By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Mar 19 1997 (IPS)

The Guatemalan peace accord has created a new agenda for society throughout Central America and, after decades of warfare, the region must strengthen democracy and to create representative governments that can govern.

This was the message delivered by participants at recent conference organized by the Friedreich Ebert Foundation (in conjunction with the German Social Democratic movement) on civil society in Central America. Delegates agreed that civil society should take the initiative in strengthening channels for participatory democracy by taking full advantage of recently created political niches.

The experience of mass-based groups who formed Guatemala’s Assembly of Civil Society, which negotiated and signed the recent peace accords, won the attention of their counterparts in the region whose actions have been limited to the traditional ones of denunciations and protest.

In Guatemala, over 300 civilian organizations joined together to create a draft proposal concerning the chief obstacles to peace. The proposal focuses on the re-settlement of displaced people, the problems confronting indigenous populations, the agrarian problem, the strengthening of civilian power and electoral reform.

Carmen Rosa de Leon, a member of the Steering Committee for Guatemala’s Assembly of Civil Society said that the peace accords addressed 80 per cent of these proposals.

“We believe that our activity constitutes the most important advance that (the grassroots organizations) have experienced in many years,” she said. De Leon added that the Assembly is working on the definition of “a new political model for the country that is based in populism.”

The Guatemalan activist, who was recently in Honduras to speak about her experience with the Assembly, said that as soon as the peace accords were signed, “the challenge for the civilian population was to keep the peace and to de-militarize society.”

De Leon added that “it is not a simple task to accomplish these things after 30 years of civil war. We have inherited a seriously frayed social fabric, as the legacy of decades of repressive, centralist and exclusionary government.”

In de Leon’s opinion, the most difficult element for civilian society has been learning to dialogue within the diverse sectors that social sectors that comprise Guatemala, to deal with dissent and create consensus.”

In the case of Honduras, the weakness of civilian society manifests as an inability to achieve a single mechanism for political expression.

Marco Orlando Iriarte, a member of the Honduran National Convergence Committee (Conacon), attributed the lack of cohesion among Honduran citizens to the nation’s lack of leadership and credibility.

According to the most recent polls, 70 per cent of Honduras’ 5.5 million people take no interest in politics and “suffer from abiding political apathy that is extremely dangerous.” Iriarte asserted that the situation is similar throughout Central American society.

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