In an unprecedented gesture, the Guatemalan President, Mr Alvaro Arzu, yesterday formally asked his people's forgiveness for the government's role in Central America's bloodiest civil war.
A treaty signed on December 29th, 1996, ended 36 years of hostilities between Marxist guerrillas and a string of mainly right-wing military governments.
Mr Arzu travelled on the second anniversary of the peace deal to Quiche province, site of some of the most brutal massacres.
The conflict, the longest of Central America's Cold War-era civil wars, was marked by army massacres that wiped out many Indian villages and earned Guatemala one of the worst human rights records in the Western hemisphere.
"The state of Guatemala has a responsibility for all the damage done to thousands of Guatemalans and as a representative of [the state] I ask for forgiveness," Mr Arzu told about 5,000 Indians in a football stadium about 100 miles north of Guatemala City.
More than half of Guatemala's 10 million people are Mayan Indians. Their rural mountainside towns were often targeted by the army on suspicion of aiding Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) rebels.