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Guatemala is edging back from the brink

Friday, January 25, 2013


Picture a nation of 15 million people where each year there are more murders than in the entire European Union, a middle-income country where the rate of child malnutrition is higher than in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and where these and other problems are rendered insoluble by a chronic inability to levy taxes.

A few years ago this was Guatemala. Talk abounded of a “failed state” in the making.

Yet in a speech on January 14, a year after taking office as Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina could plausibly declare that a “new era” has begun. He pointed to gains in security, public health and fiscal reform.

Source: The Economist