Comedian with no political experience wins Guatemalan presidency in a landslide.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9616984/guatemala-election-jimmy-morales
May 5, 2024
Comedian with no political experience wins Guatemalan presidency in a landslide.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9616984/guatemala-election-jimmy-morales
Good model – could not be worse than what they have had.
Unfortunately he may be worse than anyone imagines:
“It is almost a bad joke: Jimmy Morales, a former TV comedian, famous for having once played a campesino who accidentally became president and well known for performing in blackface, has won the presidency of Guatemala. The October 25 run-off election wasn’t even close, as Morales, running under the banner of the tiny National Convergence Front (FCN) party, captured nearly 70 percent of the vote.
Morales had campaigned as an outsider candidate, the antithesis of a career politician. His campaign slogan, “not corrupt or a thief,” looked to ease voters’ minds following the revelation of a massive corruption scandal within the administration of ex-general Otto Pérez Molina. But unbeknownst to many Guatemalans, their new president’s backers represent the same forces that carried out some of the worst crimes of the country’s 36-year-long internal armed conflict.
In fact, the FCN was founded by the same military interests that cast shadows over Pérez Molina’s cabinet. Retired Generals Jose Luis Quilo Ayuso and Luis Felipe Miranda Trejo, from the Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala (AVEMILGUA), founded the party in 2004 to rebuild the prestige and respect for the military that they felt had been tarnished since the signing of the peace accords in 1996, and to represent the nationalistic interests of the Guatemalan military.
Both founders were deeply involved in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist guerillas during the 1980s— a campaign which Guatemala’s United Nations-backed truth commission, the Historic Clarification Commission (CEH), called genocide. Miranda Trejo served as chief of intelligence at Military Base 21 in Cobán from 1979 to 1983, during which time hundreds of men, women, and children were buried in clandestine graves at the base. In this same period, Quilo Ayuso received training in Argentina, before returning to Guatemala in 1983 to take command of the Second Battalion in the department of El Quiche.”
https://nacla.org/news/2015/10/30/jimmy-morales-new-face-guatemala’s-military-old-guard