By Paul Jeffrey

Guatemala City, 12 April (ENI) - Five years ago the war in Guatemala came to an end, but the country has yet to enjoy the peace that most hoped would follow in the wake of the 36-year armed conflict.

Part of what went wrong is precisely what went right. Democratization in the wake of the war has weakened the monopoly on political power formerly held by the armed forces and the traditional economic elite. Yet more representative and democratic alternatives have had a hard time emerging. Political parties are weak, civil society remains fragmented, and the government is incapable of meeting basic needs or deepening the democratic transformation. The only well-organized group seems to be criminals; yesterday’s death squads have morphed into today’s car theft, kidnaping, and narcotrafficking organizations.

The peace accords were supposed to provide the blueprint to build a more just and peaceful society, but they have failed to have much of an impact. An April 2001 poll sponsored by the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that 53 percent of Guatemalans thought the accords had brought no benefits whatsoever.

Perhaps the accords were too ambitious; it’s not easy for any nation to reform an entire legal culture, dismantle an entrenched military, build a new police force, or develop a multilingual school system overnight.

Perhaps they were too complex; the accords contain over 300 provisions on themes ranging from tax collection to indigenous languages. Many of the tasks of implementation were delegated to a variety of commissions that were understaffed and underfunded, or simply ignored.

Or perhaps some Guatemalans really didn’t want things to change.

“The peace process has stalled because there is no political will for it to prosper, because there are sectors of the powerful who are addicted to unjust economic and political structures, and they don’t want to see things change, they don’t want to see peasants and the indigenous have more space for a dignified life,” the Rev. Jose Pilar Alvarez, a Lutheran pastor in the eastern Guatemalan city of Zacapa, told ENI.

Those in the church who speak up for the victims and the poor continue to suffer–as during the war–the consequences of their witness.

In February, forensic anthropologists working on several church-sponsored exhumations of mass graves received telephoned death threats. On February 21, a suspicious fire in the Catholic church in Nebaj destroyed files containing evidence about 35 war-time massacres in that area, in the north of the province of El Quiche.

In March, the Catholic bishop of San Marcos, Alvaro Ramazzini, started receiving death threats because of his support for landless peasants. Ramazzini was last threatened in 1996, the year the war ended.

To many in the church, this is more than mere deja vu. “Although there is no proof these events originate with the same dark forces as in the past, that’s what we suspect. This is their style. We fear the dark forces are still here, still strong,” Rodolfo Valenzuela, the Catholic bishop of La Verapaz, told ENI.

The government’s top intelligence analyst, Edgar Gutierrez, director of the Secretariate for Strategic Analysis, told ENI the latest attacks on the church “represent a definite worsening of the climate. This is a negative sign. If we in the government can’t stop this by discovering what’s behind it with our investigation, this could be the beginning of this problem spreading and growing worse.”

Despair about the lack of progress in building authentic peace in Guatemala is palpable.

“I’ve been visiting Guatemala regularly for several years, and right now I’ve found people particularly discouraged and pessimistic about what the future holds,” said Susan Peacock, a representative of the United Church of Christ who came to Guatemala this month as part of an international ecumenical delegation to encourage the peace process. Peacock directs the Guatemala Program of the church-related Washington Office on Latin America.

“It’s an appropriate moment for a pastoral visit, for a message of hope. And it’s an appropriate moment to provide whatever accompaniment we can in order to encourage people to reassume the peace process as their own,” Peacock told ENI.

Peacock’s delegation, which included leaders of several international ecumenical councils, was invited by the Ecumenical Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, a broad-based group formed early this year by Catholic and Evangelical leaders, including Valenzuela and Alvarez.

The Ecumenical Forum wants to encourage dialogue among diverse sectors as a way to build support for relaunching the peace accords. It’s forming provincial chapters as a way to drum up grassroots activism. Four provincial chapters have already been formed, Alvarez said. The groups hopes to have ten formed by the end of the year. Guatemala has 22 provinces.

Vitalino Similox, director of the Ecumenical Forum, said the churches weren’t trying to substitute for civil society, which he said must remain the principle protagonist in demanding compliance with the peace accords. “We come to work beside civil society, as part of it. The church doesn’t want to do the work of the social movements. They are the instruments to rebuild the country with justice and reconciliation, and our job as Christians is to help and inspire them,” said Similox, who is also executive director of the Conference of Evangelical Churches of Guatemala.

Similox and other Ecumenical Forum leaders invited the foreign church delegation to help initiate a new effort at public dialogue about the peace accords, and to remind the government that the world remained vigilant about the peace process here. It arranged for interviews with activists and analysts during the delegation’s April 8-11 visit, including a day-long encounter with some 60 government officials, diplomats, and leaders of a wide variety of civil society groups.

“We’re here to observe, listen, and nudge the peace process forward,” said the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the (U.S.) National Council of Churches.

Edgar said one fruit of the delegation’s visit would be to increase the visibility of Guatemala–and its current problems–in the rest of the world. Yet he acknowledged the difficulty of that task, at least in his home country. “It’s hard for people in the United States to look south, because our eyes are so often focused on the middle east or on Washington. Yet making peace here is no less important than making peace in the middle east,” he said.

Valenzuela praised the diverse nature of the Ecumenical Forum, and said it wasn’t coincidental that people from different denominations had found unity around a very practical theme.

“Ecumenism in Guatemala doesn’t exist because we sat down to talk about church doctrine, but because we came together to talk about the transformation of society, about how we could put an end to the marginalization of people,” the bishop said.

Valenzuela claimed that ecumenism in Guatemala has been “marked by a commitment to the poor and marginalized, but those who have made that commitment have had to be willing to suffer the same fate as the poor.” Valenzuela said Bishop Juan Gerardi, assassinated in 1998, was killed “because he chose to identify with the poor, and thus suffer their fate.”

Yet Valenzuela claimed that ecumenism in Guatemala needed to take an additional step and invite into the discussion the growing sector of the indigenous population that practices traditional Mayan spirituality.

“To revitalize the peace process, and our own participation in it, we need to be more inclusive of Mayan religiosity,” Valenzuela said. “The churches are called to give an example of the tolerance and dialogue we are calling for in the country as a whole.”