Broken Silence
Guatemala’s road to peace has been anything but smooth. In the nearly five hundred years since the Spanish conquest of Guatemala, the status of indigenous communities has been defined by stratified social and economic subordination under colonialism; economic and social marginalization; and state-sanctioned violence from independence to the present. Despite being a country where roughly half of the population is estimated to belong to at least one of the twenty-four distinct autochthonous ethnic groups, indigenous Guatemalans continue to face the consequences of negative peace and a tradition of impunity for the powerful elite.