Is Peace Possible?

As I was reading Lovell's stories I had the same reaction as many others have previously stated, I was stuck wondering if things would ever get better. Reading accounts of these people that Lovell had known and many others that were violently murdered for no real reason. I found it hard to understand that being a school teacher is a reason to be killed. Whether or not this is "subversive" it still is so hard for me to grasp that someone could be killed for this reason or any of the other numerous murders that had no real precedence. Reading all of these gruesome stories of bodies being found and families not even being able to claim the bodies of their loved ones because of fear of association, I really started to wonder why nothing was done about this. Why was there no prosecution for all these killings. But as it is explained later, "having the will to prosecute means taking enormous risk"(89), and with this I see a viscous cycle beginning as there is not way to stop the murders because any attempt at this will only get someone else murdered.

As I read about the search for peace something that really caught my attention was a point made by Lovell on pg. 95, that although everyone is searching for peace and freedom from the military, "also difficult to imagine politics in Guatemala without some kind of military involvement." This really is an interesting way of looking at the search for peace. Even if by some miracle someone comes to power that may bring about some good for the country, there will still always be a struggle of taking away power from the military that they have been given for so many years. Thinking about this just makes the search for peace seem that much harder. As I read about president after president like Rios Montt who brought on " the bloodiest time Maya have known" (59). I began to lose hope that there would ever be a way to bring peace to the people in Guatemala. Like Grace, I began to wonder about the whole idea of war, however I had to come to the conclusion that there will never be a world without it. It's human nature to seek power and this is a quality that leads some down a path of total destruction where they will do anything and everything, like killing millions of people, to attain this power. It's horrible to realize this is true but it seems that war is an inevitable downfall to human nature.