Guatemala: Evangelical President Ousted in Power Struggle

Guatemala’s first elected evangelical president is out of office and in exile after he assumed extraordinary powers, which he claimed were necessary to solve serious problems in his country. His ouster has raised anew reservations about the role of evangelicals in the Guatemalan government.

Jorge Serrano Elias announced on May 25 that he had dissolved the Congress, fired the Supreme Court, and would rule by decree. He also called for immediate elections for a Constituent Assembly to reform Guatemala’s 1985 Constitution. He said he would not remain in power beyond his term, due to end in January 1995, but that this was the only way to end corruption.

In a speech on radio and television, Serrano accused the Congress and court system of blocking his attempts to root out corruption and fight mushrooming drug traffic. Serrano said he had been subjected to “political blackmail” by some of the members of Congress, and he accused the Supreme Court of “selective application of justice,” which protected criminals.

Serrano hoped to take a leaf out of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s book, but when the military withdrew its support in the face of national and international protests, he was forced to resign. During several days of confusion, the army first backed Vice-president Gustavo Espina, also an evangelical, then put pressure on the reinstated Congress to elect national human-rights advocate Ramiro de Leon Carpio to complete Serrano’s term.

Facing criminal charges of abuse of power, Serrano opted to accept political asylum in Panama. Espina, accused of complicity with Serrano, fled to Costa Rica.

Considered a prophet

An engineer by training and a businessman and politician by profession, Serrano first came to national attention as president of the advisory Council of State. He had been appointed by Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt, also a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, when he came to power in 1982 following a military coup. At that time, Serrano was a prominent member of the Elim Church, a large, Pentecostal congregation, where he was considered a prophet.

Serrano ran for president in 1985 as the candidate of the cooperative movement party. He finished third in a field of nine, but the evangelical vote he had counted on did not materialize. Many of his fellow believers voted along traditional party lines, and many had reservations about the question of Christian involvement in politics.

The campaign and defeat created a rift with the Elim Church, which “the prophet” left shortly afterwards. He eventually joined with the fast-growing, charismatic El Shaddai Church, one of several new groups successfully penetrating resistant upper-middle and upper classes.

Rally from nowhere

Serrano also founded his own political party, the Solidarity Action Movement, and began preparing for another run at the presidency. Although trailing badly early in the 1990 campaign, he gained ground as other contenders battered each other.

When Ríos Montt—the obvious frontrunner despite constitutional questions about his candidacy—was ruled off the ballot at the last minute, Serrano picked up enough of his supporters to squeak into second place.

He won the ensuing run-off for the presidency with more than 60 percent of the vote and assumed power with a popular mandate but a weak political base. His party held only 18 seats in the 116-member Congress, and only one ministry in the initial cabinet.

“It was not an evangelical government,” says Christian lawyer Hugo Morales. The president did meet occasionally with church leaders, but, said one layman who was present at an encounter a few months ago, “It was obvious he was more interested in telling us what he wanted than in listening to us.”

Political fallout

Morales believes these recent events will not have any real negative effect on Guatemala’s fast-growing evangelical churches, but they may cause the public to think twice about voting for an evangelical in the future. “If, in the future, an evangelical wants to run for the presidency, people could say we’ve had two Protestant presidents [Serrano and Ríos Montt] and look what happened.”

The media speculated that the churches, as well as “divine revelation,” were behind Serrano’s actions. But Manuel Conde, who headed the government’s negotiations with the guerrillas after serving as the president’s chief of staff, says “This was a decision that Jorge alone made.… It had become impossible for him to govern.”

One positive result has been public pressure for change in the Congress and Supreme Court, discredited by widespread allegations of corruption.

Human rights has been a principal issue in Guatemala, and the selection of de Leon Carpio as president has been widely applauded. But it remains to be seen what he can do to improve things. “He’s finding out that it’s much easier to criticize from the outside than to make changes from the inside,” says evangelical Congress member Marco Aurelio Reyes. He sees little hope of changing the conditions that apparently drove Serrano to desperation.

By Stephen R. Sywulka.

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