Peace Deal Is Only Start of Guatemala’s Journey

Signing an accord next month to end 35 years of civil war in Guatemala may well prove easier than keeping the peace after Latin America’s longest rebellion ends, analysts warned Tuesday.

The day after the government and guerrillas announced in Chile and Mexico, respectively, that the peace agreement will be signed Dec. 29, experts who have been following negotiations closely took a hard look at whether the accords will bring the “lasting peace” that both sides have promised.

“The accords are an expression of goodwill,” said Elfideo Cano, general coordinator of the Guatemala City-based Institute for Political Research and Formation. “Once they are signed, the true peace process will begin.”

Because guerrillas negotiated from a steadily deteriorating position--as their military, political and moral capital successively waned--the agreement contains few guarantees that reforms actually will be carried out, analysts said.

Because of their weakness, even though the rebels plan to become a political movement, they may not have the clout to make sure the agreement is enforced, observers say.

Some analysts worry that euphoria over the end of the war will soon turn to dissatisfaction as Guatemalans realize that the end of the fighting does not automatically mean the end of the huge economic and social disparities that caused the conflict.

“Once the talks are finished comes the difficult part: implementation,” said Rosalinda Bran, a security expert in the Guatemala office of the Latin American Social Science Faculty, a regional think tank. “The process of implementation is not so easy, above all because of financing.”

As an example, she mentioned neighboring El Salvador, where the government has not had the money to give onetime soldiers and former guerrillas the land, loans and cash payments promised in a peace agreement signed nearly five years ago. The result has been increasingly violent protests by former combatants, resulting in injuries and at least one death.

“People think that violence is going to disappear like magic when the peace is signed,” Bran said. Instead, she worries that the opposite could happen once the guerrillas disband and the army is cut by one-third, as called for in the peace agreement.

When civil wars ended in El Salvador and nearby Nicaragua, highways and cities were flooded with unemployed young men whose only skill was knowing how to use a gun. They became criminals.

Further, those problems arose in countries where former guerrillas became viable political forces. For example, the former Salvadoran guerrillas are the second-largest congressional delegation. While Guatemala’s rebels have said they plan to become a political movement, analysts doubt that they will attract strong backing.

“This agreement was negotiated by defeated guerrillas,” Cano said. The Guatemalan rebels never controlled an extensive territory and had no hope of a military victory, he said. Estimates are that they number about 1,000--barely one-tenth of their strength a decade ago.

Their lack of political support became evident in last year’s national elections, when the party that the rebels backed was swept away by President Alvaro Arzu’s National Advancement Party and the right-wing party of former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt.

Last month, Bran said, the rebels lost any remaining moral authority when one of their commanders kidnapped the elderly wife of a cement magnate and nearly derailed the peace talks. “They lost all credibility,” she said. “That situation destroyed the myth of the guerrillas as protectors of the oppressed.”

That increasingly evident weakness has forced the insurgents to go along with Arzu’s determination to sign the peace agreement as quickly as possible, analysts agreed.