The Attack Against Mamá Maquín and Guatemala’s “Eternal Spring”

2016 will mark 20 years since the signature of the Guatemalan Peace Accords, which brought an end to Guatemala’s 36-year long armed conflict and genocide. The war’s casualties included over 200,000 mostly Mayan indigenous lives and thousands of disappeared and displaced. Yet, despite being a country officially at peace, high rates of ongoing violence – from violent crime to attacks on human rights defenders – suggest that the war and its traumas are being reconstituted in new ways everyday. Manuela Camus, Santiago Bastos and Julián López García (2015) refer to postwar violence in Guatemala as a “dinosaur reloaded”; similarly, Diane Nelson and Carlota McAllister (2013) argue that the aftermath of the conflict can be described as “war by other means”.