Global Courant 2023-04-25 11:06:16
Shame on all those presidential and deputy candidates, including many who crave repetition, who shout at rallies, in interviews, in forums and in the chamber itself, offering to reactivate the death penalty as if it were a panacea. Invoking executions of a few criminals is one of the most desperate, deceitful and overwrought issues with which they try to surprise voters in their good faith but whose intelligence they obviously do not respect.
Trying to politically capitalize on citizen despair in the face of the criminal phenomenon is simply Machiavellian if you do not have comprehensive plans. Attempting to patch up the omissions, silences and shortcomings of the public debate at campaign time through an unfeasible and dysfunctional proposal is cheap opportunism. Those who try to ask for votes under such an offer only give unequivocal evidence of their ignorance about the international agreements signed by Guatemala and tacitly exhibit their lack of systemic arguments, as well as the lack of professional cadres for public service in the area of security.
This repressive populism uses the propaganda technique of pigeonholing the blame for social ills on certain groups to direct social outrage at them. In one country they are the murderers, in another the parricide, in another the gang members. Certainly they are dangerous people, with a perverse profile and harmful actions who are not moved by the life or pain or dignity of others. That is why they are in jail and they are confined there to isolate them from society and try to rehabilitate. Court cases for crimes that warrant the death penalty are a minority, and if we add to this those who reach guilty verdicts are even fewer.
Currently, around 25,000 people are confined in prisons, many of them in pretrial detention. Overcrowding is a neglected problem for decades. Extortion is frequently concocted, coordinated and executed from prisons where the convicts are supposed to have no contact with the outside world. The movement of telephones, internet equipment and all kinds of devices continues. In each requisition, illegal objects are confiscated but it takes longer to remove them than to re-enter them. But regarding the reengineering, purification and transformation of the prison system, no candidate proposes anything serious.
Maybe it’s ignorance or simple inability. Corruption and prison porosity is one of the greatest burdens for community development, popular commerce and citizen security. There are offers of international advice to reconvert prisons and isolate dangerous inmates, but the politicking is content with invoking the death penalty to promote itself and appear firm.
At the beginning of the current government, measures were announced to reinforce prison security, including a maximum security prison that does not yet exist. Last February, the tender for telematic control bracelets to relieve prison congestion was awarded, but finalizing the plan does not seem like a priority. Presidential candidates find it more comfortable to invoke outdated methods under the imaginary of executions or lethal injections than to purify the prison system. Bribes, human trafficking and smuggling are more profitable for those cliques that let everything pass, even if it puts the population at risk. It was expected that something would change when a former director of the Penitentiary System became president, but it did not.
Sly offer of repressive populism
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