In 1952, Guatemala enacted the Agrarian Reform Law Decree 900. The Decree became an instrument for national development through land redistribution and the development of agrarian rights. Although the law was only upheld for eighteen months, the Decree influenced land and labor legislation through today. Struggles for agrarian rights continued throughout the military dictatorship and civil war which plagued Guatemala until the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Ideals for land reform originating in the 1952 law continue to have a pervasive influence on the Guatemalan land reform movement. This study is further contextualized and framed with quotes and analysis from José Luis Paredes Moreira’s investigation of Decree 900 and its impact in Guatemala. The second section of this project includes an original translation of Decree 900.

Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

In Agrotropolis, historian J. T. Way traces the developments of Guatemalan urbanization and youth culture since 1983. In case studies that bring together political economy, popular music, and everyday life, Way explores the rise of urban space in towns seen as quintessentially "rural" and showcases grassroots cultural assertiveness. In a post-revolutionary era, young people coming of age on the globally inflected city street used popular culture as one means of creating a new national imaginary that rejects Guatemala's racially coded system of castes. Drawing on local sources, deep ethnographies, and the digital archive, Agrotropolis places working-class Maya and mestizo hometowns and creativity at the center of planetary urban history.

This edited, one-volume version presents the first ever English translation of the report of The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), a truth commission that exposed the details of 'la violenca,' during which hundreds of massacres were committed in a scorched-earth campaign that displaced approximately one million people.

MAYA: A PEOPLE IN RESISTANCE ‘As I go around the world, people seem surprised that we indigenous people of Central America still exist’, noted the Maya Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú in 1992. More than 500 years after the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the Maya, descendants of one of the greatest pre-Columbian civilizations, not only exist but are thriving. The survival of 21 different Maya speaking peoples in Guatemala is a living testimony to their powers of resistance. In recent years, the brutal conquest of their cities and mountain lands by Spanish conquistadores in the early sixteenth century, has been replayed in all its horrors. In the 1980s alone, the Guatemalan army is conservatively estimated to have murdered 20,000 Maya. Whole villages were wiped out, as at least 120,000 fled into Mexico and 500,000 became internal refugees. The MAYA OF GUATEMALA studies the Maya world in depth: the history, culture, beliefs and responses to the nonindigenous world. The author, Phillip Wearne, a journalist with long experience in Central America, looks at the Maya cultural resurgence of recent years – the product of both fearsome oppression and international geo-political changes of the 1980s. This is a story of indomitable will, a plea for solidarity and international support for a people who want to reclaim their identity as one of the ‘first peoples’ of the world. It is also a story of resistance and resurgence on behalf of the Maya who in the words of one internal refugee ‘want to come out of the mud, the cold, the shadows and into the sunshine’. Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.