Guatemalans Declare Peace Former Combatants Sign First Peace Agreement

The Guatemalan government and rebel leaders formally renounced the use of arms Wednesday, ending an armed conflict that has claimed more than 100,000 lives over 35 years.

In the ceremonial hall where the Guatemalan Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, a top Guatemalan general and other members of the government’s peace commission joined leftist guerrilla leaders in signing a “definitive cease-fire” agreement.

It was the first and most symbolically powerful of three pacts that the former combatants are scheduled to approve this month before signing an overarching peace accord in Guatemala City on Dec. 29.

The peace effort was shaken in the fall when members of a guerrilla group admitted kidnapping and then releasing the elderly wife of a cement magnate. But both sides said Wednesday that the process seems unstoppable.

“With this agreement, the weapons will be silenced forever,” said Rolando Moran, a commander in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union, which is a grouping of three guerrilla movements and a Communist political group.

Gen. Otto Perez-Molina said support for peace pervaded the military and most other Guatemalan institutions as well as the country’s 10.5 million people, most of whom are poor. Until recent reforms, the military had been accused of systematic human rights abuses.

Menchu called Wednesday’s agreement “a milestone in our history” but warned all parties to be scrupulous in fulfilling commitments, lest Guatemala revert to the habit of war.

The civil war is generally traced to a 1954 coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that toppled the leftist government of the popularly elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and led to the military’s seizing power.

In the early 1960s a number of Marxist guerrilla organizations sprang up to fight the army and they have been doing so ever since with varying degrees of intensity. The country’s peasants, particularly the Indians, have borne the brunt of the violence.