. A telling example was the derailment of the historic 1999 referendum by the private sector. The referendum sought to enshrine many of the key provisions of the Peace Accords in the national Constitution, so as to make its commitments more binding. In the event, the business community used its control over much of the country’s mass media to spearhead a concerted campaign of misinformation and negative advertising that increased abstentionism and helped the “No” campaign win the day (Jonas 2000). Another prominent example is the cause of comprehensive tax reform, a state-building imperative contained in the Peace Accords, needed in order to finance the state’s manifold obligations and crucial public investments. Political parties have been loath to take up the cause of revenue-raising tax reform for fear of alienating powerful interests (as well as their financiers); at those times when incumbent parties have put forth (usually quite timid) proposals to reform the tax code, they have been unable to overcome the implacable opposition of the powerful CACIF (Fuentes and Cabrera, 2006; Sánchez, 2009a). Parties-in-the-executive (not unlike those in the opposition) have a very limited stock of political capital, a reflection of their uprootedness and non-representative nature; they are usually reluctant to spend the little capital which they do possess in political battles against powerful opponents (military, business community, etc). Another obvious reason that public-regarding reforms have been absent is the well-known collusion and intertwining between political and economic power typical of small Central American republics. A high number of recent Guatemalan Presidents and cabinet ministers

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hail from the country’s economic elite (Dosal, 2005), demonstrably rendering them less predisposed to enact reforms that challenge the economic status quo. In sum, the fundamental incapacity of Guatemala’s extraordinarily feeble parties to tame the veto power of the country’s poderes facticos explains in no small measure why its democratic regime has yielded so little in terms of public-regarding legislation. Legislation that contravenes elite or criminal interests is severely watered-down or entirely shelved. It is not much of an exaggeration to remark that, in its public policy outputs, Guatemala continues to resemble an oligarchic republic, almost thirty years removed from that landmark 1985 presidential election.

6.2. Low quality democracy The literature on transitions to democracy has long been handicapped by a teleological fault: the assumption that any country moving away from dictatorial rule was effectively transiting toward political democracy. The assumption that countries exiting authoritarianism tend to move from lower (incomplete) to higher (more complete) stages of “democraticness” was no longer tenable by the turn of the present century. Guatemala stands as a paradigmatic case of a country that has dashed the expectations held at the time of its transition away from authoritarianism in the mid-1980s, and again has disappointed the great hopes that the historic 1996 Peace Accords sparked. Notwithstanding some limited progress in particular issue-areas, Guatemala has generally not moved towards higher levels of democracy. Democratic deepening eludes it. It constitutes a yet another case that informs the “transition paradigm”, as Thomas Carothers labeled the longstanding assumption among political scientists that most countries transiting away from authoritarianism are gradually moving towards democracy. In the case of Guatemala, the main causal factors for such democratization stagnation are surely structural (state weakness, the enormous imbalance of power across societal interest groups, rampant poverty, abysmal levels of inequality, de facto politico-economic exclusion of large segments of its population) and historical (scant democratic antecedents and the legacy of 36 years of civil conflict). But institutional factors, including the fecklessness of

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Guatemalan political parties, are key as well. At a basic level, Guatemala remains one of the countries in Latin America with the least inclusive political institutions, understood in the Acemoglu and Robinson (2009) framework as rules of the game that distribute political power across a broad cross-section of society. Electoral democracy is not tantamount to inclusive political institutions, because many democracies are dysfunctional. Guatemala is a prime example of a pro forma democracy that is fundamentally dysfunctional from almost every viewpoint. Because political parties are not representative of society, they do little to counteract the exclusive nature of political and economic institutions. To be sure, the political system has moved in the direction of inclusiveness since the transition away from military rule, but very modestly. Democratic elections have hitherto done little to modify the country’s fundamental disequilibrium in political power dating from colonial times. Prospects for the democratization of political power across society remain dire. It is important to bear in mind that Guatemalan military’s extrication from government did not occur, unlike in other Latin American Third Wave transitions, as a result of negotiations between an autocratic incumbent and an empowered democratic opposition. The notion of a negotiated settlement (1996 Peace Accords), while true in purely nominal terms and commonly used to describe the Guatemalan case, is highly misleading. In reality, as Fabrice Lehoucq (2012: 128) writes, because the Guatemalan asymmetric civil conflict ended with the government’s de facto victory, the peace settlement was “fundamentally about administering the terms of the UNRG’s surrender”. Crosscountry research on the relationship between the way civil wars are resolved and post-conflict political trajectory, shows that government victories (as opposed to a stalemate or victory by the rebels) are associated with less democratic post-conflict regime outcomes (Toft, 2010). The case of Guatemala fits this global pattern. Guatemala’s democratization was top-down, reluctantly pursued by political, economic and military elites incentivized by a new regional and international environment that changed their self-interested political calculation at that historical juncture. It did not emerge as a result of democratization pressures from an empowered, vocal and active civil society —devastated as it was by

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a brutally repressive regime. This legacy has seriously constrained the country’s democratizing potential. The feebleness of Guatemala’s electoral democracy can hardly be exaggerated (Blanco, et.al. 2007). All manner of different democratic indices coincide in placing it among the lowest in quality. Molina and Levine’s (2011) Index of Quality of Democracy, which evaluates 18 Latin American countries, places Guatemala at the very bottom (18th), with a score of 44.6, compared to a regional average of 57.3. The country lags its Central American neighbors by significant margins. When Guatemala’s aggregate Quality of Democracy score is unpacked, the country ranks at or near the bottom on all of its constituent components: electoral decision, participation, accountability, responsiveness, and sovereignty. The authors find that the Guatemala’s level of political rights (measured as the extent to which electoral institutions provide for a free and equal competition among different groups and prevent public resources from tilting the playing field), the very low level of cognitive resources (secondary school enrollment), and significant constrains as regards freedom of the press (gauged as the extent to which multiple sources of information exist and are accessible to the public), all seriously undermine the quality of electoral decision-making. Electoral participation is well known to be low in Guatemala (Borneo and Torres-Rivas, 2000). Admittedly, it has improved since the mid-1990s (Sonnleitner, 2009: 528532), not least because the electoral management body has increased the number of voting stations in difficult to reach rural areas of the country. Yet, high levels of electoral abstention and under-registration of votingage citizens continue to pose an important limitation on the quality of democracy. Turnout levels for the second round of presidential elections, for example, continue to be below 50 percent. Numbers on electoral participation reflect the political apathy and low sense of political efficacy (the belief that political engagement can lead to change) afflicting large segments of Guatemalan society. Participation in political organizations is particularly dismal. When asked, “how frequently do you do work for a candidate or a political party?” only a mere 2.2 percent of Guatemalans responded “frequently” or “very frequently” (Latinobarómetro, 2005). Again, these figures reflect the seemingly unbridgeable chasm and profound distrust of citizens towards political parties.

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Political parties are key institutions in their potential to combat inequities in power across society. Because Guatemala evinces partylessness, the country’s underlying asymmetric power structures and nefarious historical inheritances are more prone to be perpetuated than otherwise. It is difficult to conceive of sustainable democratic deepening in Guatemala without party-building. Moreover, partylessness empties elections of much of their potential relevance, as discussed next.

6.3. The near-irrelevance of elections Elections have become institutionalized and alternation in office among parties is all too common (indeed, the norm), but electoral processes have not discernibly deepened the quality of democracy in this Central American republic. Lindberg’s research (2006) shows that, in the African context, democratization by elections constitutes a demonstrable mode of transition towards democracy and democratic deepening. By contrast, McCoy and Hartlyn’s detailed study (2009: 71) convincingly demonstrates “a relative powerlessness of elections in Latin America to improve the quality of democracy once the minimal threshold of electoral democracy has been reached”. Guatemala’s disappointing political trajectory since its democratic opening fits broader regional patterns. Guatemala has avoided democratic breakdown by one big blow (with the brief exception of Jorge Serrano’s 1993 failed self coup), as seen recently in Honduras or Paraguay; it has also avoided democratic breakdown by “a thousand blows” and a transition towards competitive authoritarianism, as seen in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua. But Guatemala’s democratic institutions remain very fragile. Electoral processes continue to be held at regular intervals ever since the foundational presidential contest of 1985. Alternation in power has scarcely been a problem, as seven different political parties have won the presidency and no party has come close to achieving reelection. However, elections are supposed to have consequences. Democracy entails the “institutionalization of uncertainty”, to follow Adam Przeworski’s famous definition, insofar as elections represent options among different political projects and worldviews. The rules of the democratic game inherently generate uncertainty about the identity of future office-

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holders and, by extension, ensuing public policy outcomes. The second element of this essential tenet of democratic theory can scarcely be observed in Guatemala: regardless of what political party accesses high national office, public policy outputs are not dissimilar. The absence of palpable policy change during the stint of UNE in office (2008-2012), the first putatively left-of-center party to win the presidency, has only corroborated this political trajectory —underpinned as it is by an unchanging societal balance of power. Two noted Guatemalan analysts aptly sum up Alvaro Colom’s UNE government as one where “in general…no public policy of importance for the economic development of the country was implemented. To the contrary, the government transferred funds from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health to [clientelistic] programs that favored the presidential candidacy of Colom’s wife, Sandra Torres” (Maldonado and Barahona, 2010: 357). Indeed, Mi Familia Progresa, the cash-transfer program introduced in 2008, was perhaps the only meaningful policy difference between the Colom government and its predecessors, but its clientelistic use blunted both its effectiveness and the political differentiation with past governments. Latin America has witnessed important gyrations in the public and economic policy trajectories in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Bolivia and Brasil as a result of electoral turnover and the coming of Leftist parties to power (Weyland and Hunter, 2010). Guatemala joined the leftist wave nominally, but not in substantive terms. This manifestation of the relative powerlessness of elections in Guatemala can be attributed in no small measure to the powerlessness of its taxi parties to effect meaningful change. While socioeconomic inequality has become politicized and taken political center-stage in most of Latin America over the past decade and a half (Roberts: 2012), the trend has largely bypassed Guatemala. The Central American republic stands as an outlier in good measure because of the extreme under-institutionalization of its party universe, which severely constrains the mapping of the theme of inequality (or any other issue) into party politics.

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7. AN INSTITUTIONAL ATTEMPT AT PARTYBUILDING: LEY ELECTORAL Y DE PARTIDOS POLITICOS (LEPP) The panorama laid out throughout this chapter is very bleak as regards the prospect that Guatemala will develop a functional party system. The one apparent tool at the disposal of political reformers in the quest to escape the country’s partyless predicament is institutional engineering. The recognition that the severe under-institutionalization of political parties poses a challenge for governance and for the quality of democracy spurred Guatemalan reformers to sign a new electoral law on political parties (LEPP), enshrined into law in 2004 (subsequently modified in 2006). The law sought to increase public funding to political parties (to 2 quetzales per vote) so as to try to make them less dependable on private donations and thus enhance their autonomy from private interests. It also sought to force parties to develop territorial party organization via the requirement that mandates that parties must have an organizational presence in at least 50 out of the country’s 333 municipalities (Blas, 2012). But the results have predictably been meager. Two general elections have been carried out under the new electoral law (2007 and 2011) with no visible sign that the dysfunctional dynamics of the party universe are changing or that the level of institutionalization of political parties is increasing. The escalating cost of electoral campaigns in Guatemala has granted even more space for wealthy private contributors (businessmen but also drug-based and other illicit financiers) to finance a plethora of taxi parties. On October 31, 2013, modifications to the LEPP were approved by Congress. The new legislation augments public funding to each political party from $3 to $5 per vote obtained, resources that the law stipulates must be used to enhance the formation and civic education of party cadres, and it prohibits anonymous contributions to parties, so as to enhance transparency. While these are worthy legislative initiatives, it is highly unlikely that they will pave the way towards an institutionalized party system. The empirical evidence in Latin America (or the developing world at large) is clear: party systems do not congeal or become institutionalized mainly as a result of changes in electoral law —particu-

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larly in contexts of pervasive institutional weakness where the ability of the state to enforce the rule of law (including electoral rules) is low, such as Guatemala. Rather, the political history of Latin America and other regions shows that bona fide party systems emerge as a result of historical conflicts (civil wars), societal cleavages (religious, nationalist, ethnic, socioeconomic) that become politicized, the ability of political formations to build distinctive party brands, or occasionally, populist movements that outlive their leaders (Peronismo, Chavismo, etc.). In short, the emergence and consolidation of a veritable party system cannot be conjured up via institutional engineering. Unfortunately, Guatemala’s ever-changing party universe displays self-perpetuating dynamics. Prospects for the emergence of a party system worthy of the name are scant in the foreseeable future.

8. CONCLUSION There are many structural factors that perpetuate Guatemala’s dysfunctional electoral democracy, stemming from a repressive, authoritarian and politically violent Twentieth century trajectory, as well as an enormously skewed distribution of power in society. The vacuous nature of Guatemala’s political parties is partly endogenous to this pernicious historical legacy. Party building is fraught with formidable obstacles in Guatemala, including a frail civil society, distrustful citizens, the dangers associated with political activism, and the presence of entrenched power brokers whose actions perpetuate the partyless status quo. An extremely feeble state renders elusive the amelioration of economic and security conditions, which fatally damages the future electoral prospects of parties that take the reins of government —a phenomenon here labeled “incumbent disadvantage”. The absence of veritable political parties dooms the political system to dysfunctionality because the political game operates, in most respects, in self-referential fashion, divorced from societal dynamics (i.e. societal fault-lines, demands, grievances, etc.). Elections have amounted to little more than governmental turnover without alternative public policy pathways. Insofar as elections simply entail the turnover in office of individual political entrepreneurs atop parties without rootedness, clout, decisional autonomy, or guiding

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ideology, little of relevance can be expected of the electoral process in terms of substantive outputs. Thus the general absence of progress in the Peace Accords agenda, almost twenty years after it was signed. Empirically speaking, one is hard-pressed to name another Latin American country where elections have been as thoroughly inconsequential in changing its political trajectory and underlying power relations. Prospects for state-building are also scant, not least because political parties, which need to jumpstart and undergird the process, are politically much weaker than most of its enemies (from organized business to organized crime). The nature of Guatemala’s dysfunctional democracy cannot be fully understood without perusing the distinct character and dynamics of its party politics. Unfortunately, despite some well-intentioned attempts at enhancing the institutionalization of political parties via legal changes and institutional engineering, there are empirical and theoretical reasons to doubt that these efforts can yield important, tangible results.

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