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Article Excerpt
In what is already being called "a new type of coup," Guatemala's Corte de Constitucionalidad (CC) has ruled that Gen. Efrain Rios Montt is eligible to run for the presidency of the republic. The ruling allows the 77-year-old perennial candidate, now president of Congress, to right a wrong he suffered in 1974, when, by widely accepted accounts, he was elected president but fraudulently deprived of the office. The ruling may also have destroyed any semblance of a judicial system in Guatemala.
Rios began working for this moment in 1990 (see NotiCen, 2003-06-26), when he first sought a high-court ruling allowing him to run despite the existence of Article 186 of the Constitution, which withholds eligibility for the office of president to anyone who participated in the overthrow of the government, as the general did in 1982 when he assumed the presidency following a coup that curtailed the regime of Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982).
Since 1990, Rios Montt's siege on the Constitution has been turned back repeatedly. In all, 55 jurists have voted against him; only nine have supported him. But four of those nine sit on the current court and, in a 4-3...
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More articles from NotiCen: Central American & Caribbean Affairs
REGION FOLLOWS SPANISH LEAD--AT ITS PERIL?, July 17, 2003
CUBA NEWS IN BRIEF., July 17, 2003
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