Ex-Houston heart surgeon takes office as Guatemala VP

(Houston Chronicle, January 16th) The first left-leaning Guatemalan government in more than half a century, in which Houston heart surgeon Rafael Espada will serve as vice president, took power Monday with promises of a crackdown on crime and a push to improve the lives of the country's poor.

"Today begins the priority of the poor, of those without opportunities," President Alvaro Colom said in the inaugural ceremony. "We want justice for all Guatemalans."

Espada, who returned to his native country in 2007 after practicing in Houston for more than 30 years, has called Guatemala "very sick."

As vice president, Espada, 64, is expected to take an active role in promoting the administration's social agenda — including the improvement of health care, education and rural development. And he has been given oversight in a new agency aimed at reining in Guatemala's rampant corruption.

But analysts say the extent of Espada's influence on those issues will largely depend upon his largely untested skills in Guatemala's tough politics. The outgoing vice president, Eduardo Stein, exerted much progressive influence on social matters in an otherwise conservative administration, the analysts say.

"We don't know how much maneuvering room he's going to have in the new government," Carmen Ibarra, of the Myrna Mack Foundation, a leading human rights group, said of Espada. "The expectations that we have are going to be pretty low."

More than half of Guatemala's 13 million people live on less than $2 a day, according to the Inter American Development Bank.

The country has long been a major transit point for South American cocaine headed for the United States, and street gangs brought by immigrants deported from the U.S. have flourished. Nearly 5,800 people were murdered here last year, many of them in street assaults.

In an interview last week with the Associated Press, Espada said Guatemala "is sick, very sick, in intensive care.

"But I think that if we use a smart methodology and do things well," Espada said, "it will be better in four years and in very good shape in 20."

Colom, 56, who won a narrow victory against a conservative retired general in last year's elections, has said he has a 100-day plan to begin bringing the bloodshed under control, to spark greater rural development and to create jobs through more foreign investment. But he has warned supporters not to expect quick results.

Guatemala's last leftist government was overthrown in a military coup supported by the U.S. in 1954. The coup and the right-wing regimes that it empowered helped spark a 36-year civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people, most of them Maya Indians. The war ended in 1996.

A textile industry executive, Colom gained national fame in the 1990s for his role in bringing home hundreds of thousands of Maya refugees who had fled to Mexico at the height of the war. He won last year's election with heavy support in Maya communities.

Trained as a Maya priest by grateful repatriated refugees, Colom directed much of his inaugural speech at the country's indigenous communities, which together comprise 43 percent of the population.

But some critics noted that Colom's 15-member Cabinet contains only one indigenous minister. A Quiche Maya businessman, Jeronomico Lancerio, will head the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

"It's a profoundly mistaken message," said political scientist Alvaro Pop, a Maya activist. "This can be seen as making the indigenous participation merely a folkloric gesture."

In moving to enact reforms to benefit the poor, Colom and Espada face a Congress dominated by their political opponents. Their party holds fewer than a third of the 158 seats in the lower house of Congress, while conservative parties hold at least 80.

Despite the difficulties they face, Espada is excited about the possibilities of his first public office, said friends from Houston who were invited to the inauguration.

"He sees it as a challenge," said Mark Lanier, a Houston trial lawyer who has known Espada since the physician testified as an expert witness in a malpractice trial 20 years ago.

"He knows what the job in front of him is," Lanier said. "He clearly sees the responsibility and he is embracing it."

Espada is renowned here for establishing the country's first coronary hospital and for treating many impoverished patients for free.

"He's a very good man," said Manuel Mancilla, 65, a retired public health worker whose mother received a free coronary operation from Espada. "He has a lot of charisma and he knows how to manage people.

"But being a politician is different from being a physician," Mancilla said, as he had his shoes shined in the plaza in front of the presidential offices in downtown Guatemala City.

Following the inauguration ceremony, Colom and Espada attended a huge street party in the Guatemalan capital's main plaza, at which a string of leaders and activists from Maya and other poor communities spoke of their hopes for his administration.

"We will have to see if he fulfills any of his promises," Maribel Iquique, 28, an evangelical Christian selling chocolate-covered bananas to the partiers, said of Colom. "Let God give him wisdom and help him."