Latino Book Festival : Sacramento

 

Choosing Democracy: Labor Wins The Big One - UAW

Choosing Democracy: Labor Wins The Big One - UAW: At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when real inflation accounted for wages for the average worker are lower today than they ...

Papi, Me and Cesar Chavez

 

Sanders on the Continuing Violence in Israel and Gaza

Choosing Democracy: Sanders on the Continuing Violence in Israel and Gaza:   Sanders Statement on Continuing Violence in Israel and Gaza   WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday issued the fo...

Immigrants' Rights to Join a Union

 

IMMIGRANT EMPLOYEE RIGHTS UNDER THE
NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT

Although employers must obey immigration laws, if you choose to talk to or take action with your co-workers to improve your working conditions, it is illegal for your employer to use your immigration status against you.

For example:

• Employers cannot threaten to call ICE because you and your co-workers tried to join a union.

• Employers cannot demand that you produce new immigration papers because you talked with your co-workers or a union about your working conditions.

Regardless of immigration status, you have the same rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as all covered employees including the right to:

• Organize with a union to negotiate with your employer concerning your wages, hours, benefits, and other working conditions.

• Talk about working conditions with your co-workers, the public, or a union.

• Take action with your co-workers to try to improve your working conditions.

• Choose not to do any of these actions.

If you believe that your employer has retaliated against you, your coworkers or your union, you can contact the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to file a charge. The NLRB will investigate the charge, which includes:

• Taking your affidavit and asking for your evidence. Because you are protected under the NLRA just the same as any other worker and because an individual’s immigration status is not relevant to whether the NLRA has been violated, the NLRB will not ask about your immigration status or the immigration status of others during our investigation or litigation to prove violations of the NLRA.

• The NLRB may take legal action against your employer if the evidence shows that your employer is unlawfully using your immigration status to threaten or retaliate against you because you exercised your rights under the NLRA. The NLRB may also work with other agencies to ensure that immigration laws are not being used to threaten or retaliate against workers for exercising their rights under the NLRA.

• If your employer has fired you because you exercised your rights under the NLRA, the NLRB will work to get your job back and to get you paid for your lost wages. But if the employer proves that you were not authorized to work, the NLRB cannot order the employer to pay you lost wages and may not be able to get you your job back. In those situations, the NLRB will seek other remedies and may work with immigration agencies to assist with employees who have been victims of labor rights violations. For example, the NLRB may consider whether you could be eligible for a U or T visa or deferred action and may work with immigration agencies to try and obtain this kind of relief.

Contact the NLRB: www.nlrb.gov, 1-866-667-NLRB, or download our mobile app!

 

Elections and Democracy in Guatemala

 

In Guatemala,  Indigenous and campesino groups have declared an indefinite national strike in response to judicial harassment of president-elect Bernardo Arévalo and his party Movimiento Semilla. Thousands of demonstrators have blocked traffic on major thoroughfares across the country. Indigenous and community leaders say the protests will continue until Attorney General Consuelo Porras and prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche resign and the Constitutional Court puts an end to what Arévalo has termed  “a slow-motion coup”  to prevent him from taking office in January.     The strike entered its  fifth consecutive day today, with at least 28 active blockade points nationally. At the road blocks, Indigenous authorities, including the 48 Cantones de Totonicapán and Indigenous mayors' offices, are joined by university students and faculty, health workers, teachers, and a  wide range of civil society groups .  The strike comes after Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) was raided for a fourth time last week by officials from the Attorney General’s office. A  live stream video of the raid shows  distressing scenes of police wrestling vote tally boxes from the arms of justices who plead with officers to respect the will of voters. The 20-hour raid was part of ongoing investigations into spurious claims of election fraud targeting Arévalo and his Semilla party. International observers have said there is no evidence of vote tampering.      For the people who voted for Arévalo, an anti-establishment candidate who promises to challenge entrenched corruption and impunity, the raids are an attempt on the part of political elites to weaken or disqualify their president-elect.     Attorney General Porras and special prosecutor Curruchiche, seen as the key operatives in the campaign to sabotage Arévalo and Semilla, have both been  sanctioned by the U.S. government for anti-democratic actions and obstructing investigations into corruption in Guatemala. Since Arévalo’s surprise showing in the first-round presidential election in June, Porras and Curruchiche, together with judge Fredy Orellana, have repeatedly pursued fraud allegations and other supposed irregularities. The criminalization of Semilla follows a worsening trend of lawfare, institutional intimidation, and judicialization of dissent in Guatemala, as NACLA contributor  Vaclav Masek observed i n the lead-up to the August 20 runoff that handed Arévalo a landmark victory.      Arévalo met with senior officials in Washington this week, after the U.S. State Department released a statement saying it was “ gravely concerned ” about ongoing efforts to undermine a peaceful transition of power. The U.S. government has imposed visa restrictions on current and former members of congress, justice officials, and “anyone else who undermines democracy.” In a statement, the White House expressed support for Arévalo “following last week's undemocratic efforts to undermine the will of the Guatemalan people, intimidate election authorities, and prevent the peaceful transition of power."     In the face of the ongoing judicial harassment against Arévalo and Semilla, the TSE is considering  extending the formal election period until the January presidential inauguration, a move that would protect the party from suspension.      The Organization of American States (OAS) described the situation in Guatemala as "a political persecution similar to those carried out in authoritarian regimes." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has raised concerns about the risk of violence as political tension runs high. In solidarity, NACLA staff  DONATE to support our work SUBCRIBE to the NACLA Report

Dolores Huerta Foundation

  

In 2005, the Dolores Huerta Foundation launched its first house meeting campaign – a foundational piece of DHF's community organizing model – and organized its first grassroots volunteer groups to work on infrastructure improvements in Kern County, California. From this effort, Vecinos Unidos was born!

In its very first year, DHF's Vecinos Unidos network successfully advocated for the Bakersfield Board of Supervisors to improve public safety by building sidewalks around three area schools that lacked them.

Within the following year, the Vecinos led a successful campaign to remove the Texas company that had been hurting the community with its mismanagement of the local water board and bring in local management. Under its new leadership – which included three Vecinos who independently ran for and got elected to the water board – the board stabilized water rates, installed water meters in residents' homes for correct water usage monitoring, exposed gross mismanagement of funds by the previous board, and called a grand jury to investigate.

Even in its earliest years, DHF's community-based model of training and organizing local volunteer leaders showed the tremendous impact that improved the daily lives of community members. It's a model – invented by legendary community organizer Fred Ross, Sr. and pioneered by our founder and namesake Dolores Huerta – that has been expanded, refined, and replicated over the past two decades, leading to the growing list of successes, the empowerment of communities, and life-changing benefits for tens of thousands of families and individuals.

Vecinos Unidos, specifically, continues to empower community leaders through hands-on training to lead civic engagement campaigns, hold elected officials accountable, and secure positive outcomes to address the needs of their community. Vecinos chapters have successfully advocated for community improvements such as more parks, paved roads, pools, sewer connections, education equity, and more.

Thanks to the ongoing dedication of our volunteers, network members, and supporters like you, we'll keep making a difference in people's lives, protecting fundamental rights, and helping marginalized and vulnerable communities find their voice in our democracy for decades to come!

Stay tuned for more stories of impact as we celebrate 20 years of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and if you're on social media and not already doing so, follow DHF's social media channels for even more updates on our work and ways to engage:

Facebook >>

X (Twitter) >>

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Thank you for everything you do!

– Your friends at the Dolores Huerta Foundation

 

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The Border: Imperialism and Mexico

 

Title: Imperialism: The U.S. and Mexico

Description: The relationship between the United States and Mexico, both today and historically, constitutes a significant feature of U.S. imperialism. Speakers at this panel event will discuss Lenin's and more recent socialists' concepts of imperialism; the long drive by U.S. capital and the U.S. government to dominate Mexico and seize economic benefits at the expense of Mexico and the working class of both countries; and Mexican/Chicano labor in the U.S. and in the Maquiladoras in Mexico, including the ways in which the U.S. imperialist relation to Mexico has divided the working class and the progressive responses to those divisions. This unequal relationship continues today, impacting workers on both sides of the border. We hope to develop a better understanding of the relationship between the two countries and deepen our bonds of solidarity. The panelists are Bill Gallegos, Luisa Martinez, and Vamsi Vakulabharanam. This panel event was organized by the Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee.

 

Registration.

 

Date etc: Saturday, September 30, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM ET

Link: https://actionnetwork.org/events/npec-presents-imperialism-the-us-and-mexico?source=direct_link&

 

 

 

Response to the Chilean Coup of 1973

  

                        Chilean president Salvador Allende speaks before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on December 4, 1972. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

We have a new post up on N.S. by DSA leader David Duhalde about the Chilean Coup of 1973, and U.S. Socialists response.

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/immediately-after-the-1973-chilean-coup-us-socialists-supported-those-fighting-for-freedom

 

Immediately After the 1973 Chilean Coup, US Socialists Supported Those Fighting for Freedom

 

BY

DAVID DUHALDE

The moment that Salvador Allende was violently deposed on September 11, 1973, democratic socialists in the US knew it was a crime. They joined others around the world organizing solidarity efforts and supporting political refugees.

 

In August, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several congressional leaders visited Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to meet with leftist activists and elected officials — a goodwill trip that the Wall Street Journal dubbed “AOC’s Socialist Sympathy Tour.” In Chile, Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues insisted that the US government declassify more documents related to Washington’s support for the coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973.

Bowing to pressure, the State Department released several of President Richard Nixon’s daily briefings concerning the Chilean military’s movement against the democratically elected government. As the memos show, Nixon knew at the time of the coup that Allende was open to a “political solution” (likely holding a plebiscite) and hoped to “fend off a showdown,” which he never got the chance to do. The revelations confirmed that the United States went into the putsch with its eyes wide open and still backed a coup that wiped out Chilean democracy.

AOC and the delegation’s successful push for declassification is the latest action in nearly five decades of US democratic socialist solidarity with Chileans, stretching back to the Democratic Socialists of America’s two predecessor organizations: the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). While not the primary US movers of what became known as Chile Solidarity — the global social movement supporting democratic rights in the Southern Cone country — DSOC and NAM, in their publications and organizing, played a real role in opposing Chile’s military dictatorship.

In Jacobin. 

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/chile-coup-allende-dsco-nam-democratic-socialists-america-aoc

 

Chilean president Salvador Allende speaks before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on December 4, 1972. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

 

 

Choosing Democracy: School Violence in Sacramento,

Choosing Democracy: School Violence in Sacramento,: Katie Valenzuela Sacramento City Council. In recent weeks, swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti have appeared on multiple campuses in our reg...

Choosing Democracy: Chilean Coup of 1973

Choosing Democracy: Chilean Coup of 1973:     Chilean  Coup of 1973  and the U.S.A. We have a new post up on our blog.  Chilean Coup of 1973.  Note. They are still at it .  September...

Choosing Democracy: The Meaning of Labor Day

Choosing Democracy: The Meaning of Labor Day:   This antagonism toward unions and worker power is out of step with most Americans. New   polling for the AFL-CIO   shows historic support ...

ONLY A SOCIAL MOVEMENT CAN WIN REAL IMMIGRATION RE...

The Reality Check: ONLY A SOCIAL MOVEMENT CAN WIN REAL IMMIGRATION RE...: ONLY A SOCIAL MOVEMENT CAN WIN REAL IMMIGRATION REFORM By David Bacon The Nation, 8/29/23   Marchers leave Petaluma on their 3-day trek to S...

The Reality Check: FROM SPAIN TO DELANO - THE RADICAL ROOTS OF FARMWO...

FROM SPAIN TO DELANO - THE RADICAL ROOTS OF FARMWO...: FROM SPAIN TO DELANO - THE RADICAL ROOTS OF FARMWORKER UNIONS By David Bacon Positively Filipino, 8/30/23 https://www.positivelyfilipino.com...

Texas Rep. Greg Casar Talks Progressive Dems Visit to Latin America, Con...

Congressman Greg Casar + Border Policy

 Border policy, and Latin America

Congressman Greg Casar ( D. Texas) once a DSA member.

Progressive Democrats visit Latin America . seek solutions to border conflict. 

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/8/30/progressive_codel_latin_america_greg_casar

 

Chile. The coup.  Latin America.  

Texas border actions. 

The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement

 

The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (Review)

https://portside.org/2023-08-24/strikers-coachella-rank-and-file-history-ufw-movement-review

Portside Date: August 24, 2023

Author: Alina R. Méndez

Date of source: August 18, 2023

NACLA Reports

rowing up in the 1990s, I always marveled at the story of how my parents met on their way to a United Farm Workers (UFW) picket line. As former members of the UFW, my parents often shared nostalgic memories of their times standing outside grocery stores asking consumers to join a UFW boycott, traveling to Sacramento to appeal to state lawmakers, and participating in union gatherings and celebrations. My mother’s recollections of César Chávez, who led the UFW until his untimely death in 1993, were of a charismatic man filled with contagious optimism. Although the UFW held few contracts in the 1990s, my parents always spoke with pride about this union that began in Delano, California, in 1965 and achieved unimaginable feats like living wages, health benefits, a pension plan, an end to pesticide spraying while workers were in the fields, and freedom from sexual harassment.

These are the kinds of memories and perspectives that I found in the pages of The Strikers of Coachella. Focused on California’s Coachella Valley, Christian O. Paiz offers us a remarkable analysis of the UFW movement that centers the union’s grassroots and eschews unnecessary binaries of union victory or defeat. The work is a welcome change from the recent emphasis on the UFW’s failed leadership. If the book is nearly four hundred pages long, that is because Paiz skillfully captures the nuance of this history—foregrounding how Coachella’s strikers viewed the movement through a place-based politicization shaped by multiple ideological and social currents.

One of the major themes that resurfaces in this book again and again is the matter of contingency. The UFW movement, Paiz painstakingly reminds us, had “multiple beginnings and endings,” and was shaped by “overlaid trajectories and shifting visions.” He develops the framework of a “field of stories” to describe how people intersected and shaped each other’s lives as they assessed the possibilities of a better tomorrow and (re)created a movement to turn possibility into reality. The author refutes the argument that the UFW’s famous leader César Chávez was largely responsible for the union’s inability to maintain the labor contracts that it achieved in the 1970s and early 1980s, let alone expand to more regions. Recent labor histories have demonstrated the extraordinary measures that capital—with the help of the state—adopted in the 1970s and ‘80s to dismantle unions and foreclose collective action.

More than a history of the UFW Movement, the book is also a history of the larger Chicanx movement in the Coachella Valley covering nearly four-decades between 1945 and 1983. Many of the region’s young Chicana/os first became involved in activism supporting the UFW cause and subsequently focused their energies on other issues like education and public health. Although most members of the Coachella Valley’s Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) emphasized their U.S. citizenship, spoke English, and some belonged to a small middle class, they endorsed the UFW’s first strike, raised funds in support of the striking workers, condemned the local media for misrepresenting farm labor conditions, and organized other pro-UFW actions.

Without losing sight of the larger political economy that conditioned the UFW and Chicano movements, Paiz utilizes his formulation of a field of stories to explain how historical actors came together in struggle. He injects life into this history by weaving together the different—yet intersecting—lives of movement participants. The author’s voice takes on an almost poetic quality when he writes about the farmworkers who sustained the UFW movement. People, Paiz writes, “built the very movement that built them. They did so in the context of past and present UFW victories inside and outside the Coachella Valley. … Each farmworker thus moved in a shared space that, in turn, moved with them—contingently and unpredictably, almost magically.” Like the UFW movement, the Coachella Valley’s Chicano movement is one of multiple beginning and endings, set forth by a multiplicity of peoples with intersecting trajectories.

Some of the main reasons behind the union’s decline, Paiz shows through UFW member testimony, include a growing political conservatism, employers’ anti-labor practices, and Mexico’s economic downturn in the 1980s. Just as the union’s contract wins never carried with them a full political economic transformation nor reflected a strong and efficient organization, the UFW’s apparent defeats nonetheless empowered farmworkers to imagine radical possibilities. The Coachella Grape Strike of 1973 is a perfect example of this. To avoid renewing their 1970 labor contracts with the UFW, Coachella Valley grape growers invited the Teamsters union to create a fabricated jurisdictional dispute with the UFW in 1973. Coachella’s UFW members found themselves the targets of grower and Teamster violence and abandoned by a national media that repeated false narratives in the name of objectivity. Despite the very real problems that the union’s 1973 defeat posed to the Coachella Valley’s farmworker movement, Paiz argues, the strike “is best seen as producing spaces for community- and self-definition, spaces grappling with past marginality and envisioning future paths.” Union losses, like wins, are never complete nor guaranteed. 

The fissures that existed among ethnic Mexicans and between Filipinxs and ethnic Mexicans, Paiz shows, made the UFW movement all the more extraordinary. While the Coachella Valley’s Mexican American community often demanded the rights that citizenship accorded them, immigrant Mexicans sustained political visions rooted in a Mexican national history of proletarian struggle. Filipinxs nearing retirement age viewed with frustration and disappointment how the union took a stronger Mexican identity with each passing year as agribusiness continued employing Mexican migrants as strikebreakers. I was relieved to see that Paiz thoughtfully addresses the complicated reality that agribusiness continuously employed Mexican migrants as strikebreakers. “We do not need to engage in xenophobic depictions of immigrants to note that many could not readily join UFW strikes or join unions for fear of strikes, because of their juridical vulnerability and/or commitments to families and communities in Mexico,” Paiz rightfully argues. 

Support Farm Workers and Their Union

 

With your help NY farm workers can win their UFW contracts We recently won five union elections in New York state, representing 500 new workers on four apple orchards and a major vegetable producer in upstate NY. Now we're fighting back against grower intimidation to get the workers the union they voted for.  We are also organizing at many other locations as workers want contracts and the protections that come with them. The need is strong. Workers are tired of being abused and taken advantage of. Here are their stories: Erik is a cabbage worker in Albion NY. He shares an illegal practice where he works: "I have to purchase my own equipment needed to work such as boots, coats, hats and gloves and spend approximately $200 for this equipment. This is money that my family needs and I know it's not right … I am hoping the union can change this practice. I know that if we're united we can win." A 23-year resident of New York, Tomasa also wants the protection of a union at her apple packing house. She shares her story about what sounds like regular exposure to carbon monoxide. "Sometimes, in the mornings when the machinery comes in to move the product, the gasses from this equipment make me dizzy, give me a headache, and once made me sleepy: it is a kind of gas that a truck emits. We have to go outside to refresh ourselves from the fumes." Santos has been picking and thinning apples in Albion NY for 8 years under the H-2A program. He shares how the farm supervisor tells long standing workers that he wants to get rid of them and replace them with his family members. "When he checks the apples we pick, he deliberately bruises the ones that we pick; but with his family members, he gives their apples only one glance and doesn't even check the quality...I want the UFW to protect me so I can continue doing my job." This new organizing drive was made possible by a recent New York law – the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act – which protects farm workers' rights to unionize and prohibits grower retaliation against those organizing. Workers want to take advantage of the new law that has opened doors for them to speak up and organize. A campaign of this sort is expensive and so are our legal fees. Please donate to help NY workers get the rights and union protections they deserve. PS: After you take action you can also share this campaign on Facebook & Twitter.

Hope in Guatemala

The anti-corruption candidate’s stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country.  Arévalo is the son of Juan Jose Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, who held office from 1945 to 1951. 

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/bernardo-arevalo-guatemala-election/

Bernardo Arévalo's Unexpected Victory Brings Guatemala Another Democratic Spring The anti-corruption candidate's stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country. But only if he is allowed to take power—and to exercise it. www.thenation.com

Bernardo Arévalo’s Unexpected Victory Brings Guatemala Another Democratic Spring

The anti-corruption candidate’s stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country. But only if he is allowed to take power—and to exercise it.

Daniel Judt, August 23, 2023

Quetzaltenango, Guatemala—On Sunday night, in the central plaza of Xela, the second-largest city in Guatemala, a crowd of several hundred gathers to watch the results of the country’s presidential election. When the press calls the vote for Bernardo Arévalo, a university professor turned anti-corruption politician, the crowd erupts. ¡Viva Arévalo! Viva Guatemala! Fireworks go off. A young campaign volunteer runs up to the podium, takes the microphone, and cries, “Today is the beginning of Guatemala’s next Democratic Spring!”

It is a reference to Arévalo’s party, Movimiento Semilla, whose language is full of seasonal metaphors. (“Semilla” is Spanish for seed). It is also a nod to the party’s birth during the “Guatemalan Spring” of 2015, when citizens took to the streets to oust President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti for corruption (both are now in prison). Most meaningfully, though, it is an invocation of the decade of social democracy that Guatemala witnessed from 1944 to 1954. That period, commonly known as the “Democratic Spring,” has remained an ironic point of light in Guatemalan historical memory—an era that gave way to a US-backed coup, a decades-long campaign of genocide during which the state murdered some 200,000 indigenous Guatemalans, and, most recently, a series of “democratic” governments marred by corruption, poverty, and political repression.

Now, with Arévalo’s victory, the phrase “Democratic Spring” has transformed from nostalgia for a distant past to hope for a near future. The comparison is personal. Bernardo Arévalo is the son of Juan Jose Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, who held office from 1945 to 1951. The invocation of Arévalo Sr. is a political strategy. Many still remember him as one of the country’s two best presidents, along with his successor, Jacobo Arbenz. But it is also an instructive reminder of what it will take for the current Arévalo to lead Guatemala toward—or back to—a genuine form of democracy.

It is something of a miracle that Arévalo even made it to the final round of voting. In February, before the first round, the country’s electoral commission used spurious accusations to bar three candidates from participating. Two were wealthy businessmen running popular campaigns. The third, Thelma Cabrera, was a Mayan Indigenous rights activist whose party, the left-wing Movement for the Liberation of the People (MLP), had performed unexpectedly well in 2019. It seems likely that Arévalo snuck through on the strength of his dismal support. Most polls had him in last place.

Arévalo, 64, is impeccably calm and soft-spoken. His lack of bombast, together with his party’s emaciated infrastructure—Semilla did not accept the bribes and gifts that sustain Guatemala’s leading parties—helped him stay under the radar. They also helped him garner support. Semilla’s party proposals are nothing if not rigorously sensible: lower the cost of electricity and food by breaking up monopolies; bring workers into the formal economy, which would lower the skyrocketing rate of immigration to the US; clean up government agencies, by following a detailed ten-step plan. Over and over on the campaign trail, Arévalo reiterated this last commitment. His words were vague (“together, as a people, we will fight against corruption”). But coupled with his honest style and clean background, they earned him a valuable epithet: the “anti-corruption” candidate.

In the first round election on June 25, Arévalo received 12 percent of the vote, enough to put him in second behind Sandra Torres, a former first lady with no meaningful ideology beyond a commitment to gaining power. (Torres had run for president twice before, in 2015 and 2019, and lost both times.) Or, really, Torres finished second, Arévalo third, behind some 1.2 million blank or spoiled ballots. Even as Arévalo’s victory is fêted, it should not be forgotten that the real winner of the first round was a simple, resounding no.

Stunned by Semilla’s advance to the second round, the current government scrambled to disqualify Arévalo. The supreme court investigated “fraud” in the vote count. The attorney general tried to dissolve Semilla on the grounds that the party had falsified voters’ signatures. The police raided Semilla’s headquarters in Guatemala City. But the attacks backfired.They reinforced Arévalo’s image as an anti-establishment candidate and carried his name out into rural areas that Semilla’s campaign, largely a social-media operation, would not have otherwise reached. Despite the fact that Torres and her UNE party used all sorts of illegal tactics on election day—busing voters to polling sites, handing out food supplies in exchange for votes, instructing her election monitors to challenge Semilla ballots—Arévalo won the second round by over a million votes. In Xela, a few Semilla poll monitors told me that their UNE counterparts accepted Torres’s money and then cast their ballots for Arévalo.

Juan Jose Arévalo took office in 1945, in the wake of a revolution that toppled the country’s military dictatorship. It was a tenuous popular front of communists and anti-communists, leftists and centrists, momentarily united to fight for democracy. Arévalo was the ideal candidate. A left-liberal philosophy professor of a Deweyan cast, he advocated the overcoming of “old class hatreds” with a flighty platform of “spiritual socialism.” Eloquent in speech and manner, upper-class but never a part of dictatorial circles, anti-communist but with vague leftist sympathies, he was, as one historian writes, “all things to all people.” 

Arévalo senior had significant blind spots. He never pursued land reform and did little for rural education. But he did pass a labor code that established the right to unionize, capped the workweek at 48 hours, and instituted health and safety standards for all laborers. (A Nationcontributor wrote that the law made the US’s Wagner Act look like “sheer fascist reaction.”) He also created a robust social security system, the IGSS, which is still active today. Crucially, he tolerated and benefited from a coalition of left-wing parties without which the most impactful elements of “Arevalismo” would not have survived. The communist-leaning Party of Revolutionary Action, for example, played a critical role in executing Arévalo’s policies—and beating back several coup attempts against him. Fitfully but genuinely, as historian Greg Grandin has argued, Arévalo cultivated a union of “socialized democracy and democratized socialism.”

Like his father, Bernardo Arévalo’s greatest strength, for now, is that he is all things to all people. This is evident even within the Semilla office in Xela. Rene, a recent college graduate who joined the party in May, eagerly affirms that Semilla is “not socialist” and labels the party as both progressive and centrist. Her colleague Guillermo, a serious politico in his late 20s, speaks of Arévalo as a Guatemalan Salvador Allende who will begin to “transition” the country out of “unsustainable capitalism.” In Xela and its environs, I heard socialists and centrists and evangelical Christians say they would vote for Semilla. Ex-guerrillas are happy he won; so is the US government. “Semilla is a party of an elite class,” Percy Aguilar, a former mayoral candidate in Xela for the left-wing MLP party, told me. “A radical left would try to transform the state. Semilla doesn’t want to transform the state. They want to keep the state we currently have, only without corruption.” He voted for Arévalo anyway. 

It is still not a given that Arévalo will take power in January of next year. At the time of writing, Torres has not recognized his victory. There are rumblings from the attorney general’s office about another prosecution of Semilla. The speeches by congressmen at the celebratory gathering in Xela’s central plaza are tinged with worries and warnings. Stay alert, the message goes, and be ready to protest. 

Even if the transition does go smoothly, it is likely that Arévalo will be limited to working through executive power and administrative appointments. Semilla has just 23 representatives in the 160-seat national congress, and the prospects of a center-left coalition are slim. The intense repression of leftist, Indigenous parties has seen to that. “Whoever wins,” Aguilar told me last week, “the political left will continue to disappear in Guatemala.” 

If Arévalo and his movement are to have any hope of upending Guatemalan politics for the long run—of creating a new Democratic Spring—they must reverse this trend. Cleaning up government ministries and strengthening social services are essential goals. But a move from corrupt capitalism to upstanding capitalism will not root out the troubles of a country at the sharp end of global power. Semilla’s promise of a renewed democracy will remain unfulfilled without the cultivation of a strong anti-capitalist left. If the invocation of the first Democratic Spring in Guatemala carries any counsel for Bernardo Arévalo, his party, and the blander forms of liberal anti-authoritarianism now in vogue around the world, perhaps it is this. 

Daniel Judt is a graduate student worker at Yale, where he studies American political economy and labor history.