Rigoberta Menchu welcomes the savior Alfonso Portillo home to Guatemala

Louis Reynolds looks at how Alfonso Portillo's return to Guatemala following his prison sentence in the US might shake up the upcoming September elections for Americas Quarterly. I mentioned on Twitter the surprising welcome that Rigoberta Menchu gave to Portillo upon his return.

Well, that's just embarrassing - let's blame the jet lag: Rigoberta Mechú welcomes Alfonso Portillo home to Guatemala http://t.co/BGNibt7WAL
— Mike Allison (@CentAmPolMike) February 27, 2015

However, her embrace of Portillo shouldn't exactly be that surprising.

Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú stunned her supporters last week by expressing sympathy for Portillo and asserting that he was targeted for political reasons, meaning that his trial for embezzlement in a Guatemalan court in 2011 was motivated by the private sector’s opposition to his social policies. After Portillo’s controversial acquittal, the U.S. requested his extradition to face money laundering charges.

Menchú also said that Portillo had paid his dues, leading to speculation about a seemingly unlikely alliance between Portillo and the country’s most famous Indigenous leader. “I welcome him [back to the country], like many other Guatemalans,” she told the Guatevision TV channel. Menchú ran for president in 2007 with the center-left party Encuentro por Guatemala, and again in 2011 as the candidate for the Indigenous Winaq party. However, on both occasions, she captured just over 3 percent of the vote, mainly as a result of sectarian divisions within the Guatemalan left and left-wing parties’ chronic underfunding.

For the last few decades, the Guatemalan left has been divided between those who want to establish a truly leftist alternative for voters (little tent) and those on the left who believe that it is more important to establish a democratic alternative to the status quo, one that brought the left, center, and maybe even the right together (big tent). Fifteen years ago, some big tent leftists viewed Portillo as an ally because he seemed to be pro-democratic, but more importantly, he was anti-oligarchic. Actually, being anti-oligarchy was almost by definition, pro-democratic.

That obviously gets complicated. Portillo was a member of the FRG, Rios Montt's party. Some leftists saw an alliance with the FRG as acceptable because of the party's anti-oligarchy positions. Others rejected an alliance because of the party's complicity in genocide.

These divisions were part of what led to the break up of the URNG/ANN between 2000 and 2002.