Guatemala: 4 Years Later, Peace Terms Largely Unfulfilled

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Friday December 29 8:53 PM ET (via Yahoo)

FOUR YEARS LATER, GUATEMALA'S PEACE TERMS LARGELY UNFULFILLED

by Will Weissert

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - It was a sweeping peace deal which brought one of the
world's longest, bloodiest civil wars to a close four years ago with
promises to solve a decades-old tangle of economic and social problems.

Signed in the Guatemalan capital in front of 1,200 foreign dignitaries on
Dec. 29, 1996, the agreement ended 36 years of fighting between hard-line
state forces and leftist, mostly Indian guerrilla groups in Guatemala.

The peace - once seemingly fragile - has held since then, and there has been
no recurrence of the violence that killed some 200,000 people, most of them
Mayan peasants.

Still, nearly half of the 250 measures aimed at undoing centuries of
repression and easing the country's staggering poverty have yet to be
enacted.

Promised - but still unseen - are land reform and agricultural subsidies,
new election laws, the overhaul of Guatemala's justice system and laws
guaranteeing the protection of human rights. Other unrealized goals include
resettlement of the 100,000 refugees who fled to Mexico to escape the war,
legal recognition of Indian rights, a full disarming of former combatants
and clear legal limits on the powerful military.

On Friday, President Alfonso Portillo marked the peace accord's fourth
birthday by laying a rose in front of a downtown peace monument and then
having lunch with hundreds of children who "have been allowed to grow up in
a peaceful Guatemala."

The peace treaty set the end of this year as the deadline for the reforms,
but on Dec. 13 Portillo unveiled a new schedule extending the deadline until
the end of 2004. The new plan moves anti-discrimination measures, women's
rights, health care and education reforms to the top of the agenda.

"The lack of immediate results makes us impatient and the distrust spreads
doubt," Portillo told a few dozen government functionaries who gathered for
a somber ceremony Friday. "But know that we have created a firm plan that
will allow us ... to recapture the time we have already lost and to create a
firm, lasting peace."

Representatives from the Corporative of Mayan Public Organizations, who
attended the rose-laying ceremony, didn't share Portillo's optimism.

"In four years, the process has been limited ... and in 2000 we have moved
backward," the group said in a written statement. "This government does not
inspire hope for a continuing peace. It does the opposite."

Critics charge that four years of inaction by Portillo and his predecessor
Alvaro Arzu show the Guatemalan state has no interest in keeping its
promises.

"A rescheduling was inevitable because there was no way we could meet the
December 31 deadline," said Arnoldo Noriega, an ex-guerrilla commander who
was a member of the original peace commission. "Even after this convenient
extension, we will have to see a major shift in political will during the
next two years."

Some blame the Congress, headed since January by former dictator Efrain Rios
Montt and controlled by the conservative party he founded. During an
18-month dictatorship between 1982 and 1983, Rios Montt oversaw one of the
bloodiest stretches of the war, orchestrating a scorched-earth campaign
against the rebels.

"The problem is that the same actors trying to resolve the peace process'
errors are the ones who committed them," said Hector Rosada, a former peace
secretary. "The last word on important questions lies with Efrain Rios
Montt, a man who does not believe in the peace accords."

Rios Montt attended last week's press conference announcing the new
peace-process schedule but left without commenting.

In a 1998 report, the Catholic church's human rights office in Guatemala
blamed the army for 95 percent of the killings and disappearances during the
long civil war. And last week, the office said it will press local courts to
try Rios Montt for allegedly ordering massacres in the 1980s. That marked
the first time Guatemalan courts have been asked to try him.

 
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