Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen

Álvaro Enrique Arzú Irigoyen (Guatemala City, March 14, 1946 – ibidem, April 27, 2018) was a Guatemalan politician and businessman, president of the Republic of Guatemala in the period from 1996 to 2000 and five times mayor of the capital. During his presidential administration, the Peace Agreements were signed on December 29, 1996 with the URNG, which ended the internal armed conflict of the republic.

Biography

Álvaro Arzú completed his primary and secondary education at the Colegio San José de los Infantes and diversified at the Colegio Liceo Guatemala, graduating in the class of 1963. He later studied law at the Rafael Landívar University of Guatemala, studies that he did not complete. culminate. When he was barely 22 years old he studied to be the owner-manager of a travel agency.

He began in political life more than 20 years ago, in the ranks of the National Liberation Movement, far-right, anti-communist and with a conservative tendency. He was expelled from it due to differences with the leader of that party.

He joined the National Renewal Party, with which he won the mayoralty of Guatemala City in the 1982 elections. These elections were annulled by the coup d'état that year carried out by a military junta headed by General Efraín Ríos Montt. In 1985, Arzú ran again and served as mayor of the capital in the period 1986-1990.

From 1978 to 1981 he was director of the Guatemalan Institute of Tourism, where he managed to break all existing records for the entry of tourists to Guatemala.

In 1990, together with fellow businessman Óscar Berger, he founded the National Advancement Party -PAN-, which nominated him as a presidential candidate in 1990, occupying fourth place.

In the first cabinet of whoever won the 1990 elections, Jorge Serrano Elías, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs for the period 1991-1992. As chancellor he signed an agreement in which the independence of Belize was recognized because it is the & # 34; only document & # 34; in which that country admitted a territorial dispute with Guatemala. After this he resigned because he disagreed with Serrano. "Far from implicating me, it saves me because it is clear that I defended the claim of Belizean territory," Arzú told a local radio station (Sonora) in an interview years later.

During the 1995 elections he ran again for the presidency of the Republic, defeating the candidate of the Guatemalan Republican Front, Alfonso Portillo, in the second round.

In 2003 he ran again as mayor of Guatemala City and won the election with 43.23% of the votes, almost double that of his second competitor, the businessman Jorge Briz and leaving Luis Rabbe with only 18.48%..

In 2007 he seeks re-election in the capital's mayor's office, which he achieves with 55.55% of the preference of the residents of Guatemala City and ratifies his leadership and acceptance of the voters.

In 2011 he was re-elected mayor of the capital through the Unionist Party, obtaining 36.72% followed by the candidates of the CREO and Patriota parties.

In 2015 he was re-elected again and was again elected mayor of Guatemala City for the 5th time and the 4th consecutive time. Unfortunately, he did not finish this period that lasted until 2020 as he died suddenly in 2018.

He was an adopted son of the Basque city of Fuenterrabía, a city to which he went regularly, since at least 1967, to visit the "Artzu" from which his paternal family originates.

Presidency (1996-2000)

In the election of November 12, 1995, Arzú defeated Alfonso Antonio Portillo Cabrera, of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), a party founded by the dictator Ríos Montt, who was prevented by law from running, with 36.5% of the votes. to the Presidency), and definitively beat him in the second round on January 7, 1996 with 51.2%. On January 14, he took office as the nation's first magistrate with a four-year mandate, replacing Ramiro de León Carpio, who had been promoted to the Presidency in 1993 as a result of Serrano's failed self-coup. As for the PAN (party created by him), it obtained a relative majority in Congress with 34.3% of the votes and 43 of the 80 seats (it had obtained 12 in the 1990 legislative elections and 24 in the 1994 elections), reaching the status of the country's main party, also winning 107 mayoralties and 8 seats in Parlacen.

His government was characterized by the development of public works and the privatization of some companies of the State of Guatemala, such as the Electric Company of Guatemala, the post office and the telephone company GUATEL. Although the sale of state assets made previously public services more efficient and functional, these privatizations were accused of not being transparent. Currently, Guatemala has a modern, thriving and competitive industry in telecommunications.^{[< i>citation required]}

During his government there was an alarming increase in kidnappings, which is why he was forced to reinforce and purge the security forces to make them better operational, achieving the best security results in recent years.

According to the report on violence in Guatemala, Arzú achieves, with its security policy, the lowest point in the homicide rate at the republic level in the last 16 years.

In February 1996, his government received the second visit from Pope John Paul II.

The greatest achievement that the Arzú government had was the signing of the Peace Agreements in Guatemala, on December 29, 1996, with the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG). Agreements that had been negotiated since 1988. Before taking office, he had already maintained contacts with the guerrilla command and had made the conclusion of the negotiation process an axis of his electoral campaign.

One of the great challenges that the Arzuista administration had was to respond to the emergency represented by the passage of Hurricane Mitch through Guatemala in 1998. The hurricane caused considerable damage to the country's infrastructure, unleashing river floods and landslides. of land, illness among thousands of people, as well as thousands more homeless. Also, it represented serious damage to the country's economy due to the loss of crops and products destined for export.

Probably one of the most significant events during his presidency was the assassination of the Guatemalan bishop, defender of Human Rights, Juan José Gerardi Conedera, which occurred on April 26, 1998, two days after he had published his conclusions on the documentation of crimes during the military dictatorship in the report "Guatemala, never again", where 93% of the total human rights violations were attributed to the Army and the parastatal organizations subject to it, corresponding 3% of them to the various guerrilla organizations, in 36 years during the period between 1960 and 1996. Arzú declared three days of national mourning and was ready to affirm that the murder had been a common crime, not a political one. He formed a commission with his most valued collaborators and, in addition, with members of the Church, to exhaustively investigate the murder; However, from the beginning of the investigation, a flagrant attitude was observed on the part of Arzú to disassociate sectors of the State from the fact. Almost four years later, three members of the army, including a captain who was part of his security, were indeed tried and found responsible for the bishop's death.

As for the economy, despite the damage caused by Hurricane Mitch in October 1998 and the little progress in human development indicators, Arzú presented as achievements at the end of his mandate an annual growth of around 3% of GDP and inflation reduced to 5%. It was the Government of the democratic era that carried out the most public works in the interior of the country, a figure that no other government has managed to match to date.

Under his government, the general privatization of the public business park was carried out, including the electricity company EEGSA, the telephone company GUATEL (companies that did not generate large income but generated enormous expenses for the State) and the FEGUA railways. The Arzú Government received the country with electricity coverage of less than 30% and delivered it with access to electricity at 70%; currently, thanks to privatization, the index is greater than 90%.

In terms of telephony, in Guatemala coverage was less than 20% and currently there are more telephones than inhabitants, ceasing to be a privilege today, as it was at the time of the state company. At the level of the railways, later governments dissolved the privatization and nationalized the train again, thanks to the efforts of Arzú, the railways had returned to circulation and when they were nationalized again, in subsequent governments, the state railway company was once again in ruins and to date the railway has not circulated again.

On the external level, Arzú participated in the annual Ibero-American Summits and those of Central American presidents. On April 16, 1998, the Minister of Economy, Juan Mauricio Wurmser, signed in Santo Domingo the Free Trade Agreement between Central America and the Dominican Republic, which for Guatemala was to come into force on October 3, 2001. On April 10, March 1999, Arzú received Bill Clinton during his regional tour, an occasion on which the US president expressed his regret for the support provided by his country to the Guatemalan military dictatorships, an implication that had already been documented by the CEH. It was the first visit by a United States president since 1968. On March 11, Arzú hosted an extraordinary summit of Central American presidents in the city of Antigua Guatemala, which Clinton joined, and on the 18th and 19th On October of the same year, he repeated the function in the country's capital on the occasion of the XX ordinary summit. In the same scenario, the opening of the XXIX General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) took place from June 6 to 8, 1999. On the other hand, on January 27, 1998, Guatemala reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending 38 years of rupture.

Formation of your Party

He participated as a candidate in the 2003 elections, again as a candidate for mayor of Guatemala City, but this time as a candidate for his newly founded political party "Unionista". Although the candidate for the presidency of the Unionists, Fritz García-Gallont, had very little support, Arzú managed to win the mayoralty of the municipality of Guatemala. The most important project that he carried out during this period as mayor was the construction of the Transmetro, a series of buses with their own routes that would replace the buses that circulated, owned by private entrepreneurs.

In the 2007 elections he ran for re-election, obtaining a victory by a wide margin over his closest competitor, Roberto González, nominated by the ruling Gran Alianza Nacional party, GANA.

On Monday, May 2, 2011, the newspaper elPeriódico, in the opinion section, published that Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen projects the idea that in his party there is no place to choose leaders and that is why he decides to nominate his wife Patricia de Arzú as a candidate for the presidency of Guatemala to participate in the 2011 elections.

Álvaro Arzú had strong friction with business sectors in Guatemala, mainly with the directors and owners of written media, this because Arzú was considered a model of the "new right" neoliberal and progressive, according to the politician's apologists. Due to such discrepancies, Álvaro Arzú was even accused of orchestrating smear campaigns against Guatemalan newspapers.He was reelected to the Municipal Mayor during the period 2012-2016.

Political history

1985 Guatemalan municipal elections

1990 presidential election

1995 presidential election

2003 Guatemalan municipal elections

Guatemala municipal elections of 2007

2011 Guatemalan municipal elections

Guatemala municipal elections of 2015

Charges

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