Treaty May End Guatemalan Fighting

The Guatemalan government has reached a peace agreement with the guerrilla movement that will end 36 years of fighting, Guatemala’s president announced Monday.

Guatemalan government and rebel negotiators in Mexico City, meanwhile, agreed Monday to a formal cease-fire and said the document to make it official is “practically concluded.”

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu told the closing session of the Sixth Ibero-American presidential summit that the final accord with the guerrillas would be signed Dec. 29, formally ending a war that took an estimated 140,000 lives.

He gave no details in his announcement, which was saluted with a long ovation by nearly two dozen other Latin American heads of state - including Cuba’s Fidel Castro - at the two-day gathering.

Arzu said word of the peace pact was relayed to him late Monday from Mexico, where talks between representatives of his government and the guerrillas had resumed Saturday under U.N. mediation.

Negotiators for the government, army and rebels of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, known as the URNG, signed a provisional cease-fire in March.

The formal cease-fire will be signed this month in Oslo, Norway, rebel commander Pablo Monsanto said in Mexico City.