Rebels Pledge Partial Truce for Guatemala Election Campaign

Guatemalan guerrillas promised a partial truce Friday for November’s general election campaign after holding peace talks here with Guatemalan political parties.

Guerrilla leader Gaspar Ilom, heading the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit at the talks, said his rebels will stop sabotaging roads, bridges, communications and other targets during the campaign, which opened Friday. The partial cease-fire would not, however, include military actions against government troops, he said.

Guerrilla fighting in Guatemala, dating back about three decades, has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.

Guerrillas, politicians and the government-backed National Reconciliation Committee headed by Archbishop Rodolfo Quezada of Guatemala City described the five days of talks here as an important first step towards peace.

They produced a five-point accord on the need to reform the constitution and for government institutions to safeguard human rights. It also mentioned the possibility of the National Revolutionary Unit’s becoming a political party and taking part in a new constitutional assembly.

“This agreement is not the signing of peace but the first step in a process,” Quezada told a news conference. He said that all participants were convinced that “peace is not just the end of war but the end of poverty and injustice.”

The archbishop said he hopes that the San Lorenzo agreement will lead to “direct conversations between the government of the republic and the guerrillas.”

“This will doubtless be a day of great importance in the history of our country,” Ilom said.

The rebels’ main interest was reforming the constitution and reviewing the role of the armed forces, he added.

Except for intermittent periods totaling about 10 years, armed forces officers governed Guatemala from 1930 until 1986, when Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo of the leftist Christian Democrats was elected president. The army defeated the guerrillas in the late 1960s and again in the early 1980s, but fighting flared up recently in the northern region of El Quiche.

The government sent no official representative to the San Lorenzo talks, arranged in March in Oslo. But direct talks may start after the rebels meet with trade unions and with church and business leaders.

The ruling Christian Democrats were represented as a party by Catalina Soberanis, who said they would abide by any concrete agreements that may come from further talks.

She said the agreement does not include dissolving armed civil defense patrols or a cease-fire by the armed forces.