Abstract

On the evening of August 12, 1987, in the grand ballroom of the poshest hotel in Guatemala City, the High Command of the Guatemalan Army took the unprecedented step of conducting a public forum to explain the strategy behind the past 27 years of counterinsurgency and how success in that war had led, step by step, to the present “democracy” in Guatemala. Although the forum was nominally open to the public, the audience consisted of high-level business leaders and top government functionaries. The exclusivity of the audience was no surprise, since the forum was sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.