Guatemala: The Iron Fist

Abstract

Politics in Guatemala is a continuation of warfare by other means. What would be recriminations elsewhere may quickly turn into threats in Guatemala City, the City of Eternal Spring. As in Colombia, when Guatemalans receive death threats, they leave. Even at the more mundane level of personal squabbles, violence is often the preferred method of conflict resolution. The daily papers are full of matter-of-fact items such as the ambush shooting of an entire family in a passing automobile because one rider had refused to pay a debt. The legacy of Guatemala’s four decades of genocidal civil war, suspended but hardly resolved with a 1996 peace treaty after producing some 200,000 deaths, remains scarcely buried below the surface.

Human rights are a hot potato, but Catholics and sex educators get along fine.