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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, over the weekend, I joined Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia on a trip to Guatemala and Honduras. With us were Senators Merkley, Butler, Welch as well as Guatemalan-American Congresswomen Torres of California and Ramirez of Illinois.
Both Guatemala and Honduras have struggled with conflict, corruption, stark inequality, and fragile democratic governments.
Many of us have forgotten that until the 1980s, much of Latin America was led by military dictators, sometimes with Cold War-era support from the United States.
Guatemala's bloody 36-year civil war only ended in 1996. It is a reminder of why the U.S. attention to this region's nascent and often fragile democracies is so important.
Guatemala is facing a deeply challenging Presidential transition. In October, Bernardo Arevalo won in a decisive landslide election where he pledged to tackle endemic corruption. Early polls showed him at 3 percent of the vote. When the final election took place, he won by 20 percent, a 1 million vote plurality, but outgoing President Giammattei, and Attorney General Porras are, unfortunately, attempting to undermine that peaceful transition ahead of the January 14 inauguration.
I might add that unlike other elections in Central and South America, this election where Mr. Arevalo prevailed was monitored by international sources, and the votes were challenged in court, counted, and found to be still in his favor, overwhelmingly.
In fact, shortly after President Giammattei didn't show up for a meeting with us one morning, his government crudely tried to annul the recent election results. This clumsy coup attempt--which was globally rejected--must not succeed. The Guatemalan voters' choice must be respected.
I want to raise the attention of the Senate to two Guatemalan political prisoners we asked about but were denied an opportunity to visit in prison, former prosecutor Virginia Laparra and journalist Jose Ruben Zamora. You won't be surprised to hear that both focused on issues of corruption, which is why they landed in jail on nonsense charges.
I look forward to working with the new President-elect, Arevalo, once he is sworn in, and hope their release will be one of his early actions.
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