Guatemala City, October 22 (teleSUR-RHC)-- The two rival candidates running for the second round of presidential elections in Guatemala on Sunday have no political agenda to address issues faced by Indigenous people, an Indigenous NGO has revealed.

A study conducted by the Observatory of Indigenous Peoples claims that that the two candidates running for presidency -- Jimmy Morales and Sandra Torres -- have ignored the structural problems of Indigenous peoples in their electoral campaigns.

“Concrete proposals for solutions to social, economic, political, racist, security, justice and structural problems for Indigenous peoples continue to be marginalized and excluded," Mario Itzep, director of the organization told AFP.
 
Following a massive corruption scandal that ousted then President Otto Perez Molina, the group found that presidential hopefuls have centered fighting corruption in their political campaigns at the expense of neglecting Indigenous people.

Indigenous leaders claim that while they represent more than 60 percent of the country’s total population, they are far more likely to be inflicted by poverty than their mestizo counterparts. The current numbers show that the economic disparity across ethnicity is as large as 80 percent for Indigenous and 53 percent for Mestizos.

According to Itzep, the comedian and actor Morales leads a right wing party for mestizos that fails to include them in the political agenda while Torres is a social democrat who only mentions Indigenous people in passing but proposes nothing.

“Neither of them touches upon the distinct problems that Indigenous people face,” Itzep said, referencing governmental plans to extracts mineral from their lands without their consultation.

They also neglect “the bilingual and multicultural education and Mayan health,” the director said.

“So how are they going to address and respond to the demand of Indigenous people who have always been excluded?,” Itzep affirmed.