Background
Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was born on December 26, 1942 in Guatemala City, Guatemala; the son of the Supreme Court judge Marco Vinicio Cerezo Sierra.
Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was born on December 26, 1942 in Guatemala City, Guatemala; the son of the Supreme Court judge Marco Vinicio Cerezo Sierra.
Cerezo earned an undergraduate degree at the Salesian College of Don Bosco, and then went on to earn advanced degrees in law and public administration from the University of San Carlos.
The start of Cerezo's political career was in 1970, when he was elected to his first office in the Christian Democratic Party.
Cerezo won the following 1985 run-off election with 68% of the presidential ballots. Cerezo's inauguration, held on January 14, 1986. The importance of his election and subsequent five year tenure is best understood by viewing the forty years preceding his election. Guatemala had experienced constant and violent political turmoil, swinging radically to the left and just as radically to the right, from the 1940s onward.
As the new president, Cerezo faced enormous social, economic, and political problems. The nation's financial equilibrium had long rested on a combination of agricultural exports and tourism but the international demand for coffee, cotton, and sugar had not increased during the five year period preceding Cerezo's election and long-term political violence had discouraged tourism. As a result of these negative economic factors, Guatemala, on the eve of Cerezo's inauguration, suffered a badly depressed economy with an inflation rate of almost 60%, unemployment/ underemployment running close to 50%, and a foreign debt of some $2. 3 billion. These economic problems, however, paled in comparison with the generations - long social disequilibrium which had produced a badly fragmented and polarized society. As a reformer, the president would be under pressure from the far left, which advocated radical revolutionary change, and a far right military-backed conservative private sector that viewed even moderate reform as a dangerous opening to their revolutionary opponents. Although Cerezo believed that armed confrontation should be resolved through political negotiation he found it difficult to curtail the domestic violence that had plagued Guatemala for so many years. Since 1954, more than 100, 000 civilians had been killed by either left-wing or right-wing terrorists. As many as 250, 000 Guatemalans had gone into exile, with some 40, 000 clustered in refugee camps across the border in neighboring Mexico. Two attempted coups launched by dissident military forces (May 1988 and May 1989) showed the fragility of Cerezo's position. Negotiations held in Madrid between the rebel leadership and representatives of Guatemala's major political parties resulted in a tentative agreement in which the rebels promised to enter the political process if the government imposed certain restrictions on the military. But the agreement could not be implemented. Even though the position of Human Rights Ombudsman was created in 1987, Cerezo's administration was heavily criticized for its reluctance in investigating and/or prosecuting human rights violations.
Cerezo's efforts at peacemaking in the Central American region met with more success than did his internal peacemaking efforts. Cerezo was able to assume the role of a disinterested broker for contending factions elsewhere on the isthmus partly because of Guatemala's strategic geographic position. His peacemaking efforts were demonstrated at various isthmian conferences (Esquipulas, Tela, San José) as well as at the Organization of American States and the United Nations. During the last two years of his presidency, Cerezo was faced with a failing economy, protest marches, strikes, and serious allegations of financial corruption and mismanagement of support funds from other countries, especially from the United States. Other problems such as a high infant mortality rate, deficient social services, illiteracy, and a renewed increase in violence contributed to the general discontent.
After leaving office, Cerezo, like other former Guatemalan presidents, became a member of the Central American parliament.
Cerezo joined the Christian Democratic Party in 1964, while still a college student.
He is married and the father of four children. His son, also named Vinicio Cerezo, ran for President but received less than 1% of the vote.
