Turning a blind eye: the modern genocide

In the spring and summer of 215, crowds gathered in front of the presidential palace in Guatemala City to demand the resignation of the president, retired General Otto Pérez Molina. During “the Guatemalan Spring,” as the press dubbed these anti-corruption protests, which on some days drew up to 3, people, I spoke to Canadians who went to stand with the protesters in the square. It was fascinating, my friends said, but it wouldn’t amount to anything. We all knew Guatemala better than that.

Guatemala’s attempts at democracy, and a more equitable distribution of wealth, were derailed in 1954 by a US-orchestrated invasion that replaced an elected reformist government with military dictatorship. In 1961 civil war broke out, lasting until late 1996. During the worst years of the war, in the late 197s and early 198s, the mass murder of indigenous Mayan people by the government reached proportions that both the Catholic Church and the United Nations, in exhaustive post-war reports, classified as genocide. The 1996 Peace Accords, which ended the war, provided a detailed blueprint for a democratic society. Yet, as the Canadian scholar Kirsten Weld has shown, Guatemala’s mainly European-descended oligarchy, which has ruled over its predominantly indigenous and mixed-race population for 475 years, interpreted the Peace Accords not as a negotiated compromise and a fresh start, but as the surrender of the political opposition and permission to restore the status quo. After 1996, the oligarchy returned to business as usual, enriching itself and impoverishing the population, while abusing high political office through corruption and illicit commerce, in