Rachel McCleary, Dictating democracy: The end of Violent Revolution, Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1999. Susanne Jonas, Of centaurs and doves: Guatemala's peace process, Boulder, Westview Press, 2000.

Abstract

In Guatemala, where military dictatorship had closed all meaningful political competition since 1954, the political opening in 1986 was, in many ways, an incomprehensible moment. For the first decade following the political opening, scholars' attempts to analyse the depth and meaning of change in Guatemala were complicated by frenetic events that often seemed to contradict one another. Part of the confusion surrounding the meaning and direction of Guatemala's political opening stemmed from the fact that the civil war fought between the guerrillas and the military since 1962 did not end in 1986. It was not until December, 1996, nearly eleven years after the first elected civilian government took office, that peace accords between the Guatemalan civilian government and the guerrillas were signed. Among their most important functions, the accords outlined mechanisms for broadening political participation in a formally recognised plural society. In the immediate aftermath of the signing of the accords, it appeared that democratisation and the peace process, even if not consolidated, had taken a more solid shape. Consequently, analyses of the post-86 period shifted focus from examining the prospects of peace to understanding how peace was realised. Prominent among the emerging literature are Rachel McCleary's Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the End of Violent Revolution and Susanne Jonas' Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala's Peace Process. Each ties the peace and democratisation processes together, but in inverse ways, thereby exemplifying the two major trends in the study of contemporary Guatemala. Where McCleary sees the consolidation of democratic institutional processes as the precondition for the conclusion of peace negotiations, Jonas emphasises that the peaceful settlement of the civil war is the key to democratic consolidation.