his immunity and was arrested. It took a year for the trial to start, and I was an expert witness in the trial. Rio was convicted but 10 days later the conviction was barricaded by another court on procedural grounds and the case may have to be repeated at the same time with other cases that are coming forward pretty quickly. There were discoveries of various state archives –a huge cache amounting to nearly five million documents from a police archive dating back to the 1800s, but definitely covering the period of urban repression and the latter part of the 20th century, was discovered a few years ago. Human rights activists have been working very hard to preserve and catalog these documents. This has started to bear fruit in terms of prosecutions and also in terms of finding out what happened to some of the disappeared. So what do we get from Guatemala’s TC? Do we get some form of social reconciliation? I would have to say NO in the case of Guatemala when I look at the title of this panel in terms of promoting peace and reconciliation with perpetrators, because there was very little of that in the Guatemala case. The nature of the transition itself does not represent enough power sharing but reflects domination by the army itself. The government also never really accepted or assimilated the findings of the Report. So what exists is a kind of a hostile state towards the Truth Commission. Conditions in most areas were not conducive for reconciliation. You had in some areas victims and perpetrators still living together under conditions of a general dearth of prosecutions against perpetrators. There are also lots of grey areas, which are not being addressed, for instance, there are members of the civil patrol who were both victims and perpetrators. This complicated things. Many people in Guatemala would say “how could we have reconciliation, we never had conciliation”. In other words we don’t have a traditional harmonious society that we can look back to. The cleavages in our society are very profound. But I do believe there are some good things that came out of the Guatemala TC in terms of dignification for the victims. The willingness of the UN to call this process and brand it a genocide, the involvement of human rights groups and, in communities, the realisation that what had happened to them was part of a larger national problem. So it had the effect of de-privatisation of guilt. The TC also helped not only to reveal the violations that people experienced, but the process also helped explain why they were targeted, what we call contextualisation of violations. So there 52 The Second International Conference on Transitional Justice in Zimbabwe