The President of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, asked for forgiveness from the relatives of the four victims who disappeared during the internal armed conflict (1960-1996) during a public event held this Friday at the National Palace of Culture, during which he recognized the responsibility of the State and stressed that these acts should not be repeated.
“The State of Guatemala has failed to meet its obligations to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible,” he said. “Moreover, to carry out the search for these human rights defenders. The State has failed and, therefore, in my capacity as constitutional President of the Republic and representative of the State, I publicly apologize (…) for the forced disappearance and to their relatives for the denial of justice that followed,” Arévalo said during a speech in which he insisted that public apologies imply “fundamentally a commitment of non-repetition.”
The case occurred in 1989 when Agapito Pérez Lucas, Nicolás Mateo, Macario Pú Chivalán and Luis Ruiz, indigenous human rights defenders and members of the Runujel Junam Ethnic Communities Council (CERJ), disappeared from a farm in a town in the south of the country called Suchitepéquez. According to their colleagues, they helped protect their community from illegal recruitment by the army at the time. “Four companions were victims of forced disappearance (…) armed men dressed in military uniforms broke into their homes and took them away. No one has seen them again. Their families continue to live this absence, an absence imposed by state violence,” commented Amílcar Méndez, representative of the CERJ.
A ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) said the four men “were victims of enforced disappearance by the State of Guatemala, solely for having made a courageous act of defending their rights, their crime was to believe in justice, organizing to demand it at times when demanding it was an act of supreme value.”
As part of its verdict, the Court ordered Guatemala to ratify several reparation measures in favor of the victims, including a comprehensive investigation into the disappearances and to implement a series of non-repetition measures, such as the declassification of files related to the internal armed conflict and the creation of a national mechanism for searching for forcibly disappeared persons, among other requests.
Also present at the event were representatives of victims, local and foreign human rights organizations such as Kennedy Human Rights, which has been in charge of the dispute between the CERJ and the IACHR since 2024. “This public recognition of responsibility is therefore not a simple symbolic act. “It is the State’s formal recognition, before its people and before the world, of the serious human rights violations committed against these communities,” said Kerry Kennedy, president of the American Center for Human Rights.
In Guatemala, thousands of people, especially indigenous people, were murdered, even massacred, during the civil war and others disappeared and, to this day, their loved ones have not found their remains.
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