Guatemala

LONDON – Eight years ago this week, after 200,000 unnecessary deaths, 40,000 “disappearances” and 440 decimated villages, peace formally came to the last redoubt of the Central American war zone, Guatemala. Put it up there with Rwanda, Cambodia, ex-Yugoslavia and today the Congo, as one of the great killing fields of the “post-war” world. The violence never reached the crescendo it did in neighboring El Salvador, nor did as many people just “disappear” as happened in Chile and Argentina, nor did the war stretch on and on as long as in Peru and Colombia, but no country in Latin America came near Guatemala for long-term systematic assassination and torture. Before my first trip to this heart-torn country in 1980 I went for a briefing in London from the secretary-general of Amnesty International. I had asked him to point me in the direction of the worst country on their books and...

LONDON- On Saturday, Guatemala will hold its first general election since the signing of the peace agreement in December 1996 which ended a 36 year long civil war that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, many of them victims of army death squads. For most of the indigenous Indian population, who have been at the brunt end of the violence, it will seem like a non-event. They have a choice between two parties of the right. One is close to business; the other to the army. Turnout is likely to be low. Yet the election is significant. It takes this mercurial country – the one that its Nobel laureate for literature, Miguel Angel Asturias, described in 1920 as “steeped in violence”- one more step away from its terrible past. Of course, so many countries in Latin America have been consumed by violent uprisings and savage army repression over the last...