While the country's 36-year civil war ended with a comprehensive peace accord in 1996, the human rights situation has deteriorated since 1998, with tensions rising sharply following efforts by rights groups and the Church to investigate atrocities committed during the war and in advance of next year's presidential elections, in which former President Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled the country at the height of the army's violence against Guatemala's indigenous Mayan communities, is expected to run.
Rios Montt, a militant evangelical Protestant, has long had a hostile relationship with the Church, which has played a leading role in the fight for human rights for several decades. When John Paul II first visited the country in 1983, Rios Montt ordered the execution of six rebel suspects, an act which the pope denounced during his visit as a "very grave offense against God."
Most activists date the return of the deathsquads to the brutal 1998 death of Bishop Juan Gerardi just two days after he delivered the Church's report on a high-profile truth and reconciliation project. It found that the army and army-backed Civil Defense Patrols were responsible for more than 80 percent of the killings which took place during the war.
Four men, including three members of the Presidential Security Guard, an army group long accused of deathsquad activity that was supposed to have been dismantled by the peace accords, were convicted of Gerardi's murder.
Rios Montt, a militant evangelical Protestant, has long had a hostile relationship with the Church, which has played a leading role in the fight for human rights for several decades. When John Paul II first visited the country in 1983, Rios Montt ordered the execution of six rebel suspects, an act which the pope denounced during his visit as a "very grave offense against God."
Most activists date the return of the deathsquads to the brutal 1998 death of Bishop Juan Gerardi just two days after he delivered the Church's report on a high-profile truth and reconciliation project. It found that the army and army-backed Civil Defense Patrols were responsible for more than 80 percent of the killings which took place during the war.
Four men, including three members of the Presidential Security Guard, an army group long accused of deathsquad activity that was supposed to have been dismantled by the peace accords, were convicted of Gerardi's murder.