The United Nations (UN) Working Group on Forced or Involuntary Disappearances denounced this Thursday, July 2, the situation of state neglect that the victims and relatives of the more than 45,000 missing persons registered during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala (1960-1996) have suffered for four decades.
After concluding an official visit to the country, carried out from June 23 to July 2, experts Aua Baldé and Ana Lorena Delgadillo warned, in a press conference, about a setback in justice experienced in the last eight years due to the dismantling of peace institutions, which they attributed to the administrations of former presidents Jimmy Morales (2016-2020) and Alejandro Giammattei (2020-2024).
“What we were able to witness is precisely all the abandonment that exists in these families for more than 40 years,” said Delgadillo, who also criticized the measures implemented during the eight years of administration of former Attorney General Consuelo Porras Argueta, who last May left the Public Ministry (MP), after conditioning the exhumations of war victims and imposing bureaucratic burdens on the relatives of those affected.
“The absence of support and protection from the State, in a context in which many families have had to directly assume the search and investigation tasks for their missing relatives, has had a significant impact on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights,” Baldé stated.
Likewise, Delgadillo reported that during an inspection at an Army installation in Petén, they confirmed the construction of civil works “where there was news that there could be remains of people.”
Given the risk of affecting esplanades that would house clandestine cemeteries, the expert demanded the immediate stop of the work.
Although the Working Group recognized the actions of the current Government of Guatemala to create a humanitarian search mechanism, it warned that the lack of coordination between multiple ministries and forensic agencies confuses victims, who do not know which institutional window to go to to initiate a file. This disarticulation also obstructs the tracking of missing persons during migratory transit.
Given this scenario, the experts explicitly recommended to the President of the Republic, Bernardo Arévalo de León, to issue guidelines so that all state agencies locate, systematize and protect the archived information from the armed conflict, in order to declare it cultural heritage.
Likewise, the international delegation demanded that the State definitively open the archives in the hands of the Army, free access to former military establishments and the provision of resources and hierarchical rank to the Presidential Commission for Peace and Human Rights (Copade), in order to articulate with legal solidity the tasks of search, compensation and compliance with international sentences in favor of the victims.
This visit coincides with the prelude to the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the signing of the historic Peace Agreements, in December 1996, a milestone that put an end to 36 years of internal armed conflict with a balance of more than 200 thousand dead and 45 thousand missing.
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