A Guatemalan dictator's daughter runs for president, illuminating the country's dark past

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The daughter of a Guatemalan dictator convicted of genocide is running for president, raising questions about the nation's memory of a brutal civil war.

El Salvador’s evangelical churches rehabilitated ex-gang members. The country’s crackdown on L.A.-born gangs like MS-13 emptied programs and filled prisons.which has conducted widespread arbitrary arrests to reduce homicides, according to human rights groups.

“It was a good government, prices were very low, as well as crime,” she said her own father had told her. In this hill country where women make and wear embroidered traditional blouses called huipiles and long skirts in colors marking their towns, many of the more than 150,000 residents scratch out a living growing beans and corn. Few of the tin-roofed homes have basic appliances such as an electric stove or a refrigerator. Teenagers sometimes leave their towns before they’ve finished high school to migrate to the U.S. to send back remittances.

“Think about your vote,” a man said into a microphone at one stop. “Zury Ríos of the Valor party is [from] a party of death, a party of revenge, and the Ixil people won’t accept it.” Having testified about the attacks at Ríos Montt’s trial, she said she would not vote for Ríos, who “has the same head as her father.”Yet the Ixil people are divided about the presidential candidate — tensions partly tied to the military’s strategy during the civil war.

The aid and the divisions he created help explain why Ríos Montt’s party did unexpectedly well in the Ixil region when he returned to politics.“There are people in parts of rural Guatemala that look at her, and because of her connections to her father, they think of the heavy-handedpolicies to deal with the guerrilla movement, and that’s appealing to some people,” said Jo-Marie Burt, a Guatemala expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Others say residents are swayed by vote-buying practices, and lack education about political candidates and parties. Many of the elderly are illiterate, and speak only Ixil or little Spanish. Its DNA bank, created in 2008, has samples from about 17,000 relatives of the disappeared that it can compare with exhumed bone fragments. It receives no financial support from Guatemala’s government.

“They shouldn’t say we didn’t have a lot of family,” she said. “We had family, but the war took them.”

 

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