Issue # 1410      13 May 2009

Raúl Molina – breaking the silence about Guatemala

Raúl Molina is a Guatemalan academic and internationally recognised human rights advocate now living in New York who, like many of his compatriots, was driven from his homeland by long years of civil war and oppression. He was intimately involved as an adviser in the peace process that led to the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 in the troubled Central American country and in developments since then. On a recent visit to Australia to participate in a conference, he gave the following interview to Anna Pha of The Guardian.

Guardian: Raúl, what has brought you to Australia at this time?

Raúl Molina: Well, an invitation from the Guatemalans here. We have in mind expanding a network of Guatemalans that some of us built in the United States in 2001 – the Guatemala Peace and Development Network. We want to expand it to Australia. That would be extremely important to connect all of us in order to work together to contribute to a new sort of project in Guatemala that will respond to the needs of the Guatemalan population …

G: Can you perhaps tell us about the situation in Guatemala prior to the signing of the peace accords in 1996?

RM: Prior to the signing it was basically what the United Nations qualifies as an internal armed conflict – two sides in confrontation, the state, basically the armed forces of Guatemala supported very much by the rich sectors of Guatemalan society, our oligarchy mainly and supported by the United States, fully in order to preserve its privileges and in order to protect the interests of people powerful in the country.

On the other side was the revolutionary movement that was represented by the URNG – the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca [the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity] – which was a coalition of four organisations that were formed from years of struggle, what was the original guerrilla organisation, the FAR. The other two were more recent guerrilla organisations, the EGP – the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres [the Guerrilla Army of the Poor] – and ORPA, the Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms. The fourth member of the coalition was the Guatemalan Workers Party, the Communist Party in Guatemala. It had been clandestine since 1954 when it was banned in the country.

So this coalition grew in importance, in strength as well. It really confronted the state, although the Guatemalan state has the best counter-insurgency forces in the Americas except for the United States. The Guatemalan one was trained and equipped for precisely attacking guerrilla organisations and, beyond, attacking the population.

Genocide in silence

It was a very bloody situation. Particularly because the definition of the “enemy”, the internal “enemy”, by people in power in Guatemala. This included all people who could potentially support the revolutionary forces. It was not just attacking those forces combating the troops of the government, it was also attacking people at all levels. All sorts of organisations, let’s say left-leaning or democratic-leaning organisations, would be under attack at the universities, mainly the national university, the trade unions, campesino [peasant] organisations, religious groups, all people who were in some sort of opposition to this repressive state were under attack. It was a very broad definition of the “enemy”.

At a given point Mayans were considered enemies of the state. That’s when the armed forces and the government fell into the trap of perpetrating genocide. This is a debt which even the international community has with Guatemala – that it has not done anything regarding the genocide that took place and was clearly demonstrated by the Historical Clarification Commission – the truth commission of Guatemala. It clearly mentioned that applying the internationally accepted definition of genocide that it applied perfectly to the situation in Guatemala …

Of course, the armed struggle involving guerrilla forces was intense although the numbers never reached the strength of the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] in El Salvador. Still, with something between 2,000 and 3,000 combatants the guerrillas in Guatemala were able to reach a certain level of offensive attacks and defensive attacks that forced the government and the state to open for negotiation.

G: You were actually involved in that negotiating process?

RM: As an adviser. That is very important to mention. When I left Guatemala (I was forced to go into exile in 1980), I was a professor at a university, San Carlos. I was the Dean of the School of Engineering so that practically the leadership of the university was under attack. Many people were killed and many of us just made the decision that we could do better or more for Guatemala if we left and survived and organised ourselves to do something from outside …

So I left Guatemala in 1980, went to work in Costa Rica and then I was asked if I could dedicate myself to the defence of human rights in Guatemala and be part of a small group of people who would be going everywhere in the world – mainly to the United Nations, the Organisation of American States – to explain exactly what was going on, the situation of human rights and the responsibility of the state and so on. That’s when Rigoberta Menchú and others, including myself, started this work with the united presentation of the Guatemalan opposition, the RAU [Research and Advocacy Unit].

So we were very soon involved with the UN in work. Our first presence there was before the General Assembly in New York in 1982 from September to December. We were able to explain what our situation was. It wasn’t easy. We had to first gain credibility. We didn’t have any. We were representing the opposition in Guatemala. Okay, what’s the opposition to begin with? We had to explain. Well, it’s a social movement, its political parties, its people who are under persecution. It’s also the revolutionary movement; we were in a way representing the revolutionary movement as well.

I remember there was a crucial event both in Guatemala and in the United Nations that gave us credibility at a very high price. We received news from Guatemala that a town in Chimantana (one of the provinces in Guatemala), San Martín Jilotepeque, had been surrounded by the army. That meant normally that they were going to kill everyone there. So we approached delegates from the European Union mainly, we approached the delegate of the Netherlands and we explained to him, “Look, we need you to act because the army is about to kill people, dozens of thousands.” He said, “Well, what proof do you have? What information do you have?”

We gave him all our sources and finally he consulted and he went to talk to the ambassador of Guatemala. And the ambassador said, “No, that’s a lie. That’s not going to happen. Everything is fine there. This is an invention so you shouldn’t pay attention to them” and so on. The good thing is that the information went back to Guatemala and the army did not attack. That’s what we wanted. We didn’t want to condemn the government; we wanted to save lives. But somehow, the fact that nothing happened and that the ambassador was so assuring that something like that would never happen made the delegate of the Netherlands a little bit doubtful about us.

So, we received another piece of information, this time about people who were going to be put to the firing squad, executed by the government, condemned by secret tribunals. Again we approached the delegate of the Netherlands and said, “This is the situation, we need you also to try to save those people, they are condemned to death.” Somehow, they did not act. The following day the people were executed. That’s why I say the price was high. From then on, they believed everything we presented …

Very few people know about that. We have to tell exactly those details of how we were confronting not only the Guatemalan government but also the United States government. The one really lobbying against us was not the ambassador of Guatemala, it was the official delegation of the United States talking to their peers in the European Union and saying, “You’ve been caught by this revolutionary movement. You don’t know what you’re getting involved in.”

The situation was terrible for Guatemala. The army could not defeat the guerrilla movement so the war continued. Then we had that period of time when President Reagan in the United States was ready to proceed to a direct invasion of Central America. That was read by everyone at that point so that some efforts, first by the group of Contadora (Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico) trying to create conditions for some sort of political solution for Guatemala and Central America in general – mainly Central America because the main concern was the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua at that point.

And then the key decision by the presidents of Central America to sign the Esquipulas II Accord in 1987 by which all of them committed themselves to look for political solutions in each of the countries. That led to each and every one of the peace negotiations or processes that we had there. Basically from 1991 to 1996, developments in Guatemala went in the direction of trying to find the agreements between the two sides in order to end the war and start a new period in the country with respect for human rights, democracy and some equality and government for everyone.

It took a long time, from 1991 to 1996. The negotiations were not easy, every single word counted. Both sides were defending their viewpoints and both sides had to make concessions. So, a peace agreement, we had been telling the Guatemalan population from the very beginning, is not reached according to a revolutionary triumph. We are talking about two totally different things. The other side also got their things and, of course, we got other important things for the population. Finally we reached the end of 1996, December 29 1996, the peace accords were signed and we were ready for a new stage.

Hopes and mistakes

G: So we move on then from the peace accords and the expectations of people after them. It obviously made some changes?

RM: Well, I do believe the peace accords were very good in terms of what was agreed upon. We had the previous experience of El Salvador … signed in 1992. So we studied what they had obtained through the peace accords and we analysed if that was enough for the Guatemalans in their situation or not. We came to the conclusion that we had to go beyond the level of El Salvador. In El Salvador the main concern – and I heard leaders of the FMLN and the FPR [the Revolutionary Patriotic Front] explain that – was to end the exclusion of El Salvadorians in civil and political terms.

They did manage to get that and then the FMLN was transformed from a guerrilla organisation into a political party and now we see some years after that finally they have come to the point of having an electoral triumph in El Salvador. I would say that this is a proof that the peace accords in El Salvador finally worked. It took time but they did work.

In the case of Guatemala we went beyond that. We said, okay, in Guatemala we’ll not have any chance for reaching peace if the majority of the population, the Mayan people, stay the same way they have been for 500 years. We’ll have to work at bringing them out of the discrimination and marginalisation that they have endured for centuries. There was a specific accord, the agreement on identity and rights of Indigenous peoples, which is a very well thought out accord.

It was the product of consultation with Indigenous peoples. It wasn’t like a group of intellectuals, sociologists, engineers and so on. It was a question of “What should we do?” I’ve analysed it closely for the United Nations Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which was created five years ago. They took this agreement from Guatemala as a cornerstone… It is helping beyond Guatemala. It is helping everywhere that Indigenous people are marginalised and discriminated against. It was a very good accord.

And then we went into the social and economic situation. There’s an agreement specifically on that. We said, well, there must be a solution to the problems that have been with us since 1954 when the democratic spring in Guatemala was finished by the intervention of the United States. At that time we had land reform going on, which is crucial even today. What is the problem in Guatemala? Millions of campesinos with no land and a lot of land in the hands of a few. That continues to be the key problem in Guatemala.

The state, the government and the oligarchy, of course, said land reform never worked.… So the URNG had to look for a way of circumventing that. It was agreed to create a bank of land that would be fuelled by state land, by land that some banks had obtained because the landowners were not able to pay for loans that they had so the banks were holding that land, and many other ways. The government was even going to look for money in order to buy land and give it to campesinos.

So the idea was good. OK, we’re not going to take the land and pay for it. The land is always paid for in this land reform. We’re going to accumulate it and give it so that people can work on it. So it was an in-between solution but it was a source of hope.

And then measures on many other problems in the social sphere like education, cutting the budget for the armed forces and using that money to put into health, education, social security and so on. All those measures had the intention of providing some balance to this society that was so skewed in which so few people have so much wealth and a lot of people are in poverty.

That was the intention. When the peace accords were signed I would say that many people were hopeful although not enthused. I was in Guatemala’s central plaza on the night of the signing and people were happy. We had finished a terrible period, beginning a new one. But you could see in all the faces “This isn’t going to work” or a question “Is it going to work?”

There was support, of course, for the accords, but not huge expectations, that we have gained everything. And then the implementation process came. I think some people like myself were saying to the United Nations you should pay more attention to the post-signing period than you do. Because they were extremely supportive, they were key elements in the process of negotiation to reach the accords.

Change in balance of forces

But after that everyone should realise that there is a change in the balance of forces. Before the state had armed forces, money, the government and so on and the opposition had an armed component, international support and a lot of elements that helped to balance the other side. That’s where the peace accords are important. When you sign peace accords this armed component is taken off and the international community that before could help the opposition gives the money to the government. Suddenly, there’s no tool in your hands to produce results. So you have to trust that the government is going to do it and that’s when things do not work. Some of them signed in good faith from the government’s side. Others did not.

G: Disarm them and then business as usual?

RM: That’s right. That’s what happened in Guatemala when it came out of that terrible situation we had. Some changes were obtained but not in the way we had expected. Even with all of the obstacles we knew we were going to face, we knew it was not going to be easy and that some people are probably going to die in the process.

But no, it was one year of good implementation. After that, it was forget the peace accords and let’s go back to the neo-liberal model that forgets about social investment, forgets about people. That’s why it has taken such a long period of time in Guatemala and we are 13 years into the implementation process and not even half the provisions have been complied with. There’s still a long way to go and the root causes of the war are still there.

The question people ask us is, well, you should go back to war and we have to say no, we have to keep trying the democratic approach because the international conditions are not good enough for supporting a new revolution. We have to find ways within what we have now to move forward.

Political transition

G: The peace agreement seemed to open up a space for legal political activity by the opposition. To what extent has that been possible?

RM: It worked at the beginning very much in the same way as it did in El Salvador although I think Guatemala is a more legalistic country. The URNG was authorised to become a political party and to begin with there was a sort of legal amnesty for having participated in the revolution so that they could go free and not have any problems. The process to organise the party took, because of all the legal aspects, about a year and a half …

Some particular mistakes were made by the URNG. I would mention two. One was not to continue a close relationship with the social movement because the social movement in a way prefers to stay a little bit away from the political parties. They consider themselves, to be dealing with people who don’t believe in political work. We are going to be in dialogue to try to help each other but we have to be separated from the political parties. That meant a separation that went beyond what was in mind. I don’t think the URNG wanted to lose the social movements but that was in a way what happened. They started to move away from the political party.

G: Did that include the trade unions?

RM: It included the trade unions. It included the student movement, a lot of groups that were working with the URNG before. Because of these new electoral conditions, there was this separation. Of course, some people said the URNG should be the natural leader while we were at war. We are at peace so we also could lead the movement. There were some protagonists and some problems that are always present within the left, that were also present in Guatemala.

It was this unfortunate separation that has been one of the factors for the situation of the left in Guatemala today … Some of us suggested when the URNG was transformed into a political party: let’s not transform the entire URNG into a political party. Let’s make a political party because we need it. It’s the only way to participate but let’s leave part of the whole organisation as a political movement that would link with the social movement. But the leadership at that time had come to the conclusion that we need all the strength together so all the efforts were put into the political sphere.

If I have any advice to any future situation like this I would keep your political movement and part of it as a political party – at least for some time. Eventually, as today in El Salvador, okay you can bring everything back together but not in this moment of transition, which is always very difficult.

The other mistake the URNG made was to abandon international work. All those people who had been supporting Guatemala and that had put efforts and resources, people in Australia, people in Europe, people in the United States, in Canada and so on, suddenly found themselves with no one to talk to in Guatemala about the transformation. That was one of the reasons, to be very honest, to create this network I mentioned before – the Guatemala Peace and Development Network – it is to try to build again an international movement because we need it …

Part II next week: the truth commission and seeking new paths.

Next article — In the US, 539,000 jobs lost in April - good news?

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