Alvaro Colom in search of social justice: Guatemala's new president is relying on the support of the people and the vigilance of the international community to bring about profound reform.

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From an airplane window, the beauty of Guatemala's altiplano stretches out below, the peaks of volcanoes looming above the clouds like soleran guards and, spread at their feet, tranquil lakes and silent towns. These dramatic landscapes still hold the footprints of the Maya civilization--"the people of corn" without whom Guatemala would not exist.

Arriving in Guatemala City--the seat of government for Central America during colonial times--I prepared to sit down with President Alvaro Colom Caballeros for an exclusive interview with Americas. He had been elected a few weeks earlier, following a tumultuous electoral campaign that reflected profound divisions in Guatemalan society, and would take office on January 14.

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Before meeting with Guatemala's new leader, I began to chat with people on the streets of the capital to find out what they thought about him and the changes ahead. Almost without exception, they expressed a sense of fatalism: God's will would come to pass. Most people interviewed gave the new president credit for his good intentions, but more than one added pointedly that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Many described Colom as a simple man who is interested in the problems faced by the poor.

The new president had not yet taken office, but already the three national newspapers were debating the decisions he might make. In the day's headlines, there were more violent deaths of women, problems caused by the Maras (gang members), and a cold wave sweeping across the country. Given the power invested in the presidential persona, the focus was on what he might or might not do about all this.

But beyond being the president, just who was this man I was about to inter view? Alvaro Colom Caballeros has a degree in industrial engineering from the University of San Carlos--the country's leading public university, which has had a major influence on Guatemala's contemporary history--and studied at a high school run by Marist priests. The Coloms are a middle-class family that settled in the capital at least five generations ago. Colom's father and two of his uncles were attorneys who fought against the authoritarianism of the right-wing governments that arose after the fall of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that dominated Guatemalan politics throughout the Cold War. The younger uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, was a Social Democrat who was assassinated by members of the military in 1979 after a car chase through the city streets as the presidential chief of staff watched from a helicopter. People remember his funeral as drawing one of the largest crowds in the country's recent history. Manuel Colom was not only mayor of Guatemala City from 1970 to 1974--the best in the city's history, many people say--but he was shaping up to be the sure winner in presidential elections.

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Public figures, particularly politicians, hide behind their words; as a result, people often don't know much about those who govern them. I decided to talk to some of the people closest to Alvaro Colom--his sister Yolanda, his wife, Sandra Torres, and some of his friends--to find out what kind of person he really is. I discovered, to my surprise, that Alvaro Colom was born with a physical handicap, a harelip, and that he had surgery and took a long time to learn how to talk. His first words, spoken at age three, were "needle" and "railroad"--the former due, perhaps, to the influence of a seamstress who lived with his family. It turns out he has never felt a complex over his disability--he always laughed about it--and in grade school he would volunteer to recite poetry, sing, and even participate in oratory contests.

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Colom spent the last of his childhood and his adolescence in Colonia Mariscal, a middle-class neighborhood in the capital. His friends from that era remember the times they spent flying kites, riding bicycles, hunting for frogs in ponds during the winter, shooting kernels of corn with a pea shooter, and playing hide-and-seek and tag. They describe the young Alvaro as fun and likable but hot-headed.

Tragedy came into his life when he was a young engineer, married with two small children, a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old baby boy. A traffic accident in the northwest part of the country took the lives of his wife, Patricia, and his sister-in-law, who was eight months pregnant, and injured his two children; the baby was in intensive care for a long time. The father stayed at his children's side and would not even agree to let their grandmother raise them. He rented a modest house, took them to live with him, and made sure they got a good start in life.

My first impression of Alvaro Colom, when he arrived for the interview at his campaign headquarters, was that he seemed like an uncomplicated person with a calm, confident demeanor and a reflective, even pensive, expression. He admitted to being worried about turning into another person once he was in power, succumbing to the demands of protocol and becoming distant from the people. But he didn't really believe that would happen. "I've traveled down many roads to get to this point," he recalled.

It was his work with the rondo Nacional para la Paz (National Foundation for Peace) that enabled him to crisscross the country shaking hands for many years, building his leadership base and the recognition he now enjoys. Above all, that work provided the basis for his knowledge about the problems faced by the poorest indigenous and mestizo communities around the country.

Asked if he considered himself an heir to the dreams of the 1944 revolution, he answered without hesitation: "It is an inheritance I have to earn, not an inheritance that is handed to me. It would be arrogant to compare myself to Juan Jose Arevalo--a great president, the only statesman we have ever had." Colom recalled a phrase by the Guatemalan poet and writer Luis Cardoza y Aragon about the revolution of Arevalo and Arbenz--"Ten years of spring in a land of eternal tyranny"--and talked about how his father was a constitutionalist and steadfast opponent of the dictatorship. Asked about the influence of his uncle Manuel, he said that it was his personality more than his role as a politician that had the greatest impact on him. The assassination, he said, shattered any sense of hope.

"For my generation, when they assassinated Alberto Fuentes Mohr on January 25, 1979, and Manuel (Colom) just 45 days later, there was no choice but to go into exile, join the guerrillas, or do your job holding your head clown and keeping a low profile, or else they would kill you. The day Manuel died, the family swore not to go back into politics, and that lasted until 1991, when I broke the rules and became part of a government. I consider myself an emergency politician who entered the arena because the circumstances of war took our leaders away from us."

Since Colom ran as a Social Democrat, I asked him what that meant within his country's social and economic context. "Social democracy places the human being at the center of the state's action--not the market or the economy," he said. "In Guatemala, everything has already been tried: extreme right, ultra extreme right, middle right, business-oriented governments, war, repression, death...." He recognized that his victory came amid very difficult circumstances: "We didn't only win against a political party--we won against a lot of things." Later his wife, Sandra, echoed this idea when she asserted that Colom not only won the election, but bested the economic powers, the communications media, and the military. That was evident in the fact that Colom won in the majority of the country's departments in the interior--small towns and poor communities--and lost in the capital. Both the president and his wife attribute this result to the influence of the media and the "Satanization" of his campaign.

"The people have high expectations--the campesinos have gone for many years without redemption," Colom said. "I will not let them down. They have the right to protest, and the government will respect that right. It will be complicated."

I asked the president how he would bring about the changes he had promised, given two key political limitations: the high abstention rate in the second round of the presidential contest, and the failure of his party to win a majority of congressional seats. "My government will be one of unity and conciliation. We need to find points of contact between the different sectors and develop a national dialogue that will address our serious problems. The fiscal issue is one of the priorities on the national agenda."

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President Colom had to leave, but he invited me to go with him to the barbershop for a last-minute touch-up before his inauguration. There, near Avenida Reforma--one of the main thoroughfares of the capital--his barber impassively began the task he's performed for twenty years. With scissors snipping away, and faces of the curious appearing now and then through the windows, I asked Colom about the "surgery" he had proposed for the country.

"I like what [English sociologist] Anthony Giddens says: The market where possible, the state where necessary," Colom said. "Here we are paying for 40 years of exacerbated neoliberalism without any kind of social dimension. I'm also in favor of the marketplace, if and when it is a free market." But, he added emphatically, "I am convinced that neoliberalism failed, and failed enormously. I still haven't seen a market that is trully free--they're all restricted. If there were a free market in globalization, our people [Guatemalans] in the United States would be able to work without any problem. What is more important in a society than human beings? Work should be globalized--there should be a free flow of work."

Referring to Latin America, he spoke enthusiastically about what is happening today in the region. "For the first time, I see a Latin America where every country is creating its own model, one with its own colors, its own variations, its specific characteristics. For the first time, we're not following a common model. That diversity is what's going to unite us, not what's going to divide us. That's how we'll find harmony in the hemisphere."

Sitting in the barber's chair, Colom looked vulnerable, like a boy about to take his first communion. I pointed out that more than one independent analyst has concluded that the Guatemalan state has been infiltrated for many years by mafias and organized crime, and asked him how he will clean house and whether he fears for his life. "It isn't easy," he answered. "We have a very comprehensive security plan with several well-defined stages. The first steps are going to be critical because we're going to take on some interests that seemed untouchable." He underscored the relationship between two issues that, at least under neoliberal models, seem to be unrelated: social justice and citizen security. "You have to understand," he said, "that if we don't turn off the spigots of injustice and social exclusion, everything will be in vain." The barber put down his scissors, and Colom promised that we could continue the conversation at some time.

By nightfall, Alvaro Colom had taken the oath of office and was walking through the crowd gathered at the Plaza de la Constitucion in Guatemala City's historic center--as Arbenz had done ha his day--to receive a sacred indigenous scepter from a Maya spiritual guide. The 56-year-old president stood out in the crowd because of his height, his broad forehead, and the white collar of his shirt. Most of the people who surrounded him were of humble means, and although there were few signs of jubilation, it was possible to perceive a sense of hope.

The country Colom wants to change is a place of enormous contrasts, with deep social fractures and one of the lowest human development index rankings in the region; only Haiti fares worse. The late Guatemalan writer Mario Monteforte Toledo--a key political leader of the 1944 revolution--said that there are "Guatemalas" that have never really been discovered: the indigenous and the mestizo; the rural and the urban; the capital and the interior; the Guatemala of a few landowner families and the country of the people themselves. The 1996 Peace Accords achieved a relative political peace and strengthened the country's fragile institutions, but they left intact a historical knot of contradictions and unbridgeable distances between the different social sectors. That is evidenced by the high levels of crime, the proliferation of multiple forms of violence, and the extreme poverty of millions of Guatemalans whose only daily meal consists of beans and tortillas. I remembered Colom's assurance: "I will not let them down."

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A third, unscheduled encounter with Colom began in the office of his presidential spokesman, when the president dropped in on his way to have his official photograph taken. We talked as we strolled through a tunnel-like passage toward one of the rooms in the National Palace--an imposing colonial structure built by the dictator Jorge Ubico. Perhaps because the building made him think about dictatorships and revolutions, Colom asked, seemingly out of the blue, "Why is it that in physics, a revolution always comes back to its starting point?"

Later, as he was getting made up for the photo, I asked the president about his relationship with the Maya and their Council of the Elders. "I don't go by the Gregorian calendar but by the Maya calendar," he said, smiling broadly. "But that's another story we could talk about for a whole day." Then like an actor applying himself to the role, he walked over and followed the directions of the new official photographer. The interview was over.

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I leave Guatemala with half my questions still in my suitcase and more going around in my head. I don't know how far Colom will go, how far he'll be able to realize his dreams of changing the sometimes bitter face of Guatemala, or to what extent the dark forces resistant to change will let him move forward. Neither do I know whether his social base of indigenous and campesino supporters will back his policies, or whether those policies will turn out, once again, to be a source of disillusionment for a people with seemingly infinite patience. Colom seems to be a leader capable of implementing a series of reforms that imply a deepening of democracy. He has also said, "It is not enough simply to call the people to action, but also to have the support and vigilant eye of the international community."

Back on the plane again, I'm filled with nostalgia and the desire to return to the land of the Maya. And I keep thinking about something a woman from Coban told me: "It's easier to find a quetzal among the cloud forests than to have social justice in Guatemala."

Hector Pena Diaz is a journalist from Colombia. Photographs of Alvaro Colom courtesy of the Secretariat of Social Communication of the Republic of Guatemala.