Guatemalan Poll Respondents Urge President to Quit

A recently released poll indicated the mounting pressure against embattled Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina to resign from his office.

According to Guatemala's Prensa Libre daily on June 20th, 84% of poll respondents replied “yes” to the question “Do you believe Otto Pérez Molina supports a corrupt system and should resign?”  Only 6% answered in the negative while 10% admitted, “I don’t know.”

In addition, 86% of those surveyed believed that the legislature couldn’t be trusted to enact reforms regarding political parties and upcoming elections.

The poll was carried out on June 16th by members of the #HagámonosElParo youth movement who asked questions to car drivers waiting at intersections in Guatemala City.

Only 1397 people were polled despite plans to inquire 15,000 respondents, which is a small sample size. Nevertheless, mass protests have been held every weekend throughout Guatemala for the past nine weeks against Pérez Molina who has been battling a growing corruption scandal involving members of his government.

On May 16th, for instance, thousands of Guatemalans marched in street protests in thirteen cities nationwide organized via social media networks. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans purportedly from different social, economic and political classes rallied near the National Palace earlier this month.

“The protests are like a democratic spring where the people have taken to the streets to demand many things,” affirmed one of the marchers, Pedro Cruz.  “I have seen the people awaken.”

A smaller rally took place this past Saturday in Guatemala City though one of the participants was Oswaldo Ochoa, a 62-year-old who trekked 125 miles in six days while also undergoing a hunger strike.

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Video Source – YouTube use NTDTV (During his visit to Brazil last July, Pope Francis “issued the first social manifesto of his young pontificate, telling slum dwellers that the world's rich must do much more to wipe out vast inequalities between the haves and the have-nots”.)

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Report: Femicides on the Rise in Honduras

Millions of Hondurans turned out on Sunday to participate in the Central American country’s presidential election. The two frontrunners, conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez and ex-First Lady Xiomara Castro, have each declared themselves as the victors though the official vote tally has yet to indicate a clear winner.

The next president will have to face several major problems hurting Honduras including deep political divisions, crushing poverty and high levels of violence.  In a country with the world's highest murder rate, women are especially vulnerable and this was shown in a report released earlier this month.

A woman is killed in Honduras an average of once every fourteen and a half hours according to the Violence Observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras. The group concluded that 2851 women were killed in Honduras between 2005 and 2012 and there has been a steady increase in femicides over the past eight years.  (175 women were killed in 2005 while 606 died last year).

The report did not provide figures for 2013 though the Observatory estimated that some 323 women died in the first six months of this year.

“Nationwide, violence against women and especially femicides make up a very alarming problem,” declared Violence Observatory director Migdonia Ayestas.  She added, “As proof of this, 14.2 of every ten thousand Honduran women last year were murdered” compared to a 12.3 per ten thousand in 2011.

Violence has steadily worsened in Honduras, as the country has become an increasingly favored route for illegal drugs transported from South America to the U.S. and Canada. Hence, it’s unsurprising that the report noted that organized crime is indirectly behind some of the violence against women with roughly three in five killings attributed to “revenge and paid killings.”
 
“It isn’t the case that these women were directly involved in illicit activities but more relevantly is that the people they live with were linked to organized crime,” said Ayestas.

Further adding to this “alarming” problem is that a majority of the women targeted last year were aged between 15 and 31 while more than 1600 femicides between 2005 and 2012 involved firearms.  Hence, the Observatory the group recommended reforming gun control laws including changing the current statute permitting adults to legally own up to five firearms.