Out of Guatemala

In December 1996, Guatemalan officials signed a truce that ended more than three decades of fighting between the nation's military and guerilla forces, the longest armed confrontation in the history of Central America.

The peace agreement, brokered by the United Nations, included the establishment of a truth commission to put on record the numerous human rights violations and to help the country begin a process of healing and national reconciliation.

Greg Grandin, an assistant professor of history, served as a historian on the truth commission's support team and has reflected in recent months on the country's social and political climate. His first book, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, will be published this month by Duke University Press. It presents a historical perspective on the two centuries that preceded one of Central America's most dismal chapters.

As Guatemala marked the third year of its armistice this past December, Grandin said the anniversary has come at a time when much of the population is losing faith in the government's attempts at reform.

"The hope offered by the peace accords has fizzled out," Grandin said, sitting in his East Campus office. "Guatemala is not doing very well economically, and there has been a great deal of common crime, as well as violent crime, in recent years.

"Early in the reform process, there was a call for a redistribution of wealth, but there has been no redistribution, either in the form of land or progressive taxation," Grandin said. "The one big change has been that the political process is more inclusive. The aim was to achieve economic reform through political participation, but so far the results have been very limited."

Grandin was asked to serve on the truth commission, whose title was "The Commission for Historical Clarification," as the fact-finding body was being organized in early 1997. At the time, he was in Guatemala conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation when a friend with the U.N.'s verification mission informed him the commission needed someone to establish and maintain a document center to support its work.

So Grandin put his graduate research on hold and set out to identify and obtain relevant written materials on the nature of the war, as well as on individual cases of murder and abduction.

He helped acquire hundreds of documents and analyzed them with the aid of some of the country's intellectuals. The materials included declassified U.S. government documents generated by the CIA and the U.S. State Department, reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as photographs and newspaper clippings.

"I was a member of the historical staff," Grandin said. "Our job was to gather and analyze whatever we thought was relevant to the actual cases, then we would write summaries to provide a historical context."

The truth commission interviewed former ministers of defense and past and present leaders of Guatemala's political parties in the course of its investigations. Among Grandin's other tasks, he was asked to prepare questions for some of the interviews. In another important contribution to the commission's behind-the-scenes work, Grandin analyzed the U.S. government's role in the Guatemalan conflict based on the various declassified documents.

"The report had an impact," Grandin said. "It forced [President] Clinton to apologize for the United States' involvement. He didn't use those exact words, but essentially he acknowledged our role of arming, training, supporting and financing the Guatemalan army when it was clear that they were engaged in the widespread repression of their own people."

The United States' reasons for supporting the Guatemalan government vary, depending on with whom you talk, Grandin said. Most scholars agree U.S. officials at the time believed there was a price to be paid to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America. Grandin said that in seeking U.S. assistance, Guatemalan government leaders may have played to American fears by characterizing all efforts at political reform as a communist threat.

The truth commission report was released in February 1999, and among other findings it concluded that the Guatemalan military was responsible for the clear majority of the more than 200,000 deaths and disappearances in the country's 36-year conflict.

Of the 42,000 deaths investigated in the report, the army was found to be culpable for about 93 percent of them. Three percent were perpetrated by the leftist insurgency, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, and 4 percent remain unsolved.

The majority of the victims were civilians and Mayan Indians, according to the report. In addition, the commission found the Guatemalan military committed at least 636 massacres, mostly in Maya communities. It also determined the Guatemalan state committed "acts of genocide."

The commission had no authority to prosecute the individuals deemed responsible for the killings, but Grandin said that in one respect the commission set a precedent.

"Past commissions have just asked who did what to whom and provided a narrow legalistic or judicial interpretation of events," Grandin said. "Guatemala's was the first report by a truth commission to closely examine the historical causes of the violence."

The report concluded there were three underlying causes of the turmoil: racism against the Maya; longstanding economic exploitation of the poor; and political exclusion and authoritarianism perpetuated by the wealthy.

Grandin's work with the truth commission formed the basis of a graduate course that he taught at Duke this past fall, titled "The Politics of Terror and Memory." The class explored the use of history to examine violence, including testimonials, literature, popular memory and legal mechanisms for dealing with the past, such as truth commissions and efforts to prosecute human rights violations.

This semester at Duke, Grandin is teaching an undergraduate course, titled "Mexico and Central America: From Colonial Times to the Present." He said he expects the course will touch on his forthcoming book.

Grandin noted that Guatemalans elected Alfonso Portillo as president in December, whose platform included promises of taking the country back from the rich and corrupt. "His promises have sparked hope in many organizations for political and economic reform."

But Grandin noted that Portillo "is allied with many of the worst violators of human rights during the war," and it is "too early to tell what the future holds for the Guatemalan peace process."

Written by Noah Bartolucci.