Retired General Otto Perez Molina was sworn in as Guatemalan president on Saturday, calling on the US and Mexico to help him fight a wave of drug trafficking and violence that has overwhelmed the Central American country.
Perez won over voters by pledging to crush criminality with an “iron fist.” Mexican drug cartels have seized large swathes of territory in the nation, which has one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
Perez, 61, is the first military officer elected Guatemalan president since the end of a military government 25 years ago. He served in that administration as then--director of intelligence.
“The change has begun,” Perez told cheering supporters on Saturday in Guatemala City. “We are committed to the peace and integral security that we all desire. Today I call on my international associates to combat drug trafficking: Mexico, Central America and I make a -special call to the United States.”
His tough campaign resonated in a country of more than 13 million people where murders are committed at a rate of 41 for every 100,000 residents, according to a recent UN homicide report. That is well over twice the rate in neighboring Mexico.
“He was the only one who from the start had a national security program,” said Leonel Archila, a 43-year-old businessman among the 5,000 people at the ceremony. About half were Guatemalans bused in from around the country. All wore blue or white shirts and sat in sections organized to form a giant Guatemalan flag.
The mood was marred by the assassination a day earlier of Guatemalan lawmaker Oscar Valentin Leal Caal, who was shot to death outside the headquarters of the former ruling party. Colleagues said he had been in negotiations to join the new president’s party.
“We are profoundly concerned about the assassination of Leal, an elected representative of the people and we hope to see the investigation generate results,” US Ambassador to Guatemala Arnold Chacon said.
Close advisers say Perez supports meeting the conditions set by the US Congress for restoring aid it eliminated in 1978 — halfway through the Central American country’s 36-year civil war.
Among the requirements is reform of a weak justice system that has failed to bring to justice those responsible for abuses during the conflict. A UN-sponsored postwar truth commission said state forces and related paramilitary groups committed most of the killings.
The US also insists that the government back a UN-supported international anti-corruption team whose prosecution efforts have been criticized by Guatemala’s political elite.
Perez has long insisted there were no massacres, human rights violations or genocide in a conflict that killed 200,000 civilians, mostly Mayan Indians.
“I suffered and lived through the armed conflict and 15 years after having signed the [peace] agreement Guatemalans are still being betrayed,” Perez said on Saturday. “I pray to God for a true reconciliation. I pray that my generation is the last of war and the next one is the first of peace.”
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