Guatemalan indigenous leaders announced on Thursday that they will maintain roadblocks to demand the resignation of the attorney general, whom they accuse of persecution against elected President Bernardo Arévalo, after a meeting with President Alejandro Giammattei and OAS delegates failed.
Six representatives of indigenous organizations met at the Presidential House in the capital with Giammattei and a mediating mission from the Organization of American States (OAS), and asked the president to request the resignation of controversial Attorney General Consuelo Porras.
However, Giammattei told them that by law he cannot make that request, indigenous leader Luis Pacheco, leader of the organization of 48 cantons of the municipality of Totonicapán (west), told journalists.
“The people want to continue the fight,” Pacheco declared, after leaving the meeting, accompanied by hundreds of protesters.
For 11 days, thousands of protesters have maintained the blockades to demand the departure of Porras, prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche and judge Fredy Orellana, after they ordered the electoral court to be raided for alleged anomalies in the elections disputed in the first and second rounds, in June and August past.
The three officials, described by the United States as “corrupt” and “undemocratic,” are accused by opposition leader Arévalo, 65, of orchestrating a “coup d’etat” to prevent him from taking office on January 14.
On Thursday, the Prosecutor’s Office again pressured the Ministry of the Interior to proceed with the eviction of the blockades, as ordered by the Constitutional Court which granted an injunction filed by businessmen last week.
The closures are maintained on almost a hundred stretches of roads, including border crossings with Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras.
“The struggle is for the good of democracy,” Pacheco later added, in front of the headquarters of the public prosecutor’s office in the capital, where protesters have remained on strike since last week.
In addition to road closures, a group of protesters occupied a hydroelectric plant in the north of the country on Wednesday, although it remains operational, according to Army spokesman Rubén Tellez.
