GUATEMALA: Madrid Once Again the Scenario for Peace

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Dec 10 1996 (IPS) - One more big step on the long road to peace in Guatemala, which is nearing its end, is about to be taken in the Spanish capital, where talks began nine years ago.

The government and guerrilla delegations met Tuesday to hammer out the last details of an accord that is to guide the reinsertion of some 9,000 insurgents into civil society. The accord signing is scheduled for noon Thursday in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, presided over by Minister Abel Matutes.

This accord, two others signed this month and a final peace deal to be signed in Guatemala City on Dec. 29 crown nine years of negotiations that began in Madrid in October 1987. The talks were broken off and renewed several times, and the first accord was reached in 1990, when the negotiations got underway for an uninterrupted period of nearly six years.

In a historic meeting in 1987, after 27 years of civil war, government and guerrilla representatives sat down at the negotiating table for the first time, in talks brokered by Spanish diplomat Juan Pablo de la Iglesia.

Guatemalan ambassador in Madrid at the time, Danilo Barillass, was one of the government representatives in the talks. Three years later, after returning to his country and becoming active in local political life as a leader of the Christian Democratic party, Barillass was killed by the far right.

Guerrilla leader Rodrigo Asturias (“Gaspar Ilom”), the star of that meeting, will be the most conspicuous absentee on Thursday. Asturias voluntarily withdrew from the talks to facilitate their success after a commando of his rebel group — one of the four making up the National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity — kidnapped a wealthy elderly businesswoman in Guatemala in October.

The figures who will put pen to paper on Thursday include Gustavo Porras, coordinator of the government peace commission, Jorge Rozal, Pablo Monsanto, Rolando Moran and Carlos Gonzalez — the general secretary of the communist Guatemalan Labour Party — representing the URNG, and U.N. peace-broker Jean Arnault. Following the ceremony, the signatories will be received by King Juan Carlos and the head of the Spanish government, Jose Maria Aznar.

During the talks, the government pushed for fast results and an immediate ceasefire, while the insurgents argued that a ceasefire had to be the result of a substantial, clear negotiation process that had taken concrete steps.

The interventions of Cardinal Rodolfo Quezada Toruño and the “group of friends” — consisting of Colombia, Mexico, Norway, Spain, the United States and Venezuela under the auspices of the United Nations — were decisive in the success of the talks.

As well as accords signed on specific aspects, the peace process gave rise to two key events: the beginning of the return of refugees from Mexico, and a unilateral ceasefire decreed by the URNG.

The first contingent of nearly 2,400 refugees returned to their country from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in January 1993, under the direction of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and non-governmental organisations.

And on Nov. 4, 1996, the URNG leadership issued a communique stating its unilateral decision to “suspend activities of armed propaganda and those that hurt the successful culmination of the peace process.” That same day, the URNG proposed that the talks continue to seek a definitive ceasefire, which was agreed on a few days later and signed last week in Oslo.