Guatemala is the northern most country in Central America, just south of Mexico and west of El Salvador and Honduras. It has a population of approximately 11 million and is comprised of 21 Indigenous ethnicities, a mixed Afro-Caribbean descendant group known as the Garifuna, and a group referred to as ladinos. The vast majority of ladinos are mestizos (of mixed European and Indigenous blood) while a minority are of pure European descent. Guatemala emerged as a country after the wave of liberation movements freed almost all of Latin America from centuries of Spanish colonialism during the 1820's. Since then it has endured a difficult road toward becoming a modern nation state, a process that is still ongoing.

Social Conditions

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and in many respects is still trying to shake off the yoke of colonialism. The country is largely indigenous with over 50% of the population being of pure Mayan descent. The People of the Corn, as they are sometimes referred to, continue to primarily live an agrarian lifestyle, which has its roots in the thousands of years of Mayan culture and tradition. However, the picturesque scene has more often been stained by the long shadow of extreme poverty.

Guatemala in many respects is still structured much like a feudal society, where a small elite owns a disproportionate amount of the prime farming land and the means of production while a large uneducated peasantry is forced to work for them for subsistence wages at best. Even after a 36 year civil war, largely brought on by extremely skewed economic conditions, over 60% of the usable farm land remains in the hands of a mere 2% of the population. The largest land holdings, and the richest land, are used primarily for the growth of export crops, such as coffee, cotton, rubber and bananas, while much of the peasant population continues to make due with insufficient, extremely marginal plots.

The population is, in general, young (51% are under 18), illiterate (at least 45% cannot read according to government figures) and living without access to basic services (electricity, running water, road access).

Political History

Spanish colonizers ruled Guatemala until 1821, when a civil uprising kicked off a 120-year-long series of short-lived and bickering dictatorships. In 1944, the last of this long string of dictators was ousted as a result of mass rioting, and elections were finally held. Juan Jose Arevalo, a schoolteacher, was elected president. Arevalo and his successor, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, began a social-minded reform program, including a free press, more schools and a social security system. This period is considered Guatemala's most peaceful and promising era in recent history.

The Arbenz administration's troubles began soon after it initiated a land reform program in 1952 and began allowing communists in positions of governmental power. These moves in the early days of the Cold War attracted the attention of the US (especially via the United Fruit Company, the largest single land holder in the country at the time and whom then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and head of the CIA Allen Dulles had worked for as lawyers). Tensions mounted in 1954 after Arbenz ordered four million pounds of Czechoslovakian arms, intended to provide defense against an obviously imminent invasion directed by belligerent forces from the US. A US/CIA supported force of mercenaries soon invaded from Honduras in what was to be called Operation Success. The Guatemalan army refused to support the government. Several military coups followed, and for the next 30 years successive military dictators ruled the country.

The War Years

The armed conflict began initially as a response from disgruntled junior officers, who were appalled that the "good name" and honor of the military had been soiled when the government allowed Guatemala to be used as one of the training grounds for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960. However, the fledgling movement grew as Guatemala's increased economic development in the 1960s and early 1970s led to increased social unrest and tension, as workers and farmers called for land reform, welfare legislation and for more freedom to organize unions. As the early success of the Cuban Revolution spread throughout Latin America, Marxist guerrillas such as the EGP, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, and the ORPA, the Organization of Armed Peoples, began sprouting throughout the country and rapidly gained followers. However, the growing guerrilla movements brought more government repression than anyone could have imagined.

As Guatemala spiraled toward more widespread civil war, the military rulers stepped up the violence against anyone who questioned their right to govern. The successive regimes of Lucas Garcia (1978-1982), Rios Montt (1982-1983), and Mejia Victores (1983-1985) reigned through the bloodiest years of the armed conflict, which in the end claimed over 200,000 lives, left another 45,000 disappeared and displaced hundred of thousands either as internal refugees or as international refugees who fled across the Mexican and Honduran borders. Some 440 indigenous villages were completely destroyed and 700,000 people were forcibly moved into "model villages" so that they could be supervised directly by the military. All of this was taken out in conjunction with US foreign policy, which especially after the Nicaraguan Sandinistas came into power in 1979 and Reagan into office in 1980, saw any communist-friendly government as a direct example of Soviet expansionism. However, the war was far from over.

Starting in 1982, the government realized that it wasn't possible to win the war by merely terrorizing the rural population with Army violence. The next step was to organize the population into what were called Patrulleros de Autodefensa Civil or PACs, which were in essence state sanctioned paramilitary organizations directly supervised by the military. In many respects, the PACs were able to finally break the ties between the guerrillas and the rural population by requiring most men over the age of 16 to patrol for one 24-hour period every 10 days or so. Participation was technically voluntary, but non-participants were likely to be labeled guerrillas and therefore ran the risk of being victims of repression themselves. These groups existed until they were forced to disband as part of the peace accords signed in December 1996.

The Struggle for Democracy

By 1984, international outrage over human rights abuses and a burnt-out economy led the government to realize that the country could not withstand such enormous destabilization. After granting themselves amnesty, the military stepped down in favor of a democratically elected government. In 1985, Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was elected president by 70% of the population.

In the first years of Cerezo's administration, the economy slowly turned around, growing at up to 4% per year. Cerezo tried to increase education and improve housing and health care, being careful to stay away from agrarian reform, tax law changes or a rise in the minimum wage (which had been US$2 per day for years). However, the constant threat of a military coup was really the main challenge to effective civilian rule. In fact, Cerezo withstood four coup attempts, and only by making significant concessions in his liberal policies was he able to ensure his protection by a majority of the military.

Human rights violations were declining from their peak in the early 1980s, though they still remained at very high levels by international standards. Respected monitoring organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch continued to express grave concern about human rights abuses by security forces, despite several years of civilian government. A United Nations assessor in Guatemala concluded, "the violation of civil and political rights of Guatemalans is not the product of government policy, but the actions of powerful groups (including the military). [The violations] can be linked to a climate of violence that still escapes control by the government."

Return to the Iron Fist?

In this atmosphere of ineffective and corrupt civilian government, popular opinion about democracy was uncertain. In a fall 1990 poll, more people favored military rule than democratic government. Many believe that strong rule could bring relief from inflation and violence.

In the elections of 1990, Cerezo and the center-left Christian Democrats were voted out, to be replaced by Jorge Serrano Elias. Serrano was a civilian businessman, and a member of the Christian fundamentalist Evangelical Church, which is associated with the right wing of Latin American politics. Serrano was a chief assistant to General Erain Rios Montt, who ruled the country during one of its bloodiest periods, 1982-83. Despite the brutality of Rios Montt's tenure it is still remembered with outright fondness by many Guatemalans.

In his first few months in office, Serrano echoed Montt's law-and-order style, though not the extremity of his methods. While he succeeded in initiating the peace talks between the guerrillas and the army, he will be most remembered for his failure to pull off a Fujimori type auto-coup in 1992. Dismissing the Congress, Constitutional Court, and Supreme Court, Serrano positioned himself to lead the country as essentially an elected dictator, but quickly had the carpet pulled out from under him by the military, forcing him to flee to exile in Panama.

Congress quickly reinstated the Constitutional Court, which declared the self-coup unconstitutional, and urged the Congress to follow Constitutional guidelines in resolving the situation. As the Vice-President soon joined Serrano in exile, the Congress was empowered to appoint a new President to finish out Serrano's term. The choice was Ramiro de Leon Carpio, then National Human Rights Prosecutor. To his credit, Carpio pushed hard to have the peace process continue keeping the URNG, the main guerrilla group, and the government at the negotiating table, but quickly lost momentum and became just another president making speeches about changes which would never materialize.

Guatemala and Globalization

The 1995 elections brought to power the PAN party, under the guidance of former Guatemala City mayor, Alvaro Arzu. A self-made millionaire and tycoon, Arzu offered a strong sense of "Government as Big Business" and pushed for new, more efficient systems and structures in his administration. A year after his election the Accords for a Firm and Lasting Peace were signed between the government, the military, and the guerrillas finally bringing to a close the armed conflict which ravaged the country since 1960 and allowed for the rebuilding process to begin in earnest.

In essence, Arzu was the "modernizer" of a Guatemalan economy trying to find a place for the country during the push for globalization signaled by the passage of NAFTA and the creation of the World Trade Organization. Arzu's administration stimulated the economy through the selling of nationalized industries like the postal service in 1996 and the privatizing of the national telephone industry Guatel in 1998-which was sold in the last year to Telmex and to which his family was the largest beneficiary in both transactions. He took out massive loans to upgrade Guatemala's infrastructure in the hope of attracting more international business, reorient Guatemala's rural economy more towards export and to increasing the size of the maquilladora or garment industry.

Even with his early success in getting the Peace Accords signed, Arzu wasn't able to move the country on from the worst legacies of the war. The Peace Accords created a Historical Clarification Committee (CEH), which after two years estimated that 93% of the massacres and human rights abuses committed during the war were directly attributable to the military or state security apparatus. The CEH was established under the notion of simply documenting what happened without naming names or assessing blame on individuals in the hopes of getting a more complete picture of what happened. The Catholic Church had also launched an effort to help move the country on from the war through what it called the Reclamation of Historical Memory (REMHI) in 1994. In 1998 they finished their long process of compiling interviews with those who were directly affected by the war and released the four-volume report entitled Nunca Mas, "Never Again." The conclusions were much the same as the CEH report, but REMHI was not bound by the Peace Accord to keep the names of the perpetrators sealed for 50 years. In response, the director of this project, the Archbishop of Guatemala City Juan Gerardi was brutally murdered in his home on April 26th 1998, two days after the report was released. The murder of someone as respected as Gerardi raised fears that the military was still running the country from behind and that anyone who tried to bring them to justice would meet a similar fate.

Rios Returns to Power

Arzu tried to keep the focus on the economy, but the rising prices of fuel, the sense that delinquency was spiraling out of control, and the stalling of the further implementation of the Peace Accords led to a loss in the December 1999 elections. The FRG slate of Alfonso Portillo for President and Rios Montt as the Head of Congress won an easy majority in the December 26th run off elections, as the fragmented remnants of the left refused to throw their support behind the neo-liberal PAN party. It was only due to a 1985 Constitutional amendment banning any of the former coup participants from running for president that kept Rios Montt out of the National Palace. In spite of this, his party continues to call for a Constitutional Convention to amend this particular article. The FRG was elected to bring security back to the streets of Guatemala, which pre-election polls revealed to be the number one concern of the citizenry. However, since getting into office the FRG has used this mandate to govern in a far from democratic fashion reviving fears that Guatemala was sliding back into the dark days of the mid 80's. There are still those who question whether or not Rios Montt is pulling the strings of power from Congress over Portillo. Human rights groups could at least claim some victory as Rigoberta Menchu-who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, pressed ahead with her case against former dictators Rios Montt, Lucas Garcia, Mejia Victores and several others in the same Spanish Court that nearly extradited former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet last year. The struggle for justice continues.

Guatemala stands at a crossroads. It is no longer the isolated, forgotten country that it was in the early 80's when the worst of the human rights abuses were being committed. Democracy has begun to take root, but the history of strongmen ruling the country is still firmly embedded in the minds of a population that still has reason to question whether any government will really take their concerns to heart. The Peace process has begun to open up spaces for civil society to emerge; Guatemala's economy is far more integrated with international trade with the US and Mexico than ever before, but more than anything the poverty persists. It is hard to say how Guatemala will ultimately deal with the legacy of the war, but the people are ready to move on to what they hope is a brighter and more peaceful future.
Political and Social Overview, 1