Ollantay Itzamná
Guatemalan migrants make a call to vote for the MLP in the U.S.
Another of the abysmal differences between the MLP and the rest of the neoliberal or conservative parties of the left and right is the attempt to build a plurinational and multi-territorial country project involving the millions of Guatemalans in the diaspora, the bastions of the daily family economy in Guatemala.
Migrants abroad are not usually allowed to exercise their political rights. The constitutional rule of comparative law is: the stay or residence in the host country is exclusive of the right to political participation or activism. Thus, the nearly 300 million international migrants in the world today are in “citizenship limbo”.
They are neither citizens here nor there
The practice and hegemonic political theory of citizenship linked to the quality of nationality is precisely what causes such a situation. One is a citizen in the country of one’s nationality (where one was born or nationalized). As long as one is not national or nationalized, one does not enjoy citizenship. Legally, one cannot elect, nor be elected, much less exercise a public function.
More than 3 million Guatemalans in the diaspora without citizenship
The exuberant and contrasting country of Guatemala, where the official is diluted in the clandestine or unofficial, does not know for sure how many sons and daughters it engenders at the moment.
Data from the 2018 national census indicate that there are 15 million Guatemalans. Data from RENAP (entity registering people) indicated that there were 17 million at the time of the census.
At present, the State of Guatemala does not know how many of its sons and daughters are in the diaspora. Much less does it know or want to know in what conditions its sons and daughters are surviving abroad. Unofficial data indicate that there are 3 million Guatemalans in the diaspora. Other sources indicate that the number is closer to 4 million.
The only official data that illustrate the national news are: Remittances increased by nearly 40% in time of pandemic. Remittances from Guatemalan migrants in the US represent about 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), dozens of Guatemalans were murdered on their way through Mexico to the US.
In other words, it seems that the Guatemalan State does not care about its migrants as human beings, much less as citizens. Without migrant remittances, the daily economy and even the macro-economy of the country would have collapsed some time ago!
The People’s Liberation Movement (MLP) is born in the USA.
In the country of leftist guerrillas and liberal revolutions, even the revolutionary left has been ideologically and politically neoliberalized.
At the moment, one of the biggest obstacles for communities and peoples in resistance against the neoliberal system to become a political force against the hegemonic system are the traditional political parties of the left. These distract popular struggles with developmentalist or electoralist narratives.
In 2016, the communities and peoples in resistance, in an unprecedented way in the two centuries of the Republic of Guatemala, managed to create their own political organization and registered it with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) as the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP). They call it a political instrument. Not a political party.
This political instrument is not only nucleated and represented by organized peasants and indigenous people, but also has its own political approach: to create a Plurinational State through a Constitutional process, and a different horizon: Good Living. In other words, they are no longer motivated by being the government and administering the collapsed republican State, nor pursuing developmentalism like the liberal revolutions.
The MLP, in its electoral debut in 2019, without money or academic wealth, managed to position itself in 4th place in the general elections. Never before had the left achieved such a volume of votes in Guatemala.
In 2019, the MLP denounced electoral fraud because with close to half a million votes, the TSE only granted it one deputation.
In the current electoral contest, whose general elections will be held on June 25, the MLP registered 171 municipal slates (of the 340 municipalities), deputations in all departments, and the presidential binomial in the process of accreditation (Thelma Cabrera and Jordán Rodas).
At the moment, the MLP shows itself as the only political force with an anti-neoliberal, anti-imperial political narrative, and with faces and languages that express the genuine diversity of the exploited, excluded or expelled Guatemalans. And, because of its expressed will to create a new State (plurinational), the current institutionality of the State (which refuses to die) still prevents it from concluding with the accreditation of the presidential binomial of MLP.
In 2019, migrants in the U.S. voted for the MLP.
In spite of the institutional impediments of the Guatemalan State to allow the broad electoral participation of the millions of Guatemalan migrants at the polls, in the general elections of 2019, in the USA and in Europe, the MLP obtained the first place in votes. Of course, migrants can only vote, but not be elected.
Since then, several migrants connected (through their relatives in Guatemala) with the communities in resistance in the Central American country that gave birth to the MLP. MLP spokespersons have even made two trips to different states in the U.S. to visit migrants sympathetic to the MLP.
This attempt to build a plurinational and multi-territorial country project involving the millions of Guatemalans in the diaspora, bastions of the daily family economy in Guatemala, is another of the abysmal differences between the MLP and the rest of the neoliberal or conservative parties of the left and right.
Why did Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. join the MLP’s socio-political project?
They organized themselves as co-deca USA. A novel situation with this collective in exile is that their commitment is not only political-electoral, but first and foremost socio-political. That is to say, before or simultaneous to their political-electoral sympathy for the MLP, their main commitment is to become an organized community under the self-designation of “CODECA USA”. The Committee for Peasant Development (CODECA) is the confluence of organized communities in resistance that fertilized and sustains the MLP as a political instrument.
They participate in the collective actions (protests) that they carry out in Guatemala. The adhesion to CODECA is expressed in the constant participation, virtually, in the acts of public protest carried out by the communities in resistance in Guatemala. This action not only affirms them as part of a socio-political movement in their country of origin, but also injects socio-political remittance to the communities in resistance, affirming them as genuine libertarian subjects.
They carry out processes of socio-political formation. This collective of migrants in the U.S., apart from self-organizing and mobilizing simultaneously with the communities in Guatemala, also undertake hybrid socio-political training processes (face-to-face and virtual). In these spaces they collectively imagine the country they want to build through their economic remittances and socio-cultural and political remittances.
They undertake proclamations of liberation in and from the USA. The MLP in Guatemala decided to call their electoral campaign “Plurinational Liberation Proclamations”. They do so to make explicit their commitment to the pending decolonization and decolonization, because, according to the subaltern peoples, independence has never arrived for the peoples.
The political message projected from the U.S. is strong, proclaiming plurinational liberation for Guatemala, a country that has just officially celebrated two hundred years of independence.
They feel represented in the proposal of “global citizenship” that CODECA MLP proposes. As part of the thematic proposals for the contents of the new Political Constitution and the new institutional framework in Guatemala, from CODECA communities, is the issue of regional and global citizenship to overcome national citizenship. They call this proposal “global citizenship or plurinational citizenship”.
This proposal basically consists, apart from guaranteed seats for migrant representatives in Congress and in the next Constituent Assembly, in allowing Guatemalan migrants to elect, be elected, exercise public functions and carry out oversight of public policies at the different levels of the State in Guatemala. That is to say, they seem to identify with CODECA MLP because it is this movement that would give them back the quality of full citizenship that they lack at the moment.
They feel that for the first time, in decades of diaspora and socio-political orphanhood, there is a socio-political movement whose philosophy and programmatic proposal makes a connection with the suffering and abandonment experienced by the cornucopia of Guatemala: an incalculable source of millionaire remittances from the US to the impoverished country of Guatemala.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 