Doubts Fester About Guatemalan Peace

As Guatemalans prepare to formally end 35 years of civil war by signing a peace pact Sunday, they strongly disagree about whether the accords negotiated over five years and two administrations will correct the injustice and poverty that originally caused Latin America’s oldest guerrilla conflict.

Negotiated in six parts--one of them, agricultural policy, was discussed for more than a year--the agreement was designed to provide peaceful solutions to a war that has cost more than 100,000 lives. The accords are also supposed to help ex-guerrillas, and soldiers mustered out of the downsized army, adjust to civilian life.

However, many Guatemalans and international observers worry about how the vague language of the pact will be put into law. In addition, anger that the guerrillas permitted such evasive wording is leading to questions about whether the former insurgents will have enough credibility left after the peace is signed to become the political force their leaders say they want to be.

At the same time, Guatemala’s supporters are trying to put the best face possible on the agreement in order to attract the millions of dollars in international aid that will be needed for the implementation of reforms in the police, the military and economic policy that the accords promise.

Norway, Sweden, Spain and the United States have all made multimillion-dollar pledges--totaling about $20 million--to finance disarming the guerrillas, said David Stephens, director of the United Nations mission in Guatemala, which will monitor putting the accords into practice.

Disarmament is expected to take about two months. Lining up support for longer-term projects, such as police retraining, has been more difficult, Stephens said.

Observers agree that the pact’s intentions are good: limiting the military’s role, recognizing Indians’ rights and resettling people uprooted by the war. The concern is how the goals will be accomplished.

“This is a window of opportunity that Guatemalans are not going to get again,” said Rachel Garst, a 15-year resident of Guatemala and the representative here of the Washington Office on Latin America, a Washington-based think tank. “The biggest risk is that the accords will not be implemented because the civil society is too weak to enforce them.”

Indeed, human rights activists charge that is exactly what happened last week with one law that has emerged from the peace agreement. The legislation, formally known as the Law for National Reconciliation, differs significantly, they say, from the accord that the guerrillas and the government signed in Madrid earlier this month.

“The law betrays the spirit of the Madrid accord,” said Ronalth Ochaeta, director of the Roman Catholic archbishop’s human rights office. “In the future, we can predict that the other accords will not be complied with either.”

Opponents charge that the law is in effect a broad amnesty that will prevent punishment of atrocities committed during the war.

However, Rolando Barrientos, first vice president of Guatemala’s National Congress, insisted that the law faithfully implements the accord. “This is not a general amnesty,” he said. “This is an effort to reincorporate the guerrillas into society and to initiate a culture of peace.”

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Human rights activists are most concerned that neither the accord nor the law specifies which crimes can be punished and which cannot. The law leaves that up to the judges in individual cases.

Significantly, when opponents of the legislation launched a march on the National Congress last Monday, fewer than 200 people participated. Only about 50 appeared Wednesday, when the law passed, 65 to 8. While that is hardly surprising in a country with a history of violently dispersing demonstrations, the weakness of the protests shows how difficult it may be to organize civil society to enforce the agreement.

The so-called amnesty and the creation of a particularly weak truth commission to investigate war crimes have been the lightning rods for criticism of the agreement. But experts say more important problems lie in the accords that address issues such as agricultural reform, which are closest to the peasants who have supported the guerrillas for more than three decades.

“The agricultural agreement did not fulfill the expectations of the population,” said Rosalinda Bran, a researcher at the Guatemala branch of the Latin American Social Science Faculty, a regional think tank. “It is incredible that after 14 months of discussion, the content should be so poor.”

The farming accord provides for virtually no land reform, although it creates a land bank from government-owned property and promises to promote peasants’ access to it, without stating how this will be accomplished.

The peace pact also fails to provide an effective plan for absorbing into the population the 3,000 guerrillas and even more soldiers who will lay down arms, Bran said.

“For many of these people, it will be the first time in their lives that they will not be outlaws,” she said. “We do not have the capacity to absorb them.”

Despite the pact’s flaws, Bran said, the end of the war has taught Guatemalans: “We have learned that guns are not the route for achieving change in the society. We must cultivate tolerance.”

Ochaeta was less optimistic.

“I am 32 years old. I am part of the generations born during the conflict. I have a culture of polarization, where reaching consensus is difficult, where distrust dominates human relationships. This conflict has left us absolutely nothing.”