Poverty Crushes Guatemala
After having signed a peace agreement, extreme poverty currently affects over 60 percent of the population in Guatemala, where the war wages on, analysts said here.

Amid the armed conflict in 1989, about 80 percent of Guatemalans were poor, and 59.3 lived in abject poverty, chiefly in rural areas, a situation that experts consider has not changed in the Central American country.

"The social stage set by the war still prevails," said Nadia Sandoval, from Human Rights International Investigation Center in Guatemala City.

The representative of the European Commission in Guatemala, Jo úo Melo de Sampaio, said it was a contradiction to have an apparently stable macro-economy to international eyes while there are such domestic impoverishment exists.

According to local press, the country is not only socially divided with a high percentage of abandoned native people in the countryside, but huge differences in the concentration of wealth.