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El Salvador’s Truth Commission: Recommending Peace in Exchange for Justice
- Edited by Elin Skaar, Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Jemima Garcia-Godos
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- Book:
- Latin American Experiences with Truth Commission Recommendations: Beyond Words Vol. II
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 19 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2022, pp 317-372
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- Chapter
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
The transition to democracy in El Salvador after 12 years of internal armed conflict (1980 – 92) between the State and the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martípara la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo MartíFront for National Liberation – FMLN) was based on a peace agreement negotiated by the United Nations and signed in1992 in Chapultepec, Mexico. The peace agreement set the premises for the institutional reforms required in the country's transition from internal armed conflict to democracy. As in the rest of Latin America, a truth commission was put in place to address past abuses. Neither the peace agreement nor the truth commission discounted the possibility of future prosecutions for atrocities, yet criminal investigation and prosecution were postponed until the country had a more developed justice system able to perform the task (Martínez and Gutiérrez 2016).
El Salvador received the direct support of the United Nations in its process of ending the conflict and establishing the TruTth Commission of El Salvador (Comisión de la Verdad Para El Salvador; the “CVES” or “the Commission”). The CVES's recommendations, which are examined in this chapter, were one of the key points of the Commission's mandate. At the time the CVES delivered its report, the recommendations offered hope for a structural change in the country and its institutions. However, the scant acceptance of the report by the national population, its rejection by the State's official institutions, and the maintenance of political balance required by the distribution of power between the two main political parties who signed the peace agreements, did not only hinder the possibility of making deep structural changes. These power dynamics have also, in fact, distorted the reforms that have been achieved (Guti é rrez 2015).
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: INFORMATION ON CONTEXT AND TRANSITION
Since its independence from Spain in 1821, El Salvador has been a country where politics, violence and the economy have been combined to guarantee the predominance of a landed economic elite (Dunkerley 1982; Hume 2014). There have been numerous dictatorships in the country's history, with a predominant role of the Armed Forces in politics, acting in favor of the economic elites (Guidos et al. 1980; Stanley 1996).
The personalist dictatorship of General Maximiliano Hernández-Martínez lasted from 1931 until 1944 and set the basis for a political arrangement between the military and the oligarchy to guarantee the institutionalization of military dictatorship thereafter (Artiga 2015, 52).
Guatemala’s Commission of Historical Clarification: The Memory of Silence or the Silence of Memory?
- Edited by Elin Skaar, Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Jemima Garcia-Godos
-
- Book:
- Latin American Experiences with Truth Commission Recommendations: Beyond Words Vol. II
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 19 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2022, pp 373-408
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
The negotiation of peace agreements in Guatemala marked the end of a bloody war that lasted more than three decades (1960 – 1999). Truth commissions have been established as a key mechanism to promote transitional justice in such contexts of political transition. The documentation, analysis, and explanation of the structural factors that caused the violence in Guatemala were undertaken by the Commission for Historical Clarification of Guatemala (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico de Guatemala, hereafter the CEH or the Commission). The Commission concluded its work in 1999 with the publication of its final Report entitled Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio (“Guatemala: The Memory of Silence”). The Report included the CEH's recommendations for restructuring the systemic defects which had allowed past human rights violations to take place. As this chapter shows, civil society organizations, rather than the Guatemalan State, have been the main political drivers for the implementation of the Commission's recommendations.
This chapter examines the fate of the CEH's 84 recommendations. The next section provides a brief overview of Guatemala's recent history. Section 3 provides a general summary of the establishment of the CEH and its recommendations. The main section, section 4, studies the relative progress toward implementation of these recommendations. The chapter concludes by briefly analyzing the role of each of the main actors in this process.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The history of Guatemala is characterized by the virtual absence of civilian governments. From its independence from Spain in 1821 until 1996, the country has experienced a number of dictatorships and coups d’état (Blanco and Zapata 2007, 292 – 338). Following the dictatorships of the first half of the twentieThcentury, the “October Revolution” ended with Juan José Arévalo as President. He initiated reformist policies that were continued by his successor Jacobo Arbenz, when he achieved his electoral victory in 1950. The agrarian reform implemented by Arbenz adversely aff ected the interests of the Guatemalan elite and the United States government. Consequently, Arbenz was forced to resign on June 27, 1954. From then until 1986 (except for the period between 1966 and 1970, when the civilian government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro ruled), the history of Guatemala features the prohibition of social democratic, socialist and communist parties, and frequent coups d’ état (Poitevin 2004, 18).