Susanne Jonas - Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemalas Peace Process

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Of Centaurs and Doves

Of Centaurs and Doves

Guatemalas Peace Process

Susanne Jonas
University of California at Santa Cruz

Foreword by Sir Marrack Goulding

First published 2000 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2000 by Susanne Jonas.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Jonas, Susanne, 1941
Of centaurs and doves: Guatemalas peace process /Susanne Jonas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-3467-5 (hc)ISBN 0-8133-3468-3 (pb)
1. GuatemalaPolitics and government1985 2. NegotiationGuatemalaHistory.
3. GuatemalaRelationsUnited States. 4. United StatesRelationsGuatemala.
5. Human rightsGuatemalaHistory. I. Title.
F1466.7 .J66 2000
972.81053dc21

99-053442

ISBN 13:978-0-8133-3468-4 (pbk)

I dedicate this book to my parents, Gerald and Hilda Jonas, and to my late grandmother, Anne Klestadt all of them refugees of a different holocaust, in Europe sixty years ago. From their example I learned about strength, grace, and humor in the face of adversity.

Come, let's go, my country, I will go with you.
I will descend the depths you show me.
I will drink from your bitter chalices.
I will remain blind, so that you may see
I will remain voiceless so that you may sing
I must die so that you may live....

I have grown tired of bearing your tears.
Now I want to walk with you in lightning step.
To accompany you on your journey, because I am a man
of the people, born in October to face the world...

Ay, Guatemala,
When I say your name, I return to life.
I arise from a flood of tears in search of your smile...

From "Vmonos Patria A Caminar" by
Guatemalan poet Otto Ren Castillo, 1965

Contents

by Sir Marrack Goulding

1. vi

Guide

Figures

Photos

Maps

The peace process in Guatemala has the potential to become one of the standard-setting achievements of the second half of the twentieth century, in the same class as the Camp David Agreement between Egypt and Israel, the peace settlement in Namibia, the Paris Accords on Cambodia, and the peaceful transitions that took place in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. It is an ambitious attempt, by visionary Guatemalans and the international community as a whole, to end an ostensibly internal conflict that has torn a country apart for almost two generations. This makes Susanne Jonas's book essential reading for anyone interested in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the Guatemalan peace process will realize that potential. One of the fascinating things about Dr. Jonas's book is that it is published at a moment when the result still hangs in the balance. She has, as it were, written the first four acts of a five-act drama. Neither she nor her audience knows at the end whether Act V will be a tale of triumph or of tragedy.

As she herself observes, the first half of the book is imbued with the optimism generated by the signature in late 1996 of a package of agreements designed not only to end a thirty-six-year war but also to remove the causes of that war by transforming the Guatemalan polity. The second half, on the other hand, reflects the doubts, even pessimism, created by the difficulty of implementing those agreements and especially by the electorate's rejection in mid-1999 of the constitutional reforms they prescribe. The voter turnout in that referendum was only 18.5 percent, recalling the worst days of the pseudo-democracy that characterized the years of military rule.

But those who continue to strive to implement the peace agreements can take comfort from an observation by Machiavelli (in chapter VI of The Prince ):

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything until they have had actual experience of it.

Amongst the outside players in the peace process, the United Nations has been the most important. Although every conflict is a law unto itself, the UN was able in Guatemala to draw on lessons learned in its previous endeavours in Central America. In Nicaragua, it had supervised the 1990 election, facilitated the subsequent political transition, and helped demobilize the Contras. In El Salvador, it had mediated the negotiation of a peace settlement, signed in 1992, which contained many features that were to recur in Guatemala, and had deployed a multifunctional peacekeeping operation to help the government and the FMLN implement that settlement.

But the United Nations has never pretended to a monopoly in peacemaking and peacekeeping, A feature of the Salvadoran process had been the support provided to the Secretary-General by a group of interested states from the region and beyondColombia, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela, who were later joined by the United States. The same occurred in Guatemala, with Norway added to the group. An innovation in Guatemala was a sustained effort to supply information about the negotiations to the intergovernmental agencies, including the Bretton Woods institutions, whose help would be needed when the time came to implement the eventual agreements. In some cases, agencies were directly involved in the negotiations. The International Labor Organization (ILO), for instance, made an important contribution to the agreement on the identity and rights of indigenous peoples, which was one of the boldest and most innovative ingredients in the peace package.

The outside players thus had an important role. But, as emerges so clearly from this book, it was the Guatemalans themselves who really mattered. The international community could help, but it could not impose. Susanne Jonas describes well the distinct way in which Guatemalans express themselves, aptly dubbed by her as "affirmation by denial." In none of the other peace processes with which I have been involved have I had so strong a sense of a society turned in on itself, a society with its own private way of doing things, a society that would be slow to accept that outsiders had anything to contribute to the solution of its problems, and a society, therefore, which had to be approached with infinite patience and with the knowledge that its reaction to one's efforts would sometimes seem irrational and perverse.

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