Álvaro Arzú
Álvaro Arzú was president of Guatemala from 1996 to 2000, the businessman and former mayor of the capital from one of the country's oldest families who signed, on 29 December 1996 in the national palace, the accord for a firm and lasting peace that ended the thirty-six-year war between the state and the guerrillas of the URNG in which two hundred thousand people had died, most of them Maya villagers killed by the army in the early 1980s. He then did the things the accords required and the things they did not. The guerrillas were demobilised and the army cut by a third and its counter-insurgency bases closed. The truth commission was allowed to report in 1999 that the state had committed genocide. The electricity and the telephone companies were sold and the roads were built, and the constitutional reforms that would have recognised the Maya languages and limited the army were rejected in the referendum of May 1999 by a fifth of the electorate. The murder of Bishop Gerardi in April 1998, two days after he had presented the Church's own report on the war's dead, was solved by the courts in 2001 with the conviction of three officers of the presidential guard. The question of what the palace had known was never answered. He was born in Guatemala City in 1946, studied law at the Rafael Landívar University, and ran the tourism institute in the 1970s. He was mayor of the capital from 1986 to 1990, when he founded the National Advancement Party as the party of the modernising business right. He lost the presidential election of 1990 before winning that of 1995 in a run-off by thirty thousand votes. After the presidency he was mayor of the capital again for four terms, from 2004 to his death, the office he preferred. He built the Transmetro buses and the cycle lanes and ran the city as a fief. He died in office in April 2018 of a heart attack while playing golf, at seventy-two, under investigation by the international anti-corruption commission that Morales's government expelled the next year. His son was president of the congress.
- Lived: 1946 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, politician
