The International Centre for Human Rights Research or CIIDH (Spanish: "Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos") is a Guatemalan non-governmental organization.
The organization was founded in 1993, in the final years of the country's 36-year-long Civil War, with the aim of promoting and defending human rights and publishing information of interest in that field. However, its original purpose was much more combative and activist in nature. Housing a project that collected testimonies from witnesses of human rights violations that occurred during the country's civil war, its original goal was to use this information and their authors to support legal attacks against Guatemalan Army officers who were suspected of perpetrating war crimes. Created and directed by Paul Yamauchi from 1993 to June, 1996, the CIIDH and its project were slowly taken over by URNG activists who while working with their Director, gradually sabotaged the project activities and terminated its original mission, all in accordance with the URNG's signed peace accords with the Guatemalan Army, which provided mutual amnesty to both parties. Nowadays, the CIIDH and its new "mission" are a far cry from what they were in 1993.
José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as de facto President of Guatemala in 1982–83. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.
Ramiro de León Carpio was the President of Guatemala from 6 June 1993 until 14 January 1996.
Álvaro Enrique Arzú Yrigoyen was a Guatemalan politician and businessman who served as the 32nd President of Guatemala from 14 January 1996 until 14 January 2000. He was elected Mayor of Guatemala City on six occasions: in 1982, when he declined taking office because of a coup d'état; in 1986; in 2003, after serving as president; in 2007; in 2011, and in 2015, for a term that would see him die in office.
The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity is a Guatemalan political party that started as a guerrilla movement but laid down its arms in 1996 and became a legal political party in 1998 after the peace process which ended the Guatemalan Civil War.
Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo is a Guatemalan politician and the current Secretary General of the Central American Integration System (SICA). He served as President of Guatemala from 14 January 1986 to 14 January 1991.
The Guatemalan Labour Party was a communist party in Guatemala. It existed from 1949 to 1998. It gained prominence during the government of Jacobo Arbenz. It was one of the main forces of opposition to the various regimes that followed Arbenz's overthrow, and later became a constituent of the URNG guerrilla coalition during the later phase of the country's Civil War.
Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is an international nongovernmental organization that employs Unarmed Civilian Protection. Their mission is to protect civilians in violent conflicts through unarmed strategies, build peace side-by-side with local communities, and advocate for the wider adoption of these approaches to safeguard human lives and dignity. NP holds Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and has been endorsed by nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including the Dalai Lama and former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In 2016, Nonviolent Peaceforce was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1994 Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification - La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) - was created as a response to the thousands of atrocities and human rights violations committed during the decades long civil war that began in 1962 and ended in the late 1990s with United Nations-facilitated peace accords. The commission operated under a two-year mandate, from 1997 to 1999, and employed three commissioners: one Guatemalan man, one male non-national, and one Mayan woman. The mandate of the commission was not to judge but to clarify the past with "objectivity, equity and impartiality."
The Guatemalan Civil War was a civil war in Guatemala fought from 1960 to 1996 between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups. The government forces have been condemned for committing genocide against the Maya population of Guatemala during the civil war and for widespread human rights violations against civilians. The context of the struggle was based on longstanding issues of unfair land distribution; wealthy, mainly European-descended, citizens, and foreign companies, such as the American United Fruit Company, had dominated control over much of the land – leading to conflicts with the rural indigenous poor.
Comandante Rolando Morán was the nom de guerre of Ricardo Arnoldo Ramírez de León, leader of Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), an armed Guatemalan communist resistance organization. At the time of his death he held the post of Secretary General of the URNG.
The Guerrilla Army Of The Poor was a Guatemalan leftist guerrilla movement, which commanded significant support among indigenous Maya people during the Guatemalan Civil War.
MINUGUA was a United Nations humanitarian mission in Guatemala that involved, at the most critical point in the peace process, a three-month peacekeeping mission.
Rosalina Tuyuc Velásquez is a Guatemalan human rights activist. She was elected as a Congressional deputy in 1995, elected from the national list of the New Guatemala Democratic Front, and served as Vice President of Congress during that period. Tuyuc is a Kaqchikel Mayan.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Guatemala face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Both male and female same-sex sexual activity are legal in Guatemala.
The Center for Economic and Social Rights is an international human rights NGO that aims to transform the dominant global economic system into one based on human rights standards that provides dignity for all people and protects the planet.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by the US-backed Guatemalan military government. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965 and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of. A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". Human Rights Watch has described "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.
Jennifer K. Harbury is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. She has been instrumental in forcing the revelation of the complicity of the United States CIA in human rights abuses, particularly in Guatemala and other countries of Central America during the 1980s and 1990s. Initially she was trying to discover the fate of her husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla leader who was "disappeared" in March 1992 by the Guatemalan military.
In July 2005, in an abandoned warehouse in downtown Guatemala City, Guatemala, delegates from the country's Institution of the Procurator for Human Rights uncovered, by sheer chance, a vast archive detailing the history of the defunct National Police and its role in the Guatemalan Civil War. Over five rooms full of files containing names, address, identity documents, were brought to light.
The Civil Defense Patrols were local militias created by the government of Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War. They were created by decree of General Ríos Montt on 1 August 1982, though they began before that under President Fernando Romeo Lucas García. Officially, participation was voluntary, but many were forced to join. The patrols officially stopped 29 December 1996 under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the war, though some of the network remained and was used by former members demanding compensation for their involvement. Estimates vary, but statistics generally state that around 1,000,000 people were members of the patrols at the height of the war in 1983. The members tortured and killed other villagers, sometimes at the threat of being killed themselves.
The Guatemalan Peace Process lasted from 1994 to 1996 and resulted in the Guatemalan Peace Accords.
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