guatemala

Dangerous Moment for Guatemalan Peace

Susanne Jonas*

While Washington's eyes are fixed on the Balkans and other faraway
places, post-war Guatemala is living through a most dangerous moment. In
December 1996, Guatemalans ended a 36-year civil war through UN-mediated
peace accords. One crucial agreement mandated Guatemala's
demilitarization by restricting the army's functions to external
defense. Another landmark agreement provided for the formal recognition
of Guatemala as a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual nation,
and greatly expanded the rights of the indigenous majority (60% of the
population). Both of these are preconditions for fully democratizing
Guatemala.

Both accords required significant constitutional reforms, which had to
be approved by Congress and subsequently in a referendum. The expected
"Yes" vote in the referendum would have guaranteed the future of these
and other accords. But this past May 16, a scant 757,000 Guatemalans out
of a population of over 11 million -- 18.5% of Guatemala's registered
voters (11-13% of the voting age population) -- went to the polls.
Clearly, the main winner of this vote was abstentionism. But among those
who voted, the "No" prevailed over the "Yes" by a margin of 55%/45% of
valid votes. The "Yes" won in rural indigenous areas of the country,
despite the difficulties of getting to the polls and the many other
obstacles to voting; but numerically, the real battle was in Guatemala
City.

Why this outcome? At one level, the "No" was a (legitimate) rebuke to
the politicians in Congress, who had swamped the reforms stemming from
the peace accords with dozens of others. But more important, in the last
month, the "No" forces left no stone unturned, no quetzal unspent, no
lie or distortion untold in the media, no racist fear unexploited  --
e.g., the "Yes" would "Balkanize" Guatemala, rekindle the war, turn the
country over to Indians, force everyone to learn obscure indigenous
languages, and replace the legal system with indigenous customary law.

Meanwhile, the government and the major political parties favoring the
"Yes" treated it as a secondary priority, doing far too little to
publicize and explain the reforms to voters. And other organizations
favoring the "Yes" made the serious mistake of taking their victory for
granted, underestimating their enemy, and failing to fully mobilize
their constituencies against the media blitz by the Right.

What now?  With this vote, Guatemala's peace accords could be up for
grabs. How serious the damage will depend on the battle underway at this
pivotal moment. Leaders of the "No" campaign are  (mis)representing
themselves as heroes of a generalized anti-peace backlash. Some are now
going for broke, pushing to have the peace accords as a whole declared
unconstitutional and/or to expel MINUGUA, the in-country UN Mission
whose presence is vital for verification of compliance with the accords.

Guatemala today still bears many open wounds from the 36-year war,
during which over 200,000 unarmed civilians, mainly highlands Indians,
were killed or "disappeared" by Latin America's most brutal
counterinsurgency forces. The Truth Commission characterized some of
their policies as "genocidal." Now the war is over, but there is still
the threat of a rollback of the peace process. In my worst nightmares
about the future, I wonder whether, left in the hands of its own elites
and peace resisters, Guatemala might be in for another half-century of
reaction, repression and racism -- something like the Jim Crow period
after Reconstruction in the U.S.

But there is an alternative scenario. Although it was not expressed in
this high-abstention vote, the majority of Guatemalans -- ladinos as
well as indigenous -- have everything to gain from the peace accords. If
the domestic pro-peace forces learn from the referendum disaster and
build on the hopes that have been awakened by the peace process, they
can limit the damage and eventually make new advances. But they will
need support from the international community. There were many moments
during the six long years of negotiating peace when the whole effort
would have failed without international support for pro-peace forces.
Today again, at a critical juncture, Guatemala needs international
attention.

The U.S. and Western European governments are preoccupied with crises in
the Balkans and elsewhere. But if they don't want to wake up and find
Guatemala in the column of "failed" peace processes and (once again) on
the list of serious human rights abusers, they should use every
opportunity to support the pro-peace forces. Concretely, Washington can
send a clear message about demilitarization by not renewing full
military training or aid programs to the Guatemalan army until its
transformation has been completed.

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*Susanne Jonas teaches Latin American & Latino Studies at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. She has been a specialist on Guatemala for
over 30 years and is currently finishing a new book (Of Centaurs and
Doves: Guatemala's Peace Process), to be published later this year by
Westview

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