It's Election Day in Guatemala today. Early results were looking fairly even between Álvaro Colom (UNE, Unidad Nacional de Esperanza) and General Otto Pérez Molina of the Partido Patriota (PP), with Molina slightly ahead.

You should not need to ask what I think of a presidential candidate who is a graduate of the notorious and horrible School of the Americas (the shame of our own country in the U.S.) I am guessing at this point there will be a runoff election. I hope so.

I did a little bit of background reading on Elections in Guatemala and on today's election. Here's a blog that has more background: Elecciones Guatemala. Gringologue does a bit of explaining in English about problems in a multilingual country with around a 60% literacy rate. (Maybe he can explain this country too since with a much higher literacy rate we still managed to elect George W. Bush to office.) And Renata Avila has written an extensive overview of the elections on Global Voices - don't miss it.

I will be very interested in continuing to watch what happens with the project to recover crucial historical documents from the national police archive in Guatemala. Teams of Guatemalan and international human rights workers have been cleaning up the dusty, mold-filled archives, scanning and digitizing hundreds of thousands of pages of police records in an effort to document the many people who disappeared or were killed during the long years of Civil War. It is a positive, hopeful sign that the archives are being rescued and valued, made part of the country's history, as painful and dangerous as that is to do. I hope that work will continue, peacefully. And that it will give families some closure, even if justice is impossible.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting videoblog which will give a picture of some common situations in Guatemala. A family and community in Nueva Linda, Guatemala have lived for 4 years by the side of the road in protest of the disappearance of Hector Reyes; the photos and Mi Mundo blog are by James Rodríguez. Bety Reyes Toledo, Hector's daughter, said in the documentary,

“If a rich person would have been kidnapped, a poor person would already be in jail. But, since it was a rich person who kidnapped my father, nothing has been clarified. Three years have passed in our struggle for justice, and nothing is clear. That is why we want justice to be applied equally... It is as if justice does not apply to us poor.”

Here is a short video clip from the movie about the Reyes family, many of whom live & grow their food in a narrow strip of land between a fence and the highway.

You can find photos of the elections and posters and voters in the Flickr Guatemala photo pool, including my favorite so far, this one by joannitam.

Coníe Reynoso at La Ciudad de las Diosas writes briefly about barriers women face as they vote and as they run for office: Aceso limitado (Limited access). Over 2,000 women are running for office, out of around 18,000 candidates. Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú is running for president, but is not one of the top candidates. I should mention as well that Guatemala has many fantastic activists struggling to bring attention to the problems of extreme and widespread violence against women and in fact, femicide. Mauri Estrada, the national women’s coordinator and a UNE candidate for Congress, plans if elected to expand the budget for women's agencies and legal prosecution services for women who are the targets of violence and threats, including domestic violence.

During the election season so far, 51 people including 45 candidates, have been killed in political violence.

I want to wish the best of luck to the brave and civic minded women running for office... and working on campaigns... and to election watchdog bloggers like Lu... and to all the women voting today in Guatemala.