On December 29, 1996, there was widespread hope that the signing of “The Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace” (known simply as “the peace accords”) which ended Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal armed conflict would remedy the systemic structural issues that had caused the war. But twenty-seven years later, that hope seems far away. Guatemalans found themselves marking the anniversary of the end of the war amid significant unrest: the return of systemic corruption, rollbacks of the measures of the peace accords, the closure of institutions formed to respond to victims, the release of military officials accused of war crimes, the ever-present threat of a blanket amnesty for those accused of committing war crimes, and far-right attempts to derail the results of the 2023 presidential elections.
At the end of December, Guatemala’s government commemorated the peace accords by stating that they were “reiterating their commitment to a culture of peace.” Guatemalan civil rights organizations, however, have argued that failing to fully implement the accords has led to an emerging threat of authoritarianism.
“[The] government [of former president Alejandro Giammattei] has not contributed to a culture of peace,” Jorge Santos, of the Guatemalan Human Rights Organization UDEFEGUA, tells The Progressive. “Giammattei dedicated himself to stigmatizing and generating hate speech against the political opposition.”
Giammiattei, after coming to power in 2020, immediately closed the Secretariat of Peace and the Secretariat of Agrarian Affairs, and oversaw the end of payments to the victims of the war.
Guatemalan civil rights organizations argue that failing to fully implement the accords has led to an emerging threat of authoritarianism.
Santos points out that the noncompliance with the peace accords has contributed to the recent exiles, detentions, and violence in Guatemala. All of these have grown worse in the last three years, with dozens of activists, journalists, judges, prosecutors, and officials involved in anti-corruption efforts being forced to flee the country. “Today what we have is very contrary to everything that the peace accords established,” he says. “We’re seeing a weakened and deeply co-opted justice system.”
Guatemala was launched into war following the 1954 CIA-backed coup d’état against the administration of Jacobo Árbenz, ushering in decades of military dictatorships and the rolling back of social reforms that were known as the Guatemalan Spring. In the thirty-six years of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, more than 200,000 people were killed, 45,000 people were forcibly disappeared, and one million were displaced.
Guatemala’s Indigenous Maya communities faced the brunt of the government’s brutal counter-insurgency, representing 83 percent of its victims. As a result, the Catholic Church-backed Truth Commission determined that “acts of genocide” occurred in the regions most affected by the violence.
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Relatives of disappeared people during the civil war listed in the "Military Dossier", put posters with photos of their loved ones in front of the Supreme Court in Guatemala City, May 2022.
Decades later, the scars from the Guatemalan military’s brutality remain. The measures that were agreed upon to resolve the causes of the war have largely been left by the wayside, as many of the social problems that contributed to the war—such as poverty, hunger, and racism—have remained and grown more dire.
While the new measures put in place by the peace accords initially were implemented in Guatemala, by 2012, the systemic changes and attempts to root out the causes of the war had largely ceased. These rollbacks were the result of former-general Otto Pérez Molina’s presidency, during which he failed to use the available budget for efforts to comply with the peace accords.
But since 1996, systemic corruption and impunity have also grown.
The international community assisted in rooting out corruption through the creation of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, commonly known as CICIG, in 2007. But these efforts came to a grinding halt when the body closed in 2019 during the administration of Jimmy Morales following a successful investigation into corruption in the administration of Pérez Molina.
“This type of institution had been suffering a weakening since the time of Otto Pérez Molina,” Santos explains. “It was Jimmy Morales and more profoundly Alejandro Giammattei, who have carried out very hard blows to the peace agenda.”
He adds, “The policies established in the Secretariat of Agrarian Affairs put in place a dialogue system. But in the absence of dialogue, what you have is a true increase in acts of violence, particularly in the violent evictions of Indigenous communities and campesinos.”
What’s more, the country’s pro-military far right has gained historic levels of influence in Guatemala’s judicial system during the Giammattei administration, jeopardizing the quest for justice for the victims of the war.
Justice for the victims of the Guatemalan military’s brutal counter-insurgency was slow in coming, as many on the right argued that the former soldiers and those in high command should benefit from the amnesty that was declared in 1996. But in 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Guatemala’s amnesty did not apply in cases of serious war crimes.
Jeff Abbott
A family member of one of the victims of Guatemala’s genocide holds a cross bearing their name during a February 2019 protest against the proposed amnesty for soldiers accused of war crimes.
The court’s historic ruling opened the door for the prosecution of Guatemala’s military officials for war crimes, leading to the prosecutions and convictions of numerous soldiers and military officials for crimes against humanity and the campaign of forced disappearances during the war. These cases include the historic 2013 prosecution and conviction of former General Efraín Ríos Montt—who took power in 1982 in a coup d’état—for overseeing the genocide against the Ixil Mayan communities in Guatemala’s western highlands.
The genocide case against Ríos Montt was quickly retracted in 2013, when Guatemala’s Supreme Court reversed the decision within a week of the court’s ruling. Guatemala’s conservative-controlled congress quickly passed legislation that dictated “there was never a genocide.”
The rollbacks of war crimes cases have accelerated in recent years. The greatest shifts have occurred during Giammattei’s administration, with high ranking officials who stand accused of forcibly disappearing people as part of The Military Dossier case benefiting from being released to house arrest. This has generated concerns that other accused former military leaders will benefit from similar decisions.
In another major precedent-setting and worrisome example, three of the four military officials convicted of the 1981 abduction and disappearance of fourteen-year-old Marco Antonio Molina Theissen—including Manuel Benedicto Lucas García, the former Minister of Defense and brother of dictator General Fernando Romeo Lucas García—were granted release from prison to house arrest. Molina Theissen’s surviving family condemned the decision to release the high-ranking military officials, expressing concern that the precedent could affect other war crimes cases.
The pressure against those who have overseen these cases has had impacts on the Guatemalan judicial system. In 2022, Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez, who had sent the Military Dossier case to trial, was forced into exile following pressure from far-right pro-military activists.
And just days after the anniversary of the signing of the peace accords, a Guatemalan court freed General Manuel Callejas y Callejas, who was facing charges of genocide against the Maya Ixil people. The court decided the former intelligence chief was too incompetent to face criminal proceedings due to his health.
Organizations such as UDEFEGUA hope the arrival of the administration of Bernardo Arévalo, who was inaugurated on January 14 will result in a new emphasis on the compliance with the various parts of the peace accords as a means to address the growing problems in the country.
“Arévalo is going to receive a devastated institutional structure. The effects of corruption on public institutions are very deep."—Jorge Santos
“Arévalo is going to receive a devastated institutional structure,” Santos says. “The effects of corruption on public institutions are very deep. So much of the initial task that the new government will have under its charge is to recover the institutionality, provide it with capacity, and to fulfill its functions.”
But among the key things for Arévalo’s administration is to rebuild dialogue in the Central American country, complying with measures of the peace accords.
“One of the central tasks of the Arévalo government is to open a permanent systematic dialogue with the people, in particular with the Indigenous peoples,” Santos explained, “and to build public policy that benefits these broad segments of the population.”