ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the two most recent phases of Guatemala's civil war, during the 1970s and 1980s, as the backdrop for the peace process of the 1990s. The counterinsurgent forces, strong enough to prevent a popular or revolutionary victory, were unable to address the sources of revolt, to triumph definitively over the carriers of revolt, or to control the social forces unleashed by chronic crisis. This dynamic has been expressed in Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, the longest and bloodiest in the hemisphere, leaving some 200,000 civilians dead or "disappeared. By the late 1980s, Guatemala was by no means in an insurrectionary situation or "ungovernable," but it was in a chronic social crisis. The counterinsurgency state made reformism by itself unviable, by precluding partial solutions to the staggering problems of poverty and ethnic discrimination. Guatemala's new popular movements were the product not only of austerity measures but also of the country's multiple crises, including the many crises of uprooted populations.
