There is a misconception that when the fighting stops, the war is over. That there will be no more bloodshed, no more insanity. This is especially true for the more than the estimated 250,000 traumatized children from the former Portuguese colony which, after 16 years of civil war, formally signed a peace accord in 1992. But little was done for the mental health of the soldiers, who continue to suffer flashbacks of past atrocities and continue to use extreme levels of violence in their communities.
Suicide is also on the increase.
Such community support systems are not always available in all parts of the world, nor do they always reach a majority of the victims. The selective target of the forced military recruitment focused mostly on young male indigenous children, from the age of 14, from poor, rural highland communities. If adequate programs for the treatment of psycho-trauma inflicted upon the children are no implemented in Guatemala, the report states, then the child victims will, as they grow older, continue to imitate the trauma they have suffered on other children. An estimated 20,000 soldiers will be demobilized in Guatemala after the signing of peace in Guatemala later this month. Thousands of indigenous girls were raped by the Guatemalan military, and over the past four decades of undeclared war in Guatemala, mostly young girls from indigenous communities who, under the arrogance of the armed uniformed perpetrators, were the spoils of war and rape was used as a mechanism to trigger terror, a strategy of using women and children as instruments of victory.