HAVERFORD POLITICAL SCIENTIST
AMONG ELECTION OBSERVERS FOR GUATEMALA NATIONAL ELECTIONS
On November 9, Guatemala held
national elections for the second time since the end of its
brutal 36-year-old civil war during which an estimated 200,000
Guatemalans were either killed or disappeared.
In the days leading up to
and following the Guatemalan elections, Haverford College political
scientist Anita Isaacs was part of a team of election observers
representing the Organization of American States. Since the
Guatemalan peace accords were signed in 1996, Isaacs has spent
considerable time in that country studying the challenges of
peace building there. Because the current regime has permitted
the resurgence of some of the most repressive and corrupt elements
from the authoritarian, wartime era, Isaacs believes that the
outcome on November 9 is absolutely crucial.
“One of the leading
contenders for the presidency is Rios Montt, a former general
– now president of Guatemala’s congress –
who was a dictator during the worst of the repression,”
says Isaacs. “ He and his party have reversed the initial
progress made towards the end of the 1990s.” She also
notes that there also has been a resurgence of political violence
against those Guatemalans seeking some kind of reckoning or
accounting for the past.
Following the completion of
her last book project, The Politics of Military Rule and
Transition in Ecuador, Isaacs turned her attention toward
researching the ways in which the international community can
contribute to the building of democracy.
“Although the international
community was not central to the democratization that swept
through Latin America in the 1970s and ‘80s, it did play
a secondary role, principally because of the Carter administration’s
emphasis on human rights as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy,”
explains Isaacs. She points out that under the Reagan administration,
the emphasis on American foreign policy shifted away from human
rights narrowly defined toward the notion of exporting democracy,
a theory of which Isaacs remains skeptical.
“In the case of Guatemala,
the international community did play a role with regard to that
country’s peace accord,” says Isaacs,” but
I believe that in the long run the success of peace hinges on
Guatemala’s resolve to continue toward peace.”
Isaacs is being accompanied
by her research assistant of the past several years, Virginie
Ladisch, a 2000 Haverford graduate, who has studied reconciliation
in South Africa and Guatemala.
Prior to joining Haverford’s
political science department in 1988, Isaacs worked as a program
officer for the Ford Foundation funding initiatives relating
to international affairs, governance and human rights in Latin
America and the Caribbean. She earned her undergraduate degree
in political science at McGill University, and her D.Phil in
politics at the University of Oxford.
Isaacs, who holds the Stinnes
Professorship in Global Studies, has focused much of her research
on both Ecuadorian and Guatemalan politics. She has published
a book and several articles on the politics of military rule,
transition and democratic consolidation in Ecuador. For the
past several years she has been researching and writing about
the challenges of peace building in Guatemala. Her work is particularly
concerned with the topic of transitional justice, and the problematic
relationship between the search for truth about Guatemala's
wartime past, reconciliation and democracy.
