Guatemala Revolts

Officials of the Guatemalan government and the rebel Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit will begin a new round of negotiations in Mexico City on Friday, according to Hector Rosada, president of the ruling regime's peace commission. Social, economic and agrarian issues are on the table in the talks being mediated by United Nations representatives. More than 100,000 people are estimated to have died in Guatemala's long-running civil war.

A civilian judge has sentenced two former army officers to seven years in prison for their part in a failed coup attempt last May, army spokesman Col. Luis Arturo Isaacs said Thursday. The former officers, Maj. Gustavo Diaz Lopez and Col. Gustavo Adolfo Padilla Morales, had been stripped of their military rank last year after a previous failed coup attempt on May 11, 1988.

When the survivors of the Rio Negro massacre buried their dead, it was 12 years after the fact. The cracked bones of the 144 Mayan women and children slaughtered by an army patrol had remained hidden in a common grave until a team of forensic anthropologists excavated the site as part of an effort to unearth Guatemala's dark, brutal past. The Rio Negro survivors, whose ancestors populated these highlands 2,000 years ago, gave their relatives funerals in the public cemetery of Rabinal.

Guatemala has reached a peace agreement to end Latin America's longest civil war, Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu and the country's rebels announced separately Monday. The accord ushers in "a final period" of a 35-year war that has taken more than 100,000 lives, and it will be signed Dec. 29 in Guatemala City, Arzu told a summit of Ibero-American presidents meeting here. Later in the day, the Guatemalan guerrillas and the U.N.

Nine people have been killed or kidnaped in this mountain town in the last three months, in a wave of violence that residents and human right workers say stems from an army counterinsurgency campaign. Seven schoolteachers and two bus drivers have fled the town in recent weeks after the army circulated a list, said to have been taken from guerrillas, bearing the names of 192 people.

Three guerrillas died in a raid on the western village of Chel, and five militiamen were wounded repelling the attack, the military said Saturday.

Guatemalan government and rebel leaders are scheduled to resume peace talks today in Mexico's capital after a six-month stalemate. The discussions are aimed at ending the 33-year-old civil war that has killed about 120,000 people in Central America's largest country. Previous talks, initiated when President Jorge Serrano took office in 1991, broke down over human rights enforcement. Currently, the sides are divided over a rebel proposal to negotiate conditions for a cease-fire.

In an effort to end Latin America's longest-running armed conflict, Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano has taken his peace plan on the road. Serrano is calling for an immediate cease-fire with leftist guerrillas and has invited the United Nations to inspect human rights in his country. This week, he began seeking international backing for his proposal, which follows a months-long impasse in the negotiations aimed at ending Guatemala's civil war.

It was a mock tribunal, a staged courtroom drama designed to bring justice to a world that has none. But the tears the witnesses shed were real, as was the litany of horrors presented to the 150 people who gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to listen to tales of torture, murder and kidnaping that have become part of daily life in Guatemala. There was Nineth de Garcia, telling of the day in 1984 her husband was kidnaped by military police and dragged off to a secret prison.