The foundational moment of Guatemala’s contemporary State : the transitional road to democracy and its influence in time

Abstract

This document develops a revision done to the process of transition towards democracy live in Guatemala around the middle eighties, making a critical and detailed evalution of the main events and how they influenced on the constitution of a new model of State. The research work allowed finding out intricacies of the process through several direct actors of the transition. After the democratic decade lived from 1944 through 1954, different from other studies, this research work points at the year 1973 as the slow beginning of a journey that would encounter different obstacles and some facts that turned out to be catalysts of the transition. Furthermore, it explains how the military-oligarchic system generated its own entropy and provided a scenario appropriate for changes that ended up in a new system. The role of politics in the process is highlighted and the influence of the christian-democrat way of thinking on the new Constitution, as well as a revision of the new institutional design. The research work also introduces the type of State built in regards to a historical evolution, closing with the implications the coup of 1993 had, the return to constitutional order and the constitutional reforms of that same year that somehow altered the original model.