Thirty-six years of internal conflict came to an end on 29 December 1996 when the Government of Guatamala and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatamalteca (URNG) dsigned the Agreement culminated a six-year negotiating process under the auspices of the United Nations and brought into effect a number of previous agreements, social, economic, agrarian, cultural and ethnic issues.

"In a century of horrors, Guatemala from 1954 to the present has been a bloody scene of some of the worst horrors—and the United States has been deeply involved. Drawing upon 30 years of experience in Central America, hundreds of interviews, and analyses of the vast documentary materials, Susanne Jonas masterfully explains not only how the Guatemalan tragedies, the U.S. involvement, and the stumbling 1990s peace process developed. She also raises fundamental questions about the badly misunderstood and much over-hyped 'democratic transition' supposedly occurring in Guatemala and elsewhere in the region." —Walter LaFeber Cornell University, author of Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

One of the longest and seemingly most intractable civil wars in Latin America was brought to an end by the signing of the Peace Accords between the Guatemalan government and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) in December 1996. The essays in this volume evaluate progress made in the implementation of the peace agreements and signal some of the key challenges for future political and institutional reform. The volume opens with a chapter by Gustavo Porras, the government's main negotiator in the peace process. The first section then examines the issue of demilitarization. This is followed by aspects of indigenous rights in the peace process, including conceptual frameworks for rights advancement, the harmonization of state law and customary law, and the challenges of nation-state and citizenship construction. The next section examines issues of truth, justice, and reconciliation, and assesses prospects for the Truth Commission. The volume closes with an analysis of different aspects of political reform in Guatemala and includes comments made on the chapters and developed in the debate which took place at the conference on which it is based. The contributors are Marta Altolaguirre*, Marta Elena Casaús*, Demetrio Cojtí*, Edgar Gutiérrez*, Frank La Rue, Roger Plant, Gustavo Porras*, Alfonso Portillo*, Jennifer Schirmer, Rachel Sieder, David Stoll, Rosalina Tuyuc*, Anna Vinegrad, Richard Wilson (* chapters in Spanish).

The role of private companies in violent conflicts has gained increasingly more attention in recent years. Although the private sector is often associated with sustaining conflicts, companies are also assumed to be self-interested as well as able to support the prevention, settlement and transformation of violent conflicts. This book explores the role of the private business sector during the civil war and the peace process in Guatemala. It examines and analyses the corporate positions during this period, aiming to add to a better understanding on the potentials and limits of integrating private business actors in conflict transformation.