In 1996, Guatemalans witnessed the signing of peace accords that officially marked an end to the country's 36-year civil war, the longest and bloodiest of this century's Latin American conflicts. Behind the smokescreen of "fighting communism," military groups trained and funded by the US killed 200,000 mostly Indigenous people and destroyed 440 Mayan villages. More than a million people were uprooted from their homes and over a quarter million became refugees in surrounding countries.
The peace accords aimed to reduce the power of the military in civilian life improve the living conditions of rural Guatemalans and protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Yet the accords failed to resolve many of the root causes of conflict in Guatemala. The country's most fundamental crisis, the unequal distribution of land, remains a major problem, with 2 percent of Guatemalans controlling 72 percent of the country's arable land. This inequality was at the core of the civil war, which was fuelled by US-backed efforts to monopolize land for the benefit of agribusiness.
Although the conflict has officially ended, Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala face ongoing human rights violations. Racism, neo-liberal policies that prioritize corporate interests, lagging land reform, and a persistent culture of impunity that favours former military officials and the landholding elite continue to generate high levels of poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment in Indigenous communities. Poverty is significantly higher in Indigenous communities than in non-Indigenous communities; Indigenous Peoples comprise 58 percent of the poor and 72 percent of the extreme poor. The average wage gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers is approximately 50 percent in all industries. 67 percent of Indigenous children suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Although the peace accords require the withdrawal of the military from civilian life, the militarization of Guatemalan society has steadily increased in recent years. The armed forces have retained an influential presence in government and the role of the army in public security has expanded. Clandestine security structures, made up of former military, paramilitaries and drug traffickers, have resurfaced. Former members of the Civilian Action Patrols (PACs), paramilitaries that were made up of young, Indigenous men, which never completely disbanded after the civil war, have consolidated power through leadership positions in local government and are demanding compensation for their unpaid service during the conflict. The Estado Mayor Presidential (EMP), the state military unit responsible for gross human rights violations during the civil war, was finally abolished in October 2003, as called for in the peace accords. A new civilian intelligence unit is slated to take its place, yet faulty legislation may allow for its future militarization, and former EMP members, in strict violation of the peace accords, have already joined the new unit's ranks.
The United States has encouraged the remilitarization of Guatemala as part of the implementation of proposed free-trade agreements such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would turn all of Latin America (except Cuba) into one big free-trade zone, and Plan Puebla-Panama, which seeks to build a giant network of highways and railroads and develop the oil and electric industries from Mexico's Puebla state all the way to Panama. The US government is using these trade agreements and resulting investments of US corporations as a pretext to increase military assistance throughout Central America. Already, a more visible US military presence in Guatemala has coincided with increased oil exploration by US companies. The US also uses the drug war to justify ongoing US military operations in rural areas of Guatemala. For Guatemalans, armed troops in their communities means more human rights abuses, intimidation, land confiscation, and the denial of labour rights.

Remilitarization has led to renewed human rights violations reminiscent of Guatemala's civil war. Since 2000, Guatemala has witnessed a sharp rise in violence and intimidation directed at union leaders, human rights activists, and journalists. Indigenous communities in rural areas have been particularly affected by the escalating crisis as landowners increase their violent harassment of campesinos organizing for land rights. The violence has been attributed to illegal groups and clandestine security structures that have, until this point, received impunity from the Guatemalan government.
Guatemala has also experienced an alarming increase in violence against women, including rape, torture, and extra-judicial killings. The government has tried to dismiss the violence as a product of gang activity and drug trafficking, but human rights organizations claim that the precipitous rise in attacks against young, mostly poor and Indigenous women in Guatemala may be related to a larger pattern of abuse directed at Indigenous communities and social justice activists. In total, more than 2,200 women have been murdered since 2001, and the rate of murders continues to rise each year. Most are young women who migrated from rural areas to shantytowns of Guatemala City, in search of better wages.
At the end of 2004, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) withdrew from the country. MINUGUA was established towards the end of Guatemala's civil war to monitor the human rights situation and the implementation of the 1996 peace accords. It was hoped that by the end of MINUGUA's ten-year mandate, the Guatemalan government would have enacted the majority of its obligations under the accords. It didn't. While it was in Guatemala, MINUGUA documented a gradual but definite upswing in extra-judicial killings and lynching. Now that MINUGUA has left Guatemala and there is no joint commitment to ensure the implementation of the accords - which include provisions for land reform, Indigenous rights and demilitarization - it will be much more difficult to achieve a resolution to the current human rights crisis.

In Guatemala, where poverty and inequality rates are among the highest in Latin America, policies like structural adjustment have caused unemployment to soar, while the minimum wage hovers at less than a third of what it costs to meet a family's basic needs. 75 percent of the population lives in abject poverty and nearly 60 percent of households lack access to a health facility.In city, women displaced by the war compete for poorly paid work under abusive conditions in the maquila (sweatshop) factories that have become emblematic of Guatemala's role in the global economy. Meanwhile, in the Guatemalan highlands, Indigenous communities are contending with worsening poverty and outright hunger after one of the worst droughts in recent memory and the collapse of world coffee prices (Guatemala's biggest export) in 2001. The ongoing coffee crisis—the worst of the past 100 years and a result of destructive World Bank policies that flooded the international market — have left over 40 percent of Guatemalans without work. Almost 60% live below the poverty line and nearly 40% live on less than $2 per day.Small farmers continue to lose their homes and land as the push for open markets bankrupts those who cannot compete with the low price of US imports.
Structural adjustment policies, which encourage foreign investment and the privatization of critical services and utilities, are slated to work hand in hand with neo-liberal free trade agreements such as CAFTA, the FTAA and Plan Puebla-Panama. Almost all of these agreements include a one-sided protectionism in favour of the US, making it nearly impossible for local businesses and small farmers to compete with US corporations. By allowing US corporations increased, unregulated participation in the Guatemalan economy, such agreements promise to further exacerbate poverty and unemployment, displace more poor farmers and Indigenous Peoples, destroy natural resources and biodiversity, create many more maquilas and lead to further militarization of the region.
Furthermore, as a condition of these US-driven trade pacts, critical services such as health care and education would be privatized, placing access to medical care even further out of reach for poor women and families. In Guatemala, women's and children's health is already jeopardized by inadequate medical services: maternal mortality among Indigenous women is 83 percent higher than among non-Indigenous women and, with only one doctor for every 10,000 rural Guatemalans, most women and girls lack even an annual medical check-up. Guatemala has the highest infant mortality rate in Central America and malnutrition among Guatemalan children is one of the worst in the world.

Unable to feed their families, many rural Guatemalans have flocked to the city to work in the country's maquila sector, producing name-brand clothing for export to the US. Without the protection of unions, Guatemala's 80,000 maquila workers suffer deplorable conditions. Most earn subsistence wages and spend more than a quarter of their pay on water in the under serviced shantytowns where they live.
Like their counterparts in Taiwan, the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere, over 80 percent of Guatemala's maquila workers are young women who work longer hours than men and are paid half of men's wages. And many maquila workers are the sole providers for their families. Without adequate labour laws and enforcement of those laws, workers suffer human rights violations, including physical assaults, humiliating treatment and the forced consumption of amphetamines to increase output. Garment workers often sustain permanent lung damage from textile dust. Other workers live with chronic injury from the strain of repetitive manual work. Poised to create more maquilas in Guatemala, US-backed free trade agreements offer no increased protection for maquila workers. Privileging profit over workers' safety, health and other human rights, these agreements give US corporations the right to sue governments for enforcing labour laws that could improve conditions in maquilas and protect women's human rights