Jorge Uzon

On the 29th of December, 1996, the ex-guerilla movement Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity signed an accord that seemed to be Utopia – peace in Guatemala after 36 years of civil war.

The wounds still bloody from a people overwhelmed by the biggest armed conflict in Central America seemed to scream in denial of a new possibility : The reconstruction of a country founded on the construction of peace.

Now, a year and a half later, Guatemala struggles in the fragility of this new found peace while the violation of human rights are still committed even now, though on a smaller scale. And on the surface appears a new war – the war of ignorance, poverty and hunger in this a nation of some eleven million inhabitants.

The violence has not yet ceased and the desire for a national reconstruction has become more difficult with the citizenry accustomed to violence as the sole effective form of survival.

The kidnappings, the assaults and the insecurity of Guatemala’s citizens live in a state where rights exist but still are unfulfilled.

According to the eighth report of the United Nations Mission of Guatemala (MINUGUA), between the first of July of 1997 and the 31st of March of this year, the international mission has verified 109 violations of the right to life, 78 violations of personal liberty and 957 violations of personal security.

MINUGUA is still a concern of the administration of the justice system en Guatemala where, in spite of the government’s efforts and those of the civilian society, and international cooperation, peace must still be qualified as “fragile”.

On the 26th of April of this year, the Archbishop of the diocese of Guatemala, Monsignor Juan Gerardi, was beaten to death and the crime remains unsolved and the criminal unpunished. Two days earlier Gerardi had presented the report “Guatemala Never Again” which contained the testimony of the violations committed during armed conflict.

The country’s fragility is intensified by poverty for some 50% of the Guatemala population, (figures are unofficial), a multi-ethnic, multi-racial population – 22 indigenous languages along with Spanish – whose prospects of health, education and employment are abysmal in the capital and the interior.

According to a study done by the United Nations Program for Development, 70% of Guatemalan children (some four million) suffer from malnutrition, half of them severely. The government must double its investment in education to improve its quality and attendance.

Nevertheless, the eyes of the world do not cease to watch Guatemala, a country where apathy was buried with the war, a country which has not lost its hope and still takes to the streets to demand justice, equality and a much longed-for peace, which seems, still, not to have arrived.

Lorna Chacon AFP Guatemala