Guatemala in the 21st Century: Permanent Counterinsurgency

Abstract  The objective of this work is to analyze the recent political evolution of Guatemala, against the backdrop of the economic and political reordering produced by the 1996 peace accords, and authoritarian tendencies that have crossed the region in recent years. Specifically, it asks why the popular protests that overthrew the military president Pérez Molina in 2015 did not pave the way for a further democratization of the country. On the contrary, it is argued that this process engendered a reaction from the ruling class that takes on the contours of an authoritarian reversal. This work is based on field research, but also resorts to journalistic material and the pertinent bibliography. The hypothesis of this research is that the state of permanent counterinsurgency that characterizes the independent history of the country is updated in the present.

Keywords:  Guatemala; Central America; Counterinsurgency; Authoritarianism