Carmen Aída Ibarra "Los acuerdos de paz en Guatemala: La reconciliación, un proceso integral que supera los ámbitos, la justicia y la reparación" November 20, 2006

Carmen Aída Ibarra speaking at CLAS on November 20.

Finding the lights of hope in postwar Guatemala
By Kara Andrade

It is weeks before the ten year anniversary of Guatemala's Peace Accords and Carmen Aída Ibarra, coordinator for Myrna Mack Foundation, says the country is not yet at peace -- far from it.
 
"What we have in front of us is a crisis of governance that we're already living; a scenario of political and social conflict; of precarious social and economic situations; and a scenario of violence and criminality," said the diminutive Ibarra who in thirty minutes painted the grim picture of Guatemala's current political, social and economic crisis. "Everything is precarious."
 
The Peace Accords marked the end of one war and the beginning of another. More people die now in the years after the war than during the war, an average of 5,000 a year then compared to an average of 6,000 a year now.  One out of every eight casualties in this new war - from drugs, gangs, domestic abuse and the simple but violent settling of scores - are women.  Most are under 30 and inhabit a country where 17 percent live on less than one dollar a day according to the 2005 US Aid report.

The postwar violence is a violence that goes beyond Guatemala's structural and historical roots and presents a greater challenge for Guatemalans and the country's now twenty years of democracy.
 
"We have a different Guatemala than 20 years ago, we still have political and social violence, but we don't have a systematic violation of human rights by the government," Ibarra said. "It's true there are no lights because you can't see in the panorama a concrete light of hope where you can say well this will help us reduce poverty, or reduce organized crime. Instead we have a lot of threats surrounding us."
 
The reasons that Guatemala continues to have problems are multifold and may in part rest upon a process of democratizing which has had problems in its development and a lack of resolution of problems from the past. Ibarra attributes some of the country's problems to the tension that manifests from corruption in social, political and economic institutions whose direction and loyalties are based on the needs of the stakeholders and not fairness for the rest of the population. In part this tension arises from the constant give and take of hidden powers and the more traditional power dynamics in Guatemalan society.
 
Where this dynamic is most evident is in the legislative process, an area where Ibarra and the Myrna Mack Foundation has pushed for judicial reform in cases such as the murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack who on September 11, 1990 was stabbed 27 times by a commando from the Guatemalan army working for the Presidential General Staff.  Mack had studied displaced indigenous populations and described how the government persecuted them; her work was controversial and stirred the past that Guatemala's government was not ready to acknowledge.
 
That same month a group of displaced people had taken out an advertisement in a local newspaper telling of the government's exploitation of indigenous populations and the repercussions went back to Mack who the army thought had taken out the ad. Mack's family pushed forward a judicial case in 1990 to bring to justice her murder; fourteen years later Jesus Bette was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Speaking with a student after her talk.

For Ibarra the case proves that justice is possible in Guatemala, but it is a slow and complicated process, held back by the traditional powers and the favor bank mentality within the institution. Although much attention has been given to Guatemala by the international courts, litigation on the local front is indispensable in creating accountability and justice.
 
"When we bring the people like Myrna Mack to justice, we begin to create a series of benefits beyond the family of Myrna Mack," said Ibarra said.
 
One of the benefits of the Mack case is that in 1992 Helen Mack was awarded a local peace prize and the money from that prize was used to create the foundation in 1993. Since then her organization has litigated three cases dealing with human rights violations, including a case of a massacre that happened 30 years ago and one case for the disappearance of 29 people.
 
"For us it is very satisfactory that amid such a negative situation we can say, look, we were able to bring something to justice. It is a huge advance with regards to what we could do before when we couldn't do anything. It gives us a sign that we can make things happen," said Ibarra. She is quick to repeat her three part strategy for many of Guatemala's problems: justice, truth and reparation.
 
Ibarra joined the Myrna Mack Foundation after having been a journalist. She has seen since learned that the solutions to Guatemala's problems must occur both on a personal  and political level, where there is an acknowledgement by the government that people's emotional and mental health have been damaged; the community level, the government must begin to construct a new social fabric and sense of ownership; and political institutions and agencies must be rebuilt and funded. The monitoring and balancing of the country's flow of power is an important component which takes into account blocks of power (religious, political and corporate) that are in agreement on things that need to happen to make justice possible.
 
"We don't have good conditions to create reconciliation because we have this whole set of institutions that are traumatized. But they are there and they can be perfected, it can be made better," Ibarra said. The good news, wherever you can find it, is that there are more spaces of civil participation. The upcoming elections in 2007 might be an opportune moment for change.
 
But Ibarra does not think so. The elections might well function as a platform for more political violence and the political party crisis could make create the opportunity for organized crime and the corrupt segment to secure popular support. What is clear is that change needs to happen both from the top down and from the ground up. Universities must make proposals based on their research and social organizations must help to create social participation and evaluate these proposals objectively. Just as important, is for politicians and government authorities to remain open to all the proposals that are made and that the churches take a roll in creating an ethical morale.
 
So, while there are very few lucecitas or small rays of hope to be found, you can't just sit down and cry about it, Ibarra thinks. You must have hope in the existing institutions and the democratic process behind them.
 
"Hope is based not on concrete things, but on things that are very abstract, like the notion that tomorrow we can start making decisions that will transform the institutions and will make things better in the country."

Kara Andrade is a graduate student in the School of Journalism.

Carmen Aída Ibarra is the political coordinator for Guatemala’s Fundación Myrna Mack, one of Guatemala’s leading human rights foundations.