The major story involving Guatemala internationally, covered widely in the UK press, has been the deaths of eight Guatemalan peacekeepers 23-01-06 in DR Congo. The BBC has followed up the Guatemalan government's questioning of the United Nations as to whether the Guatemalan troops were on a secret mission when they were fatally attacked. The French newspaper Le Monde says the Guatemalan special forces members were on the trail of Vincent Otti, a leader of Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army, who is wanted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

According to AlertNet, Guatemala has 80 peacekeepers in the Congo at present which it intends to keep there. The irony of the new role of the 'kaibiles' as peacekeepers will not be lost on students of recent Guatemalan history. After all, the infamous Kaibil creed of: "If I go forward, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I turn back, kill me", seems to kind of jar with the traditional peacekeeper approach.  

In February 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclaracimiento Histórico, or CEH), the truth and reconciliation body established under United Nations auspices by the 1996 Peace Accords ending the 35-year-long civil war, called attention to the brutalising nature of the training conducted by the Kaibil Centre in its final report, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio ("Guatemala: Memory of Silence"):

The substantiation of the degrading contents of the training of the Army's special counter insurgency force, known as Kaibiles, has drawn the particular attention of the CEH. This training included killing animals and then eating them raw and drinking their blood in order to demonstrate courage. The extreme cruelty of these training methods, according to testimony available to the CEH, was then put into practice in a range of operations carried out by these troops, confirming one point of their decalogue: "The Kaibil is a killing machine." (CEH, §42)