I was briefly detained by the Guatemalan military in the mid-80s. They had stopped the bus I was on to check for papers and detained me for a couple hours. It wouldn't had been such a deal had there not had been a reputation for people "disappearing" after such stops. While I was scared shitless throughout, the individual soldiers were pretty cool in my interactions with them.

Lots of stories from the mid-80s there, like finding a decapitated body on a river bank and, the next day, the head.

The military was always scarier that the guerrillas. I once hitched a ride with some guerrillas. I was thumbing for a ride, and a pickup stopped. Hopped in the back, only to find that it was full of assault weapons. (For all the gun enthusiasts here, I wouldn't be able to tell what they were.) They gave took me to the town where I was heading, and I bought them lunch when we got there. They seemed to have no concern about parking a pickup with guns in the bed while eating lunch. But this was a town that had known revolutionary sympathies.