Countries at the Crossroads 2006

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Country Report - Guatemala

Previous | Introduction | Accountability and Public Voice | Civil Liberties | Rule of Law | Anticorruption and Transparency | Author | Notes | Next

Introduction

Nine years after the signing of accords officially ending a brutal 36-year armed internal conflict that claimed some 200,000 mostly indigenous Mayan lives, the fragility of Guatemala's peace has been revealed once again. Two events shook the country during the summer and fall of 2005. In July, firefighters, summoned to investigate a possible gas leak in a munitions plant, found a vast police archive instead. The plant's vermin-infested rooms contained piles of documents lying in bundles, tossed in plastic bags, and meticulously filed in cabinets, their drawers labeled with their content--"assassinations," "disappearances." The firefighters had stumbled upon an official history of Guatemala's 36-year counterinsurgency (1960-1996), data that security forces had consistently denied existed.

One month later, massive mudslides coming on the heels of Hurricane Stan buried indigenous communities in the western highlands. Stan destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those who had already lost everything once, or in some cases twice, before--during the civil war and earlier, during a powerful earthquake that shook parts of those same highlands in 1976. It was in the rubble of the earthquake that the military lost its struggle for the hearts and minds of Guatemala's indigenous poor, leaving room for a guerrilla movement to capitalize on the state's total disregard for their suffering.

Because the fault lines of peace and democracy remain so close to the surface in Guatemala, the outcome of these events in large part hinges on how the state responds. Government resolve to catalogue and to disseminate archive contents, currently under the control of the human rights ombudsman's office, and to use emerging evidence to provide justice and reform the country's security forces would offer the ruling Berger administration an unprecedented opportunity to deepen Guatemalan democracy. Similarly, by coming to the assistance of survivors of Stan in ways that affirm their human dignity, the government can turn another historic page, fostering a new relationship between state and society that is based on an elite commitment to respect, tolerance, and equality for the country's majorities that is more than rhetorical.

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