GUATEMALA CITY — Alvaro Ramazzini, Guatemala’s longest-serving Catholic bishop, thinks President Obama should resign because he has “compromised his integrity” on the issue of illegal immigrants.
He also thinks the Norwegian Nobel Committee should ask Obama to return the Peace Prize it bestowed on the U.S. president in 2009.
“It would be interesting right now to ask the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize if they were not wrong in giving him the Nobel Prize,” Ramazzini told the Washington Examiner in an interview recently at the Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala in Guatemala City.
Ramazzini is a left-leaning activist priest who has been a bishop for 25 years and has become an out-sized figure in the western districts of Guatemala, where the central government is weak.
That’s also the region of Guatemala in which thousands of “coyotes” operate. The coyotes are paid thousands of dollars each to shepherd illegal immigrants, many of them unaccompanied minors, from Central America to the U.S. Illegal immigration from the region to the U.S. has grown exponentially since 2009.
Alfred Kaltschmitt, a nationally known columnist for Prensa Libre, Guatemala’s largest daily newspaper, described Ramazzini as perhaps the most powerful political force in the country’s nearly ungovernable western districts.
“Bishop Ramazzini has been a force unto himself and has been more powerful in the Western regions than the government and or the police,” Kaltschmitt told the Examiner.
Ramazzini is particularly angry about U.S. deportations of illegal immigrants.
“The number of deportees in the Obama administration has been larger than in the previous administrations,” he said. “My own perception is that the administration of the United States plays with double-talk.”
Under Obama, annual deportations of illegal immigrants have increased from 175,000 in 2004 to 410,000 in 2012, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.
Ramazzini poses a problem for the U.S. in two respects. First, many of the immigrants illegally entering the U.S. through Mexico with the aid of coyotes leave their home countries because there are so few jobs there. So U.S. efforts to contain the immigration problem would be aided by economic growth in Guatemala and other Central American countries.
But there has been a recent sharp increase in violence against private sector development projects in areas where Ramazzini’s influence is strongest. Police officers have also been shot and wounded in a number of clashes with angry mobs led by groups allied to Ramazzini. The violence makes foreign firms less likely to view Guatemala as an attractive place for new investment.
Second, Ramazzini’s comments to the Examiner may reflect a cooling of a formerly growing warmth between the Obama administration in Washington and the bishop’s allies in Guatemala’s political establishment, from whom U.S. policymakers hoped to draw support for their efforts to deal with the immigration problem.
Earlier this year, administration officials intervened in local politics by publicly supporting two controversial Guatemalan activists occupying prominent government posts.
U.S. Ambassador Arnold Chacon lauded Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz when the country’s Constitutional Court removed her from office this February.
Chacon’s comments were made public in a Spanish-only YouTube video that sparked charges he had improperly intervened in Guatemala’s internal affairs.
Susanna Barrios, a former Guatemalan diplomat, told the Examiner she found the video “startling.”
“Do you believe that any ambassador could do the same in Washington?” She called Chacon’s video “an open intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.”
Then, in March, first lady Michelle Obama attended an award ceremony at the State Department’s Washington headquarters for Judge Iris Yassmin Barrios, who presided over the 2013 genocide trial of former Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt. Barrios was one of the winners of the 2014 International Women of Courage Award.
Montt’s conviction was subsequently overturned because Barrios had unilaterally removed Montt’s attorney and assigned other lawyers to his defense without his consent. A new trial has been set for 2015.
In the wake of those diplomatic stumbles, Ramazzini, formerly a vocal Obama supporter, is now unsparing in his criticism of the president.
“A person should be coherent with his principles,” Ramazzini said, adding that “if he is a Democrat and he talks about helping the poor, he should be congruent with his principles.
“If I as president compromised my integrity, I’d resign. I would prefer to go on in history as a president that had to resign because he saw his integrity compromised,” he said.
Pope John Paul II appointed Ramazzini in 1988 as bishop of San Marcos. In 2012, he became the bishop of the nearby Diocese of Huehuetenango. San Marcos and Huehuetenango were centers of a violent Marxist guerrilla movement that ended with a peace accord in 1996.
Ramazzini said rumors of changes of U.S. laws encouraged Central Americans to send unaccompanied minors into the United States.
“So that rumor went around, ‘now is the time to go to the United States,” he said.
Two guerrilla groups attempted to persuade him to run for Guatemala’s highest office in 2011 but he declined.
A March 2012 study by professor Miguel Castillo, a political science professor at the Universidad Francisco Marrroquin in Guatemala City, described Ramazzini as part of a waning anti-capitalist religious movement led by Catholic priests in the 1970’s.
“Ramazzini represents a branch of Latin American Catholicism which is anti-capitalist, and which has promoted revolutionary movements. He is one of the few surviving church officials who became leaders of those movements, in many countries, during the 1970s,” Castillo said.
