Rich, Poor and the War - a simplistic view

From 1960 through 1996 a war was fought between the poor people of Guatemala and the army. The simplistic view is that the Guatemalan army maintained immoral social-economic relationships. A few land owners became wealthy on the work of the many. The workers - primarily indigenous, were given too little education to participate in a modern economy, and too little money for their work to support families in anything more than squalor. The people tilled by hand crops of vegetables and coffee. As the workers were driven into poverty rebellion broke out and the army was called in to enforce peace. The army became a law unto itself and repressed the rebellion most brutally. The people, now with murdered family members and murdered friends as well as empty bellies, fought back as best they could. Rebel leaders and hundreds of thousands of others filtered into the relative safety of southern Mexico. The Catholic Church, siding with the poor, became a target of army death squads.

... my view

Above is a simplistic view and it is my view - an arrogant army brutal suppressed a downtrodden people. I see the people in the fields to this very day. Boys begin working the fields in their early teens, hoeing and pumping pesticides by sunrise. Women find what work they can, weaving and washing and more. The workers of the fields and their families live 6 and 10 to a few hundred square feet. Usually floors are dirt, walls are sticks and roofs are tin. Water, not fit for drinking, is drawn at nearby public wells. I often get an eerie feeling that I have slipped through the cracks of time, tumbling into a Biblical village.

Reuters story about illustrative events at the end of the war