All this Portillo–who last week won Guatemala’s first presidential election since the country’s 36-year civil war ended in 1996–has admitted. The Guatemalan press reported on the incident back in September. Given the country’s violent past and growing fear of crime, such a revelation might be expected to destroy a candidate. But Portillo, who is allied with a former military dictator, used it to enhance his appeal to voters. One of his television spots boasted: “A man who can defend his life can defend yours.”
Self-defense it may have been. But perhaps not such a clear-cut case as the slogan implies. Witness testimony taken in the few days after the slayings, and recently obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the slayings were a deadly escalation of a drunken brawl. According to witnesses, a fistfight erupted after the dance; Portillo and his friend Eduardo Calzada fled when they realized they were outnumbered by at least a dozen men. They returned with guns in a Volkswagen. Portillo reportedly fired two shots in the air and warned his foes to come no closer. Arturo Visoso ignored the warning, and Portillo shot him. Then Javier Encarnacion and his brother, Gustavo, charged. Javier was killed and Gustavo wounded. Whether any of Portillo’s foes was armed remains unclear. All 11 shells recovered by investigators were fired from the same gun, but two men in the anti-Portillo crowd had explosive residue on their trigger hands.
The court file does not include the testimony of Portillo. His campaign refused to discuss details of the case, even though it was formally closed in 1995 after the statute of limitations expired. Earlier this year Portillo told a reporter: “After the incident I lived a moral and ethical crisis. It’s a tragedy in my life.” He says that he fled from the state of Guerrero because he could not have received a fair trial. That may be true. Portillo was a leader of the left in the student movement, and friends say he had many enemies in the local government.
So how did the leftist leader wind up in the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), the party of 74-year-old Efrain Rios Montt, who once led a military coup? It is an odd pairing. Around the same time Portillo went on the lam in Mexico, Rios Montt’s army was carrying out the deadliest massacres of the civil war. Portillo still identifies Che Guevara as one of his heroes; Rios Montt, an evangelical, has successfully cast himself as the anticorruption dictator. But they need each other. The Constitution bars former coup leaders from the presidency, and Portillo needed a successful party to help him fulfill his presidential aspirations. What the two men share is charisma and a common touch. Portillo portrayed his main opponent as a candidate of the rich and himself as a man of the people. Says Dina Fernandez, a political columnist: “This mix of populism and authoritarianism was very successful for the FRG and says much about we Guatemalans.” The legacy of a 36-year war doesn’t disappear quickly.
