--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Support for this broadcast of Today Explained comes from the good people at KiwiCo. KiwiCo is offering the good people who listen to Today Explained the chance to try them out for free to redeem that offer and learn more about the KiwiCo projects that are made for kids of all ages, by the way. Visit KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I'm Daniel Alarcon of Radio Ambulante filling in for Sean Ramos Firm. Guatemalans are gearing up to elect their next president this Sunday. The only problem is their candidates keep getting disqualified, arrested, and threatened. There's something like 20 candidates for the presidency, you know, more parties than you could possibly count.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Jonathan Blitzer has been covering it for The New Yorker, And he says this election really comes down to one thing. Basically, as I've sort of tried to report on it and as I've come to understand it, the election as a whole boils down to this very pointed question about corruption and anti-corruption efforts in the country.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And there has been an internationally backed and U.S. funded anti-corruption body that's been extremely successful called the SESIG, which has for the last several years brought forward hundreds of prosecutions against corrupt politicians from all political parties.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And recently, within the last two years or so, the president of Guatemala has started to attack this anti-corruption body, largely because he and his family have come under investigation. This is the comedian. This is the comedian who no longer tells funny jokes. Jimmy Morales.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And Morales has systematically attacked and tried to dismantle this body. And he's been more or less kept at bay by the courts, but only to an extent. And so he has really chipped away at the authority of this body.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so when you look at the elections later this month, there are, of all of the candidates, really only one major candidate who had supported this anti-corruption body. Her name is Del Maldana. She had been the attorney general for four years in Guatemala and was the lead prosecutor in a lot of these anti-corruption cases.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So 70 percent of the country supports this anti-corruption body. They see it as the answer to all kinds of major systemic problems in Guatemala. Thelma Aldana has based her candidacy around extending the mandate of this group called the Sisiq.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And almost immediately after she declares her candidacy, she comes under attack. All sorts of interests align against her. All, you know, these members of the political class, business elites, have kind of had it in for her because she's prosecuted them, their families, their friends.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And the short of it is they kind of conspired to knock her candidacy out of contention through a series of sort of legalistic maneuvers claiming that she was under investigation. That investigation just qualified her.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so two weeks ago, three weeks ago, she was knocked out of contention. And just like that, the election is completely upended.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: It seems the elections are a referendum on, if not the Sisiq specifically, but on the corruption fight more broadly. If that's the case, the leading candidate is this woman, Sandra Torres.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Where does she stand on all this? She is opposed to the Sisiq, in part because she's under its investigation and because she very much has towed the establishment line that the Sisiq has overreached.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so just like that, with the disqualification of Aldana, this kind of major question at the center of Guatemalan politics kind of gets deferred. And that's what I think makes the elections on the 16th so curious because it's unclear actually whether any of the leading candidates, Torres being the leader among the kind of mainstream candidates at this point, It's unclear if any of them will get enough of the vote to win the first round.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so what will probably happen is there will be a second round. Someone like Torres has a lot of name recognition. She's the former first lady. She's been very much kind of in the public domain for years.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so that helps her generally. She has a lot of support in rural areas, much less so in the cities. But one striking thing about her is that for all of her name recognition and for right now her ostensible lead in the polls, she has a high unfavorability rating.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So that kind of complicates to this question of how she'll do. So it really kind of is a toss up. And the striking thing before coming over here, I looked at the latest polls and Torres has – last I saw, she's in the lead among the candidates with something like 20 percent support, which is just astonishingly low.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: So I don't know what will shake out of all of this. I really don't.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Now, one of the things that you mentioned is that 70% of the population is sort of in support of the CICIG. So it would seem that popular support would make it politically untenable to pull off attacks like this on the legitimacy of the CICIG and on the candidates that support this anti-corruption fight.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: No, it's a really good question. I think it I think it just has to do this is going to sound like a cop but I think it has to do with just how insulated a lot of these politicians and business interests are from public opinion from public scrutiny.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I mean there is such a broad swath of politicians who are opposed to this anti body that there is you know in Guatemala the phrase that's used is pactos y corruptos. And that's the idea is that there's sort of this pact among politicians to fend off this kind of analysis and scrutiny.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Sandra Torres, who I should say. I mean, there are merits to aspects of her campaign. But as someone who's also under investigation right now, just to give you an example as to why politicians might not feel more responsive to broad public support for the SACIG, the SACIG has brought charges or brought an investigation into Sandra Torres.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so her stance on the SACIG is it's overreached. It's abused its authority. They're kind of going too deep into the lives of all of these politicians.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so I think basically when presented with the choice of doing something that's broadly popular with the electorate and saving their own political skins, even though there might be some – there's a little chafing between those two possible outcomes, I think these politicians seem to have chosen their immediate political futures.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: So Aldana and the Cicig accomplished a lot. I think it might be interesting if you could just go through sort of like the major accomplishments of Aldana and the Cicig in the last four or five years.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. Well, the most notable case and in some ways the most ironic one is the successful investigation and prosecution into the former president and vice president of the country in 2015 that caused both of their resignations and also opened the door for Jimmy Morales to run for higher office.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And his platform was, you know, neither corrupt nor a thief. And that was very much sort of the mantle that he claimed as a candidate.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So those were the highest profile cases. I mean a president and a vice president essentially being found to have engaged in bribery schemes, customs, fraud and theft, illicit campaign dealings.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: This was Perez Molina. That's right. That's right.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And Roxana Baldetti. And so there have been since then – I mean quite literally hundreds of other prosecutions of politicians, national politicians, business leaders.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: The main thrust of the Sisek's investigations has tended to kind of capture people who have used the private sector as a kind of outlet for public graft.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so that's kind of been the general thrust of it. And over the years reporting in other countries, I'm sure you found a similar thing. I mean, in Central America, you're in El Salvador, Honduras, and everyone is telling you, oh, the SACIG, if only we could have the SACIG in our countries.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I mean, it was, I actually mostly learned about the SACIG through reporting in other countries. It was so aspirational. Everyone talked about having something like the SACIG.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So it kind of always loomed large for me just as a reporter, hearing about it and hearing about it and hearing about it.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But that's been its mandate. And the US until very recently has always been very supportive of that agenda.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Until – until essentially 2017, until the Trump administration took over.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And what happened then was a combination of things, a concerted lobbying effort from members of the Guatemalan elite who essentially tried to make inroads with congressional republicans and convince them to start to criticize the CECIG, to withdraw funding, to question its kind of investigatory excesses.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And then simultaneously, the Trump administration and the State Department kind of recalibrated its vision for Central America and specifically for Guatemala because Jimmy Morales proved himself to be a willing ally of the Americans when it came to the question of moving the embassy, the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move widely condemned by much of the world.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Where I think there were like maybe two countries that followed suit to show their support for the Americans. One of them was Guatemala. Jimmy Morales immediately got praised by members of the Trump administration for showing that level of support.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: At the time, Nikki Haley, the U.S. U.N. ambassador, traveled to Guatemala to thank him personally. He kind of had truck with – also with members of the administration because they were – they're all evangelical Christians.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And he is as well. He is. And that's very much been a part of his political identity.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So there was a certain kind of general affinity too between Morales and Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley and obviously Mike Pence.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so that began to recalibrate the American interests in Guatemala with regard to the Zizig.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: After the break, it's not just corruption driving Guatemalans to flee. It's climate change, too. I'm Daniel Alarcon of Radio Ambulante, filling in for Sean Rama's firm. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: This is the middle of the show where I'm going to tell you a bit more about KiwiCo. I asked around the office if anyone's kids were using KiwiCo, and Liz's son, Desmond, who is nine years old, is totally unrelated to the show. He's just a big KiwiCo fan.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Apparently looks forward to the KiwiCo crate every month like it a highlight of his month. She said it like a low Christmas every month. I haven been a kid in at least a couple of years but I could really go for a low-key Christmas every month.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Desmond has gone in a year from needing lots of help with the projects to doing the projects on his own. So Liz is seeing big leaps in learning and independence that she's really excited about.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: KiwiCo is offering today to explain listeners the chance to try their projects for kids of all ages out for free right now. Visit KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: That's K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: The reason I'm so invested in the Guatemalan elections as a journalist is primarily because there is a massive immigration crisis at the U.S. border. And most of the people showing up at the border, most of the families seeking asylum at the U.S. border are Guatemalan.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so what we've seen in the last few years, in addition to years of accumulated trends of emigration from Guatemala to the U.S., we have actually seen a huge explosion in the number of Guatemalan asylum seekers at the U.S. border.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And there is, in fact, a humanitarian crisis at the U.S. border. A 16-year-old Guatemalan child has died in U.S. custody. He is the fifth migrant child to die after being detained in U.S. custody since just December.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: There are major problems with how the U.S. immigration system works generally and specifically with regard to asylum.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And a big part of the current situation has to do with Central Americans fleeing Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, but principally Guatemala and Honduras.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And just to give you a sense of the numbers, in 2018, there were 50,000 Guatemalans in families who were apprehended at the U.S. border seeking asylum.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: That was double the number from the previous year. Within the first five months of this year, and there's a bit of a lag because the statistics come out kind of in a staggered way.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But in the first several months of the current fiscal year, there were already 60,000 families from Guatemala apprehended at the border.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Exponential growth in the number of migrant families from Guatemala seeking asylum. Absolutely.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so you have – at this point, the numbers have been really astonishing. I mean, every – the last few months, there have been over 100,000 families apprehended at the southern border.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Again, the majority of them are coming from Guatemala. And so as a reporter covering immigration, I mean, just to be frank, at a certain point, it feels sort of random and futile to just be covering the situation at the border.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: In many ways, that's the end of the story. There is so much going on before any of these people even arrive at the border.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And if we're not invested in what that story is, then nothing is really going to change it.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But one of the major root causes of migration, in addition to mass poverty, hunger, violence, is political corruption and what that does to a country.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so I think that's one of the reasons why these elections loom so large for the Americans.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Right. So what you're saying is that impunity around issues of corruption is one of the major drivers of migration from Guatemala right now.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Exactly. And first of all, there have been detailed empirical studies over the years linking impunity to emigration.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: I mean there is a direct link. When people see their politicians commit illegal acts and go unpunished, they have an almost immediate reaction to think, OK, there's no hope for me here.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: This is not a country that's invested at all in my needs.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So that's the first sort of just general thing.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But secondarily, a lot of this corruption has to do with misuse of public resources.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so one of the things that you see as a result of the entrenched corruption in the political establishment in Guatemala is that the regions that have the highest rates of poverty, that have the highest rates of emigration are not receiving the most public funding.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: That public funding gets routed to particular districts where politicians are connected with private businesses, have vested interests in making sure that federal appropriations go their way.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so you have at a moment of actual crisis in the country, money isn't going to the regions. Aid money isn't going to the regions that need them the most.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And when it does go to those regions and there have been other studies that document this, when the money does go to those regions, a majority of it, generally at least 55 percent or more, get caught up and siphoned off in these corruption networks.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And so if you're someone living in the western highlands of Guatemala and you're going hungry and you need basic government services, healthcare, education, food assistance, and more than half of the money of the scant resources that are getting directed your way from the federal government are being skimmed off the top, you're really left with few options but to leave.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: One of the things that I found very interesting about your reporting, and I haven't seen really reported in other places quite this depth, is the driver that is climate change.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And I was wondering if you could tell me what it's like in the highlands of Guatemala and tell me how that's changed the calculus for a subsistence farmer living in these areas in terms of survival and in terms of like how they make the decision whether to stay or to go.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I was in the Western Highlands of the country which is one of the regions both most affected by climate change and that has had the highest rates of emigration most recently.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And I was just astonished by how widespread the understanding was in just small communities that climate change was making their lives basically untenable.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: So what you see is temperature variations on a daily basis. So you might wake up one morning and there will be a frost. That might kill off your crops that you've planted.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: The next day might be unseasonably warm. One of the consequences of these kind of rapid swings from cold to hot at unexpected moments is that there are more pests in the soil, whether bugs or fungi.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And that means that people have to spend more money on fertilizer, pesticides.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And simultaneously to all of that, rains are not coming at the predictable times.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: So not only is the overall amount of precipitation starting to go down, But when it rains, it rains unpredictably.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: So for example, for people who are planting corn or maize, they rely generally in the Western Highlands on rains coming in May. In the last few years, those rains haven't come in May.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: They've come much later, closer to kind of late July.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And then when those rains do come, they come all at once. And that also destroys crops because the soil isn't capable of absorbing that much water.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: For example, a family might have been able to grow potatoes and maize that would feed them for nine months of the year.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Now, the amount of food they're able to produce in one harvest covers two months.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so increasingly what people have done is they've briefly tried other things. So in some cases, in some places where I was, communities were chopping down trees and selling the firewood because it was just fast cash for them.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: That, of course, exacerbated all of these other climactic problems because now you had less tree cover, the soil was less able to retain water.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And so that kind of sped up the cycle of climate-related struggles.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: You have other families who leave rural areas altogether and migrate within Guatemala to cities, hoping that there'll be some form of work there.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Generally, that's a kind of holding station before they then just leave the country altogether.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And other people, of course, just emigrate straight away.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I don't know how else to say it other than you see the absence in these communities. There is a conspicuous absence of people in a lot of these places.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: You mentioned the numbers which really are startling in terms of Guatemalan families arriving at the border.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: I'm wondering if in the election, is migration and out-migration something that's discussed as an issue? Like, what are we going to do to make this country a place where people don't want to flee?
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Absolutely. I think the thing that struck me most on my trips to Guatemala is that emigration is such a fact of life now in Guatemala.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: It's essentially synonymous with the idea of a failed state.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: And I think everyone sees emigration, the inevitability of emigration, as a kind of comment on where the country's politics are and how corrupt and inefficient the government has been.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Voting with your feet, essentially.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: That's right. That's right.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: I mean, the only thing I would say in response to that is I don't even know that people leaving is meant to be a show of frustration with the political system.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: It's desperation that's driving them.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: But effectively, yes. I mean, there's just – they have no alternative.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Right. It's a mass opting out.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. I've always been really sort of stingy about using the word exodus in my reporting to describe emigration from Central America.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But honestly, the way these numbers have kept up over the last few years and the way they've been picking up recently, that's what we're seeing.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: We're seeing a mass exodus from these countries.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: I think the statistic I saw was that in the last few months of 2019, there were over 300,000 Central Americans who were apprehended at the U.S. border.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And of those, 165,000 of them were Guatemalan.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: But on the whole, it's mostly Guatemalan and Honduras. Those are the two main countries that people are leaving.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: And in the first four months of 2019, fully 1% of those two countries was apprehended at the U.S. border. That's in four months.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Bananas.
--:-- Jonathan Blitzer: Which is why I do feel like what we are seeing is, in fact, an exodus.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I'm Daniel Alarcón of Radio Ambulante filling in for Sean Ramos' firm. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Daniel Alarcon: Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today. In addition to supporting the show, they want to empower the show's listeners and especially the show's listeners' kids to not just make a project, but to make a difference in what they're doing and what they're learning. to redeem an opportunity to try that all out for free, go to kiwico.com slash explained.
