LATIN AMERICA : Under Fire for Rights Record, Guatemala Leader Urges Truce

In an effort to end Latin America’s longest-running armed conflict, Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano has taken his peace plan on the road.

Serrano is calling for an immediate cease-fire with leftist guerrillas and has invited the United Nations to inspect human rights in his country. This week, he began seeking international backing for his proposal, which follows a months-long impasse in the negotiations aimed at ending Guatemala’s civil war.

While peace came to El Salvador and Nicaragua in recent years, fighting simmered in Guatemala. Although the level of violence is dramatically lower now than a decade ago, 30 years of warfare claimed about 100,000 lives and forced a like number into exile. And military attacks on indigenous villages helped give Guatemala an abysmal human rights record.

Serrano’s new offer to the guerrillas, which he made in a State of the Union speech to the Guatemalan legislature last week, calls for a cease-fire and challenges the rebels to sign a peace agreement in 90 days. Rebel fighters would be allowed to demobilize inside U.N.-controlled zones in the Guatemalan countryside.

Perhaps most significantly, Serrano seemed to be softening his resistance to a wider U.N. role.

In his speech, he said that in exchange for signing an accord, he would accept U.N. verification of an 11-point human rights plan on which the government and guerrillas reached partial agreement last year.

Previously the government has refused to allow U.N. intervention, insisting that the human rights situation was not as bad as international monitors have long maintained. Army officials also believed that more formal U.N. participation gave undue status to the guerrilla force, a relatively small group that poses little military threat to the powerful right-wing army.

Serrano is clearly looking for political gain with his proposal. His initiative allows him to portray himself as a peacemaker and puts the guerrillas in the position of having to respond to a government overture.

After days of silence, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit, the three-faction guerrilla organization, replied from Mexico City that it would be willing to work toward a cease-fire and peace accord within 90 days. But it warned that Serrano’s proposal was incomplete and reiterated other demands, including a purge of the Guatemalan military of its worst human rights abusers. Later in the day, the military dismissed the rebels’ conditions as “ridiculous.”

With his peace proposal issued, Serrano embarked on a diplomatic offensive, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and dispatching several presidential delegations to Europe to present his government’s case.

The efforts seem designed in part to preempt a U.N. condemnation of Guatemala’s human rights situation next month. The U.N. Human Rights Commission will meet in Geneva to consider whether Guatemala should be put in the same category as the world’s worst human rights violators.

A report issued this week by the U.S. State Department found a generally improved human rights situation marred by persistent, serious abuses, including torture and murders most often attributed to security forces.

The report noted an increase in attacks--verbal and physical--on human rights activists and journalists, and the failure to bring violators to justice.

Government critics say some of the abuses show the continued dominance of the military, which ruled Guatemala for decades until a civilian president was elected in 1986.

While several diplomats and political observers in Guatemala praised Serrano’s peace proposal as a substantive step that could resuscitate the negotiations, other analysts here criticized the president for focusing exclusively on military issues while failing to address other reforms that the guerrillas insist remain on the table.

The guerrilla factions’ military leverage is minimal, but they also advocate--along with many Guatemalans--a broader agenda of social justice and improved status for this country’s impoverished Indian majority. The government and the military maintain that such issues do not belong in the peace negotiation process.