AAAS Science and Human Rights Program

Assistance to the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)

The thirty-six year Guatemalan armed conflict ended on 31 December 1996 when the government signed a peace accord with the URNG insurgents. Part of the accords directed the United Nations to organize a Commission of Historical Clarification (known as the CEH by its Spanish acronym), similar to what in other countries has been called a truth commission.

The Commissioners invited the Program to advise them on the development and implementation of an information management system. During 1998 and 1999, Deputy Program Director Patrick Ball spent eleven weeks in Guatemala working with the Commission, and twelve weeks in preparatory or follow-up work.

In addition to designing the quantitative analysis used in the CEH report, AAAS prepared a scientific projection of the total number of deaths in Guatemala. The method adapts a well-known demographic technique to human rights in an entirely new application. Given the particular problems with the available data, the AAAS team developed innovative techniques to estimate the error of the projection. The scientific projection was possible because of the existence of two other large-scale databases in Guatemala in addition to the data collected by the CEH. The Guatemalan Archbishop’s Project for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (REMHI) and the International Center for Human Rights Research (CIIDH, see below) also conducted interviews and coded their data in formats that could be compared with the Commission’s data. Using data from all three projects, the AAAS team was able to estimate the number of deaths excluded from the three studies, which, when summed with the documented deaths, yielded an estimate of the total.

The CEH report used the most advanced information management and analysis methods of any truth commission to date, and the report has been well-received in Guatemala. The CEH concluded that 93% of the violations were committed by the government, and 3% by the guerrillas; that more than 200,000 people were killed during the conflict; and that in certain regions and against people of certain ethnicities the army committed genocide.

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