Guatemala - An inclusive democracy?, A Case study of the indigenous inclusion in the democratisation process.

Abstract: This paper studies the inclusion of the indigenous population in the Guatemalan democratisation process. The indigenous population have throughout the history of Guatemala always suffered from exclusion. Thus it is interesting to study if there have been any improvements in their situation since the signing of the peace agreement in 1996. The base of our paper is Donna Le Van Cott’s article, Building inclusive democracies, which we will use to examine to what extent Guatemala has succeeded in building an inclusive democracy. In doing so, we study the implementation of the peace agreements under three criterions; representation, rights and redistribution. Our findings show that due to various political and economical reasons, the implementation of the commitments made in the agreements has not been successful.