Global Forces and Regime Change: Guatemala in the Central American Context

Democratization %rough Peace: T%e DifJcult Case of Guatemala The Guatemalan peace process provides an excellent opportunity to revisit a number of discussions about political democratization and social justice in Latin America. It is the premise of this article that fulfillment of the peace accords, particularly on demilitarization, is the necessary precondition for full development of political democracy in Guatemala. The article first summarizes how, beyond ending the war, the peace process has contributed to Guatemala's democratization, and then analyzes the Guatemalan experience since the early 1980s as a means to address some of the broad theoretical debates. Demilitarization and Security in El Salvador and Guatemala: Convergences of Success and Crisis The Salvadoran and Guatemalan cases correspond to a new model of public security that is widely shared across Latin America. The more localized processes of demilitarization in the two countries, moreover, appear to share a similar dynamic. In the midst of real reforms, however, the deterioration of public security as directly experienced by much of the population is cause for worry. An examination of the reforms established in the peace accords leads to an interpretation of these experiences in a comparative regional framework. Global Forces and Regime Change: Guatemala in the Central