Skip to content
Sunday, August 30, 2026 · Guatemala CityQ7.6242 per US$+0.00%
ADVANCE GUATEMALA
Back to the researchResearched · unverified

The investor atlas

The Decree 19-2016 cutback of incentives

Dossier
The legal framework for foreign investment02-marco-legal.md
Domain
The decrees that create the incentiveslegal-incentivos
Room
Invest · The 29-89 regime: benefits and qualification/invertir/incentivos-fiscales
Audited
not audited

The Emergency Law for the Conservation of Employment (Decree 19-2016) was passed as a matter of national urgency by 112 votes to 10 and took effect on 31 March 2016. It responded to Guatemala's commitments at the WTO to eliminate export subsidies. It confined the benefits of Decrees 29-89 and 65-89 to three sectors: (i) apparel and textiles, (ii) call/contact centers and (iii) software development, while confirming the income-tax exemption for up to 10 years and the temporary suspension of duties. It also abolished the commercial-user category (marketing/re-export) in free zones. An investor outside those three sectors has no access to these regimes today, except for the activities reopened in free zones by Decree 6-2021.

The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.

Figures

Votación Decreto 19-2016elPeriódico
112 a favor / 10 en contramarzo 2016
Entrada en vigorelPeriódico
31 de marzo de 20162016
Sectores que conservan beneficiosLexology
3 (vestuario/textiles, call centers, software)desde 2016

Caveat

secondary sources; the text of the decree was not read directly

Sources

Related records

This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.