ABSTRACT
On the night of 29 December 1996, Guatemala came to the attention of the international media for ending the last revolutionary war in Central America. A negotiated peace process put an end to a 36 year-long conflict with a final toll set at 200,000 dead, 45,000 disappeared, hundreds of massacred villages and more than 1m. people displaced, with state forces responsible for 93% of the human rights violations committed (CEH 1999). Fifteen years into the post-war period, political violence has declined and Guatemala stands as a democratic country in international rankings. Although no index considers Guatemala a full democracy, all register substantial improvements in relation to the preceding decades (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Polity IV, for example, raised the country score from 3 to 8 in 1995 on its 10-point democracy index; Freedom House lists Guatemala as a partly free democracy since the 1990s; and the Economist Intelligence Unit has long placed the country among ‘hybrid regimes’, not fully democratic but certainly not authoritarian. Despite this improvement since the peace accords, a closer look at recent trends gives little room for optimism about the prospects of democracy.
