GUATEMALA CITY · In a country where the masses of rural poor survive on barely enough food, work or hope, the spectacle of peasant mobs rampaging through exclusive neighborhoods on July 24 should have come as no surprise.
But what many people found unsettling -- if not altogether unexpected -- was that the mobs were well-organized and rallying in support of Efrain Rios Montt, a former general and dictator whose iron-fisted rule devastated many of their communities in the early 1980s and who is now seeking the presidency.
The emergence of these class warriors -- apparently bused in and directed by Rios Montt's political party -- is hardly the only contradiction these days. The country's highest courts have been ensnared in a crossfire debating his right to run for president, a right twice denied him since 1990 under a law that bars coup leaders from office.
In a ruling that horrified rights groups, Guatemala's highest court on July 14 allowed Rios Montt to stand, agreeing with his argument that the law was created after his term. An appeal by opposition parties that led the lower Supreme Court to suspend his candidacy on July 20 was overruled, seemingly assuring him a place on the ballot sheet.
Although the former general himself is an evangelical Christian who preaches helping the poor and outcast, human rights groups have prodded prosecutors to investigate him for massacres during his time in power.
Rios Montt was once embraced by the United States, and one campaign advertisement trumpets him as a defender of democracy and features an early 1980s photograph of him with President Ronald Reagan. But State Department officials have warned that normal relations would be impossible under a Rios Montt presidency. Others feel that a shadowy network of former military officers now engaged in organized crime would continue to enjoy impunity if he were to ascend to power.
The flashbacks to past allies and battles underscore the essence of what Guatemala has faced since its 36-year civil war ended in 1996 with more than 200,000 dead and 50,000 vanished: How to build peace and democracy in a place with little experience with either.
"You need democratic people, and obviously Rios Montt is not a democrat," said Helen Mack, a leading human rights advocate in Guatemala. "You cannot have a democratic state with someone who has relied on fear, force and the tactics of counterinsurgency."
Those tactics were evident on July 24, as roving mobs descended upon a downtown high-rise that houses offices of some large corporations. Journalists covering the tumult were chased, and one television reporter died of a heart attack. Just outside a gated community where many diplomats and wealthy businessmen live, groups burned tires and slathered obscene slogans on the barbed-wire-topped walls.
Human rights advocates and opposition leaders saw the protests as a crude attempt to intimidate the judges presiding over the complaints and challenges to Rios Montt's candidacy. They fear that last month's violence was also part of a psychological campaign to make people fearful before the Nov. 9 election.
The U.S. ambassador, John Hamilton, called the protests "an affront to democracy and a dangerous mockery of the right of protest and freedom of assembly. It is difficult to believe these protests were not centrally planned and organized."
Leaders of Rios Montt's party prefer to cast the crisis as a class struggle, aggravated by the refusal of the country's elites to pay their share of taxes to help improve the lives of impoverished peasants.
Edin Barrientos, the party's vice presidential candidate, shrugged off those accusations, and said he did not think the Rios Montt campaign was manipulating the poor.
"They say we would get the vote of the ignorant," he said. "We say, in a democracy, the vote of the illiterate is the same as the vote of a doctor of laws."
Information from Reuters was used to supplement this report.
