María Zambrano told us that there is no present, but the present of the past, or memory, and the present of the future, or hope. On December 29, the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords in Guatemala has been celebrated, and this presents us with the challenge of transforming her memory into hope. It would be difficult to conceive a more beautiful film for Guatemala than the one written in the script of the Peace Accords. The quetzal is submerged in perplexity by the distance between paper and reality, the paradox that the perfection of the content of the agreements – their incarnation of positive peace and contemplation of the roots of the conflict, of the problem of building peace in Guatemala in its ultimate sense – constitutes at the same time a reason for the weakness of its execution. And this fires us the questions of him.
We can, to try to answer them -as I do in my book The perplexity of the quetzal. The construction of peace in Guatemala–, approach the problem of the construction of the State in Central America, of the regional pacification in Esquipulas II, of the Guatemalan process and its lessons or of the process of incorporation of the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit), and undertake reflection in its light about the what, why, why and how of the construction of peace, democracy and development and about the making of History in Guatemala.
Consider that, just as the peace process in Guatemala knew how to make a virtue of necessity both in the content and positive conception of peace reflected in the Agreements, as well as in the inclusion of the relevant actors absent from the negotiating table through the Assembly of the Civil Sectors and the composition of the 17 commissions created by the Agreements for the translation into legislative and public policy proposals of the principles defined by them, without forgetting the contribution of the Group of Friends of the United Nations –of which Spain, in the wake of his constant commitment to the peace processes in Central America, he was a prominent part – in their work for their negotiation and subsequent execution; The translation from paper to reality was conditioned by the negative result of the referendum of May 17, 1999 on the reforms aimed at incorporating the content of the Peace Agreements into the Constitution, determining their legal sustainability, and by the non-realization of the fiscal reform –which aimed to increase the tax burden from 7% to 12%–, a determinant of its economic sustainability. Ultimately, after the referendum, the Guatemalan process loses, its disguise or clothing of the peace process, understood as a set of commitments to execute of the surrender of weapons and the incorporation of the legality of the URNG, effectively produced in a referential process to other incorporations; but nothing prevents the content of the Agreements and the reports of the commissions that develop them from constituting a reference or goal to be achieved in the collective journey of Guatemala in History and the process, the processes, in which it is immersed. Well, peace, democracy, development and a culture of acceptance of the other and the conformation with him of a common us are a process, and are always under construction.
Johan Galtung tells us that the construction of peace is the avoidance of resorting to violence to manage the conflict inherent in all life in society. And that violence can be direct, structural and cultural. It supposes the negotiation and execution of the Peace Agreements, the disappearance of the recourse to direct violence as an instrument of collective action for political purposes, as well as the consolidation of a democratic regime that overcomes structural violence in the political sphere. But they do not entail, in substance, the transformation of the socioeconomic model, and therefore do not imply the overcoming of the structural violence that may result from this inherent. And they could do little, beyond the declaration of intent, to overcome cultural violence. They suppose – and this implies a qualitative leap with respect to the previous situation – the possibility of making socioeconomic and cultural transformation the object of politics, the design and implementation of public policies that lead to the gradual overcoming of both.
In the key of hope, looking to the past to build the future, we can conceive the Peace Accords not only as a movie script, and ask ourselves what happened to the actors, the direction, the filming or the financing of the sets; but also contemplate them as the painting, the outline of the final scene of Guatemala towards which we want to direct our walk in history, guide our navigation, get the quetzal out of its perplexity.
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