A few months ago, Siglo Veintiuno, a daily Guatemalan newspaper published a note by one of its reporters referring to Standard and Poor’s (S&P) recent grading of Guatemala’s debt. It was graded at BB-, just as the year before. According with Beatriz Lix –the author of the note— the analyst Roberto Sifón Arévalo attributes this rating, in part, to the fact that Guatemala is a developing democracy in an environment of high polarization and social and ethnic division. This statement seems mostly accurate to me.

This diagnosis, however, can be explained from very different viewpoints. One possible explanation would be that the Government does not respond with concrete actions to the demands of support and relief made by those stricken by poverty, mostly Indian peasants of Mayan descent. As the Government ignores their demands –so the argument goes— it causes them to become politically more radical and prompts them to publicly protest and create unrest. According with this view, if the Government would be attentive to the demands of the poverty stricken population there would be no social unrest and thus, among other things, S&P’s grading would presumably improve.

Another quite different explanation is that most of the leaders of the so called “social movement” are aware that the Government has every incentive to appear to be responsive to social demands and that, more or less efficiently –depending on the administrative capabilities of the team in office—, it is trying its best to really cater to those demands; this means more votes for the official party for the next electoral process. However, the leaders also know that their demands cannot possibly be attended to in the short or even medium terms. The gap is just too big. Furthermore, they know that things, in general, would most probably improve, even if modestly, if their position on several matters of national importance and their actions would be less radical and polarizing.

But, is it in their interest that important segments of the population make the connection between more moderate and serious positions on their behalf, on the one hand, and some progress and improvement of the general living conditions of the population, on the other? There is no obvious answer to this question, but it is certainly a troubling one. Two things are clear: fist, that credible institutions such as S&P pay close attention and take into consideration the unstable and polarized political climate that social protests create; second, that bad and stagnant grades work directly against the real chances of progress of the poor people the leaders purport to represent.

Human circumstances are rarely black or white and most probably there are moments and places where the exercise of the right to publicly and pacifically protest against any given governmental policy might be the only way to make things change for the better. It is also probable that some of the leaders of the social movement heartedly believe that public protests will cause politicians to deliver the public goods they demand so vehemently. Systematic opposition, continuous protests, and utopian demands one after the other, however, can hardly be understood as something other than strategic behavior.

So what is wrong with tactics and strategy in politics? Is this not what the game is about? To some extent it is; but even the Machiavellian will admit that it is necessary to show two things for a political strategy to work in the long run: plausibility and results. And it is here where systematic protest breaks down and, paradoxically, punishes the very people it purports to defend. It produces nothing else but bad grades.

The still darker side of the systematic social protest strategy is better not giving much thought to: the end purpose would be merely to create such state of affairs as to get S&P and the others to downgrade the country’s business and political environment, in order to scare local and foreign investment away and prevent things from improving so that the leaders may continue to have a role to play and a reason to exist.

* Eduardo Mayora-Alvarado is the former Dean of the School of Law of Francisco Marroquin University, Guatemala. Is also a practicing attorney and a regular columnist for the daily newspaper Siglo Veintiuno.