March 22nd is World Water Day. This year, representatives from Guatemala’s diverse indigenous peoples and territories presented their findings and demands regarding the water situation to the government of Bernardo Arévalo. This was the result of 24 assemblies for water and life, held during the first quarter of the year in different regions. Over 600 people from more than 35 community organizations, including ancestral authorities, participated in these assemblies.

A Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice delegation visited Guatemala on November 6 and 7, 2023. The purpose of this visit was to analyze and address the current situation in Guatemala from a legal perspective and to offer recommendations from this group of  nternational law experts to support restoration of public confidence in the Guatemalan judicial system, institutionalization of an independent judiciary, alignment with international democratic standards, and strengthening the rule of law.

(published in the News of our work in the Bulletin no. 48)

For some years now, walking through the streets of the historic center of Guatemala City, we are astonished by the hundreds of photographs that paper some of its walls. They are the faces of people who disappeared during Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict (IAC), lasting over three decades, and ending with the signing of the Peace Accords in December 1996.

On May 27, 2021, eleven former military officers were arrested and charged by the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) with serious human rights violations committed during the Internal Armed Conflict (IAC). These arrests are part of the “Diario Militar” (DM) case, referring to a document also known as the “Death Squad Dossier”, which contains detailed information about the capture and disappearance of 183 people between August 1983 and March 1985.