Guatemala: News & Updates

The Q’eqchi women of Sepur Zarco were forced into sex slavery during Guatemala's civil war. The trial against the perpetrators ended in the conviction of senior military officers last year. Between 2008 and 2018, Guatemalan courts issued 16 verdicts in human rights cases linked to the 36-year civil conflict (1960-1996), convicting 33 former military officials, military commissioners, and former civil defense patrol members of a series of war crimes, including torture, enforced disappearance, extrajudicial execution, aggravated sexual violence, and sexual and domestic slavery. A proposed Amnesty Law would terminate all ongoing proceedings against grave crimes committed during the country’s civil war, free all military officials and guerrilla leaders already convicted for these grave crimes, and bar all future investigations into such crimes.

Maya communities bore the brunt of almost four decades of a civil war that ended in 1996, leaving over 200,000 casualties, the majority indigenous Guatemalans, according to the United Nations. Now the mostly Maya organizations and many human rights groups worry that the violence is making a comeback: In just the last year, 26 members of mostly indigenous campesino organizations have been killed. "Guatemala is on the verge of a major human rights catastrophe," says Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America.