by JEFF ABBOTT
Queqchí people carrying their loved one’s remains after an exhumation in the Ixil region of Guatemala, in 2012 PHOTO/Cafca Archive/Wikimedia Commons
Two decades after the end of Guatemala’s violent internal armed conflict, challenges to peace remain – from criminalization of indigenous authority to remilitarization.
This past Thursday marked the twenty-year anniversary of the signing of Guatemala’s 1996 Peace Accords, an agreement between the Guatemalan government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) guerrilla organization that ended one of Latin America’s longest-running internal armed conflicts. The Peace Accords led to state recognition of the rights of Guatemala’s indigenous communities for the first time in the country’s history, and set the stage for subsequent government recognition of women’s rights.
The war itself sprung from the deep chasms wrought by historical inequalities in the country. Colonization followed by centuries of enslavement, disenfranchisement and lack of legal rights had left the country’s majority-indigenous population trapped in a cycle of extreme poverty. After democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz attempted to address some of these inequalities through a platform of land expropriation and redistribution, he was removed from power by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. The CIA put Carlos Castillo Armas, a former military coronel, in power, who was assassinated in 1957. Thus began a power grab by military officials.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was entrenched in a conflict that utterly divided the country between right and left, Evangelical Christian and Catholic, and Spanish-descendent Ladinos and indigenous Maya. The war left 200,000 dead, 40,000 disappeared, and over a million displaced both within and outside of the country’s borders.
The Peace Accords sought to disband the guerrilla forces and end combat. They also included neoliberal structural reforms that opened the country up to foreign direct investment, and made way for the prosecution of military leaders for war crimes, the reduction of the role of the military, the recognition of indigenous rights, and the redistribution of land.
Twenty years later, few aspects of the Accords have been fully implemented, while those that have have often brought about new conflicts, as poverty and crime have steadily increased. According to statistics from the United Nations Development program, poverty rose from 64% to 67% between 2011 and 2014. The majority of the poor are rural indigenous farmers who have faced land conflicts and competition with imported goods. All the while, funding for public services such as health care and education has dropped, making them inaccessible for the majority of the population.