The armed conflict in Guatemala ended in December 1996. The signing of the Peace Agreements marked the end of thirty-six years of armed conflict, leaving behind thousands of people dead, disappeared, and displaced. This war happened against a framework of mass inequality— historically, large sectors of the population had no opportunity to own the land they worked on, a factor that seriously aggravated many peasants and pushed them to join the revolutionary movement.

After the signing, a group of ex-combatants in The Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) demobilized to insert themselves into civilian life once again. Their new era started with the foundation, in February 1998, of the Cooperativa Integral Agrícola Nuevo Horizonte, a community-based organization located in the northern department of Peten. Along with the farm work came the need to build and shore up a new collective identity recovered from memories of the immediate past. With this purpose in mind, residents took values and ideologies from their pasts and reinterpreted them to create the possibility of a new future as civilians.

Eighteen years later, the people of the Nuevo Horizonte Co-Op are still fighting for legal tenure on their land and for basic needs: education, health, and housing. Their revolutionary and reinsertion memories remain foundational to this struggle.

Examples of their efforts to construct a new narrative about themselves rooted in the past are scattered everywhere in the co-op. Some are successful, such as the construction of various territorial markers and a few collective and individual photographic collections. Others remain challenges, such as how to best incorporate youth who never experienced the war into the community.

Framed in this historical process, my research explores how this group of ex-combatants constructs memories around the armed conflict and their efforts to reinsert themselves into society. It explores the role that photography plays in constructing memories and the problems that come with attempts to incorporate audiovisual media into this construction during the ethnographic process.