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In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that "historical memory, both individual and collective," is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide. In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

for Juan José Hurtado, in memoriam For the narrator of the following crónica, 16mm films made by Kaqchikel villagers, flying ants, and dragonflies all flicker in the historical shadows of [...]

Practices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first time he shared a room at the Hotel Río Azul with a woman, he was young and the country was at war. The government celebrated the New Year [...]

This article applies recent trauma and memory theory to Valeria Cerezo's acclaimed literary fiction. Her novel of the Guatemalan civil war, La flor oscura (2017), and short story collection, La muerte de Darling (2016), probe collective and individual experiences of trauma through depictions of physical and psychological pain and bodily response. Her work explores the traumatic "crisis of life" (Caruth) suffered by ordinary Guatemalans, rather than those who wield power or celebrity, and draws on the painful experiences of previous generations to forge connections beyond familial structures with an extended social family that confronts lingering war trauma through the re-embodiment and repetition of inherited memories. Cerezo's fiction emphasizes survival rather than what has been survived, and affirms literature's value in comprehending the past and navigating the present. As coherent stories (Hunt) that "organize pain" (Kaplan), La flor oscura and La muerte de Darling offer a powerful literary contribution to a society still working through its traumatic history. Valeria Cerezo is an emerging and prolific talent whose work confronts the consequences of Guatemala's brutal past upon national identity and recognizes the human body as a site of violence, betrayal, and isolation, but also, ultimately, as the site of potential redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do settlements to civil conflict bring former combatants into normal politics as political parties? Prior work shows that electoral-participation provisions in settlements correlate with enduring peace; such provisions help end some of the longest and deadliest civil conflicts. But they are not always included in negotiated settlements. This article presents original data showing that no settlements included electoral-participation provisions until the end of the Cold War. Since then, they appear in almost half of all settlements. What explains this pattern? I argue that combatants include electoral-participation provisions to engage international actors; through these provisions, international actors can often enforce negotiated deals by monitoring and providing incentives conditioned on combatant compliance. This helps to overcome commitment problems that often prevent peaceful settlements of civil conflicts. An analysis of data on civil conflicts and settlements since 1975, as well as illustrative case evidence, provides support this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guatemalan Civil War was still raging and the green berets were running the town, spraying the good buildings with bullets. The good buildings with the good designs by white [...]

Dominant theories of mass violence hold that strategic concerns in civil war drive the deliberate targeting of civilians. However, the causal mechanisms that link strategic objectives to large-scale violence against civilians remain underspecified, and as such the causal logics that underpin each remain blurred. In this article, we identify and explicate four plausible mechanisms that explain why armed groups would target, for strategic purposes, civilians in war. We then turn to the peak period of violence during the Guatemalan armed conflict to assess which mechanisms were most prevalent. Specifically, we leverage unique archival data: 359 pages of military files from Operation Sofía, a month-long counterinsurgent campaign waged in the northwestern Ixil region. Through process tracing of real-time internal communications, we find that state actors most commonly described the civilian population as loyal to rebel forces; violence against civilians was a means to weaken the insurgency. Troops on the ground also depicted the Ixil population as ‘winnable’, which suggests that security forces used violence in this period to shape civilian behavior. These findings are most consistent with the idea that mass violence in this case and period was a coercive instrument to defeat insurgents by punishing civilians for collaboration. The evidence from this period is less consistent with a logic of genocide, in which the purpose of violence would be to destroy ‘unwinnable’ civilian groups. Our analysis illustrates how a mechanism-centered approach based on process tracing of conflict archives can help uncover logics underlying civilian killing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the migratory plight of the Mam Indigenous peoples to present the journey of migration to and settlement in Oregon of Guatemalan residents. Also cited are the history of the Guatemalan civil war, the linguistic and ethnic Guatemalan Maya groups in Oregon like Akateko, Kanjobal and Quiché, and the efforts by Indigenous Guatemalans to seek various types of asylum in the U.S.

ABSTRACT Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat-response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens an empirical window into the practice of imprisonment in postwar Guatemala. It foregrounds the spatial and social components of incarceration that create a combination of improvised disciplinary techniques, what this article calls the practice of "making do." During Guatemala's genocidal civil war, which began in 1960, state officials tended to disappear rather than imprison people. Following the 1996 Peace Accords, rates of incarceration rose dramatically while the state committed less than one percent of its annual budget to managing and maintaining the country's twenty-two formal prison structures. Today dilapidated infrastructure and extreme budgetary constraints characterize postwar Guatemala's penitentiary system, as does the improvisational nature of incarceration. Often extending beyond the penitentiary system itself, those forms detailed in this article include a state-run prison farm; high profile prisoner cells; an extrajudicial police detention center; and a private drug rehabilitation center. By illustrating the manifold carceral spaces in Guatemala, this article highlights the importance of expanding notions of detention beyond the prison proper while also reflecting on improvisational approaches to imprisonment. Este artículo discute de manera empírica la práctica del encarcelamiento en la Guatemala post-guerra. Se enfoca en los componentes espaciales y sociales del encarcelamiento que generan una combinación de técnicas disciplinarias improvisadas; las cuales en este artículo se llaman las prácticas de "arreglarse con". Durante la guerra civil genocida de Guatemala, que inicio en 1960, los oficiales del Estado solían desaparecer en vez de encarcelar a las personas. Luego de los Acuerdos de Paz de 1996, los índices de encarcelamiento aumentaron drásticamente, mientras el Estado invertía menos del uno por ciento de su presupuesto anual en manejar y mantener las 22 prisiones formales del país. Hoy en día, el sistema penitenciario de Guatemala se caracteriza por sus restricciones presupuestarias extremas y mala infraestructura, así como la naturaleza improvisada de encarcelamiento. En este artículo se exponen y detallan algunas de las distintas formas de encarcelamiento existentes, que muchas veces se extienden más allá del sistema penitenciario en sí, como una granja prisión manejada por el Estado, celdas de prisioneros de perfil alto, un centro de detención policial extrajudicial y un centro privado de rehabilitación para las drogas. Al ilustrar los distintos espacios de encarcelamiento de Guatemala, este artículo recalca la importancia de expandir las nociones acerca de la detención más allá del espacio de la prisión como tal. Además, también hace una reflexión sobre las técnicas de improvisación ante los encarcelamientos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia is the property of Universidad de Costa Rica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Historia is the property of Universidad de Costa Rica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of IBEROAMERICANA. América Latina - España - Portugal is the property of Vervuert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates how the production of police records was linked to the policies of repression and violence during Guatemala's civil war. We provide empirical evidence from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police that the police used language, terminology and codes to record deaths in ways that produced silences about the level of violence during the height of repressive military rule. Using a dataset derived from a statistically valid sample of police records together with qualitative archival analysis, we find evidence of profound changes in the terminology used to record and report on deaths-changes that follow a pattern consistent with the policies of information control and concealment of the three different military regimes that ruled Guatemala between 1978 and 1985. We argue that researchers will need to consider the silences created through the selective use of terminology in documents when using archives to produce historical knowledge. Detecting and intercepting silence will be especially important as state records are increasingly sought in service of ongoing pursuits for truth and justice about past atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the end of Guatemala's thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict, the country set about figuring out the history of this violent past. This article explores street artists' contributions to historical knowledge, arguing, first, that they are public historians and, second, that these artist-historians work to expand responsibility for gross human rights violations beyond a traditional focus on the military to include the economic elite, whose role in the conflict must also be acknowledged if Guatemala is to work through past trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) fought one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history. In 1996, the URNG and the Government of Guatemala signed a Firm and Lasting Agreement ending the country’s civil war and initiating the URNG’s post-war life as a political party. After finishing third in its initial electoral competition, the URNG has since been unable to capture more than 4% of the vote, on its own or in coalition, leaving it a minor political party. What explains the poor electoral performance of the URNG as a political party? Based upon fieldwork, elite interviews, and analysis of electoral data, I argue that the URNG’s minor party performance was caused by both organizational and institutional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does repression influence overt, collective challenges directed against political authority? To date, answers to this question have been inconclusive. This article argues that recent works inadequately address the topic because the focus has been on repression’s impact on local civilians, with less consideration of dissident organizations. The author develops an organizational theory of challenger development and specifies predictions for how repression’s effects on dissent are contingent upon the types of organizational behaviors targeted for coercion. The analysis employs original, microlevel data collected from previously confidential Guatemalan National Police records to assess the effects of repression during the years 1975 to 1985. Results show that the effects of repression are more complex than previously imagined. When repression targets the clandestine activities necessary to develop and sustain dissident organizations, such as holding meetings, training participants, and campaigning for funds, dissent declines significantly But when repression is directed at ongoing, overt, collective challenges, it motivates a backlash that escalates dissent. Implications are drawn for how political order and conflict are understood and studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text analyzes the semiofficial interpretations about Guatemala's Civil War (1960-1996) since 1990's. These interpretations are favorable with the Marxist guerrilla, which was the responsible for the arm movement and was defeated. These explanations justify the insurgency from a sociological study and denigrate the position of those people who combated the Marxist guerrilla. Then, it analyzes the theoretical and practice consequences of these interpretations. Finally, this work presents others similar cases in the Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This vertical case study applies a transitional justice approach to analyzing curricular reform, as intended, enacted, and experienced in the aftermath of Guatemala's civil war. Drawing on ethnographic data, I juxtapose the teaching and learning of historical injustice in one urban and one rural classroom, examining how particular depictions of war are positioned as civic narratives for different identity groups, while set against the backdrop of particular ways of understanding the "postwar" period. This study illustrates how young people construct the role and relevance of a history of violence and authoritarianism in relation to their civic identity in a postauthoritarian democracy. It also illuminates how the educational sector addressed legacies of war and how these legacies have been reproduced and challenged through an unequal education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia" by Rigoberta Menchú is presented. It outlines the public opinion about civil war and social and economic conditions of Mayas due to the war. It examines the role of the book and narrative technique in attracting the attention of international community towards the civil war and indigenous population.

Copyright of URVIO - Revista Latinoamericana de Seguridad Ciudadana is the property of FLACSO - Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite recent interest in the psychosocial effects of deportation, psychologists have rarely investigated the multiple forms of violence that compelled many undocumented migrants now living in the United States to 'leave home.' This thematic narrative analysis of interviews with four Maya from Guatemala, part of a larger participatory and action research project, particularizes the experiences of Maya in the United States who are frequently subsumed under homogenizing constructs (e.g., 'illegal aliens') and labeled with universal psychological diagnoses that fail to reflect their complex histories, through which they give meaning to their lived experiences. Analyses focus on three major themes: violence and violation, multiple migrations, and suffering and survival. We illustrate how participants situate contemporary effects of deportation within the collective story of their people, connecting contemporary violations of human rights to earlier migrations due to extreme poverty and experiences of violence during and after 36 years of armed conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the forced disappearances which occurred in Guatemala during the second half of the 20th century. Topics mentioned include the implication of the Guatemalan army including Otto Pérez Molina who became president of the country in 2012, the report in the press in the 2010's, and the trial of former president Efrain Rios Montt and former head of military intelligence José Rodriguez Sanchez, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Guatemala was under the microscope. The charges were genocide and crimes against humanity. The events took place between March 23, 1982 and August 8, 1983, the death toll was in the thousands and other victims in the hundreds of thousands. The country had made its way into history. This was the first time that a former head of state was put on trial for genocide before a national tribunal. This Note provides a historical account of the country as well as a brief overview of the conflict that gave rise to the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. More importantly, it gives an observer's perspective of the trial and the circumstances, both social and political, surrounding the trial. It will finally lead us to lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the wildfires in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee, a fire in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California, and the thirty-six-year internal war in Guatemala.

A literary criticism of the novel "Senselessness" by Horacio Castellanos Moya is presented. It discusses themes of cowardice, Central American wars, particularly the Guatemalan Civil War, and political retreat. The article also discusses the concept of Latin Americanism as identified in the book Latinamericanism after 9/11" by John Beverley.

The article focuses the decision of Guatemala's Court of Constitutionality in a case that involved conviction of Guatemala president Efrain Ríos Montt on genocide claims by a domestic court based on charges of massacring members of the indigenous Ixil group. It discusses the juridical and human rights implications of the Court's decision, and a brief history of the internal armed conflict that involved killing and rape cases of Guatemalans during 1960-1996.

Geographers describe how social movements elaborate alternative histories in public spaces. However, few studies have examined how such alternative histories are conditioned by underlying historical narratives. We engage this topic by analyzing public art created in 2004-5 by the Guatemalan chapter of a transnational organization called Hij@s por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, (H.I.J.@.S.). Composed of the sons and daughters of people whom the Guatemalan government forcefully disappeared and murdered during the Civil War (1960-1996), the group seeks to maintain a historical memory of the war and represents an important voice of the Guatemalan left. Our analysis shows how public art created by H.I.J.@.S. resists the continued effects of enforced disappearance by elaborating historical memory in which the disappeared have a place. We also document how images and texts created by the group privilege the actions of ladinos--Guatemalans who identify as nonindigenous-- and their organizations and open limited space for imagining Maya agency or the possibility that Mayas were subject to enforced disappearance. We suggest that differences in the ways Mayas and ladinos are portrayed in public art created by H.I.J.@.S. in 2004-5 is an effect of the leftist historical narrative that informed the group's work at the time. While we agree with H.I.J.@.S. that there is a battle to be waged against official histories of the war, we argue that leftist historical narratives must also be transformed to be more inclusive of indigenous knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how mass atrocities end has been dominated by a normative approach regarding how they ought to end. Arguing that an evidence-based approach to terminate mass atrocities might offer profound insights into theories of mass atrocities as well as policies designed to prevent or end their occurrence, this article outlines the key questions and approaches needed for an evidence-based study of atrocity endings. It draws on theories of genocide, political violence and civil war termination, and presents initial insights from case studies, including the killing of civilians in colonial German Southwest Africa, the Soviet Union, the Nigerian civil war, the Guatemalan civil war, the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experiences of Guatemalan urban Mennonites during the political leadership of former Guatemalan president José Efraín Ríos Montt during the late 20th century. It examines violence in Guatemala, referred to as la violencia, the significance of the organization the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and the relationship between Guatemalan Mennonites and Ríos Montt. It also discusses the establishment of the urban Mennonite community in Guatemala, Mennonites as human rights defenders, and social justice.

An interview with anthropologists Beatriz Manz, Elizabeth Oglesby, Krisjon Olson, Victoria Sanford, Clyde Collins Snow, and Heather Walsh-Haney is presented in which they discuss the prosecution of former Guatemalan military general José Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and other crimes against humanity during the Guatemalan civil war between 1960 and 1996.

The article offers information on the unprecedented ruling delivered by the three-judge panel in Guatemala, on May 10, 2013, in which judges convicted and sentenced former dictator president of Guatemala Efrain Rios Montt (Montt) for guilty of both genocide as well as crimes against humanity. Topics discussed the Guatemalan civil war, human rights violations in civil war, and Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court).

Copyright of IBEROAMERICANA. América Latina - España - Portugal is the property of Vervuert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El artículo describe varios informes en el tema sobre temas relacionados con la migración de Guatemala chuj a México durante la guerra civil de Guatemala, Pascal, un plato de pollo de los huastecos y confesionario escritos en el en la lengua cuicateca.

This is the presentation of the text "El Éxodo", which narrates the migration of Guatemalan Chujs to Mexico during the '80's civil war in Guatemala. Also, a brief grammatical sketch of Chuj grammar is presented in order to make it easy to read the text (verbal word structure, word order and nominal classifiers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We could already hear the marimbas. My father had parked our jade-green Volvo on Séptima Avenida, and for all his insistence that we wait for him, my mother, and little [...]

An essay is presented that discusses the role of political funerals that involved students from Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) in the history of the street La Sexta Avenida in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Persons remembered at political funerals include university official Mario López Larrave and student activists Robin Mayro García Dávila and Oliverio Castañeda de León, all leftist activists who were assassinated.

This article explores the link between processes of democratic subjectification and truth commissions. Looking at the two truth commission projects that operated in Guatemala in the 1990s, it argues that these commissions can and have been used as important spaces for the articulation of political identity and thus for making demands upon the future democratic society for the communities involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby for a protected areas system that enclosed one-third of Guatemala's territory. This paper argues that this transnational conservation alliance, comprised of international conservation agencies and national elites, evokes the violence of scorched earth counterinsurgency. The use of jungle and forest discourses in successive territorial projects produces a racialized landscape that connects a violent past to a violent present. In recent years, jungle discourses have articulated advocacy for increased militarization to fight the ‘war on drugs’ in protected areas. As such, I argue that conservation agencies and the military are complicit in reproducing social inequalities, often through violent exclusions. This paper was presented at the 2010 International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, sponsored by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex. A National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant provided research support. Leonardo Luc, Mario López Barrientos and Alberto Alonso Fradejas all offered important insights into Guatemalan land politics. I consulted the CIRMA Archive and the ProPetén library for key project documents. J. Keith Gilless, Octaviano Chavarin, Norman B. Schwartz, Melissa Leach and two anonymous reviewers wrote incisive comments on paper drafts. I am especially grateful to Nancy L. Peluso for encouraging me to develop this paper in consonance with her work. I am responsible for all translations. Any remaining errors are my own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

El artículo discurre sobre el desarrollo del Proyecto de la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica de la guerra civil en Guatemala de 1960-1996. El autor examina la importancia de la memoria histórica en comprender la situación del presente. Se analiza la dificultad para los guatemaltecos recordar las atrocidades de la guerra y el reto de separar la verdad de la ficción de los eventos. Se describe el proceso de construir la paz y el cambio del gobierno a causa de la firma de la paz.