Hundreds of Protesters Storm, Set Fire to Guatemalan Congress Building

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL –  Hundreds of protesters stormed the Guatemalan Congress on Saturday, November 21st, and set fire to several of its windows, until they were removed by security forces.

The demonstrators, most of them hooded, broke the entrance door to Congress as well as its windows, hurling flaming torches inside, with no deputies present inside the building.

For approximately ten minutes, amid the chaos, the protesters managed to set fire to a part of the Congress building and also destroy everything they found around them.

The flames in the Legislative Palace were visible from the street and the Red Cross assisted several people for smoke inhalation, a spokesperson for the Guatemalan Red Cross, Andrés Lemus, told reporters.

The demonstrators were removed after several minutes by the National Civil Police launching tear gas, forcing them to disperse and evacuate the street. The fire department reached the scene to extinguish the fire, but the damages are not yet known.

The storming of Congress occurred during a demonstration organized on Saturday by artists, organizations and dozens of institutions, to reject the budget for revenue and spending of the State for 2021, passed by Parliament, which is mostly pro-government, and submitted by the government of Alejandro Giammattei.

In parallel, while hundreds of demonstrators took over the Congress building, thousands of other Guatemalans were peacefully demonstrating against Giammattei a mere kilometer away outside the National Palace of Culture (government seat).

The Guatemalan president reacted to the demonstrations through a message on his social media networks, in which he stated that “one has the right to demonstrate according to the law” but “we will not tolerate vandalism of public or private property.”

The animosity against Giammattei and Congress stems from the budget approval last Wednesday at dawn, without 160 deputies having access to it.

On Friday night, after Giammattei once again validated the budget, his vice-president Guillermo Castillo assured in a press conference that the country is not “well” and urged Giammattei to resign jointly with him “for the good of the Central American nation”.

“For the good of the country I have asked him to submit his resignation together with me,” said Castillo in a message to the nation through social media and addressed to journalists in the vice-presidential WhatsApp group. Likewise, he assured that he told the president that “things are not well” and conceded that he does not have a good relationship with the chief executive.

Castillo also issued an ultimatum by proposing his resignation before Congress unless the situation was rectified.

The Congress, mostly controlled by the government and allied parties, last week passed the largest budget in the history of the country with almost US$13 billion.

However, the opposition charges that a majority of funds are directed to infrastructure projects favorable to entrepreneurs while neglecting the fight against poverty and child malnutrition that affects almost 50 percent of children under five years of age.

In addition to the protests it has sparked, several economic organizations and analysts caution that there is risk that a third of the budget will be financed by debt.