Conflicto Armado

The negotiation of land distribution and horizontal inequalities, direct causes of the conflict, meaningful transitional justice mechanisms, including prosecution of perpetrators, and indigenous territorial autonomy, was at best sidelined, at worst bluntly sacrificed, in order to lower resistance of the parties to the accords to sit at the negotiation table and sign the peace. Moreover, the process was undergirded by the framework of universal individual rights over and above social, economic and cultural rights, rights that would have gone some way towards addressing certain structural causes of violent conflict.

In 1982, after almost twenty years of armed conflict, it is a first attempt by the military government of General Jose Efrain Rios Montt, to try to find a negotiated solution, which is rejected by the guerrillas. Later in the year 1983, carried out an international effort by a group of countries that became known as the Contadora Group to help find the peace and reconciliation in Central America. In 1987, the Presidents of Central America, determined to achieve peace, signed the Esquipulas I and later Esquipulas II, which established mechanisms to achieve peace and reconciliation in Central America through political means.

In the year 1991, the government of Guatemala decided to go to the negotiating table with the Guatemala National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), for which established an agenda for discussion. This was the result of the moderation of the president of the National Reconciliation Commission and had the participation of the United Nations as an observer. Finally, after more than five years of negotiations, two changes of government and changes in the procedures of negotiation, in December 1996 signed the final peace agreement.

The Guatemalan peace process was innovative also in the new types of third party intervention that it produced. The idea of the Group of Friendly Nations was probably the result of the different kind of participation that they have had in the recent past concerning the peace process.

Concerning the Guatemalan internal armed conflict, the longest and more difficult to resolve of the region, the peace process can be seen as an interesting theoretical case of analysis in peace research precisely because it is a success story of peace making and conflict transformation. The explanation for this success is- linked to three major points: a) the political opening and the democratization process initiated in 1986; b) the pragmatic (unintended) “contingency approach” used by both parties in the negotiation process that allowed the intervention of all sort of parties: both insider partial and outsider neutral mediators (however, we must recall that they were called: “conciliator” and “moderator” in two different and clearly defined stages of the peace process), as well as the third party consultations, with actors like “the group of friends” and the “civil society

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