Peace Education in Contexts of Transition From Armed Conflict in Latin America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia

Peacebuilding in transition scenarios is a challenge that societies assume from different perspectives. One approach is educational transformations. This article analyzes Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia's experiences in their transition contexts that resulted from negotiation processes and included educational components. We reviewed their educational policies and curriculums and discussed with specialists in education and peace. Implementing a critical analysis of discourses, we seek to identify the relationship between implemented educational policies and the international context, the characteristic of specific educational initiatives, and the senses of education in transition scenarios. As results, we can identify that educational transformation to promote peace and citizenship are build according to the local and global contexts, most of the time omitting sensitive parts of the history. Educational initiatives are relegated to debates related to behaviors, values, and coexistence, but there are few approaches to the past and memory. Public Significance Statement This study shows how educational guidelines: Norms, public policies, and course offerings are conditions for the establishment of peace processes in contexts of transition in Central America and Latin America. Similarly, as in education, there are disputes over shaping collective understanding matrices different from war; the collective construction of nonviolence is not homogeneous or standard in each of the countries in transition. This study can be a reference to establish public policies that involve the peace education as a central axis to articulate strategies in transition contexts. It allows recognizing lessons learned from the historical experiences of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia.