Guatemala is a country of contrasts and contradictions. Situated in the middle of the American continent, bathed by the waters of the Caribbean and the Pacific, its inhabitants live in a multiethnic and multilingual nation. Guatemala has seen periods marked by beauty and dignity from the beginning of the ancient Mayan culture to the present day. Its name has been glorified through its works of science, art, and culture and by men and women of honor and peace. However, in Guatemala, pages have also been written of shame and infamy, disgrace and terror, pain and grief, all as a product of the armed confrontation among brothers and sisters. For more than 36 years, Guatemalans lived under the shadow of fear, death and disappearance as daily threats in the lives of ordinary citizens. Although the war is officially over in Guatemala, the effects are still very apparent in the economy, education, and many other issues that are plaguing Guatemala's development. .
With the outbreak of the internal armed confrontation in 1962, Guatemala entered a tragic and devastating stage of its history, with enormous human, material and moral cost. In the documentation of human rights violations and acts of violence connected with the armed confrontation, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) registered a total of 42,275 victims, including men, women and children. Of these, 23,671 were victims of arbitrary execution and 6,159 were victims of forced disappearance. Eighty-three percent of fully identified victims were Mayan and seventeen percent were Ladino. Combining this data with the results of other studies of political violence in Guatemala, the CEH estimates that the number of persons killed or disappeared as a result of the confrontation reached a total of over 200,000 (www.ceh.com).
Although the devastating war ended in 1996 with a peace accord that brought many rights to the indigenous people of the country, many issues still need to be dealt with in Guatemala.