Guatemalan genocide

Guatemalan genocide
Part of Guatemalan Civil War
Excavation of the corpses of victims of the Guatemalan Civil War in Comalapa, Chimaltenango.
LocationGuatemala
Date
TargetMaya peoples, alleged communists
Attack type
Forced disappearance, genocide, genocidal massacre, summary executions, torture, sexual violence, war crimes, crimes against humanity
Deaths
  • Silent Holocaust period (1981-1983): 162,000 total including 134,600 Maya[1][a]
  • Civil War: 200,000 total[2] including 166,000 Maya[3]
PerpetratorsU.S.-backed military Guatemalan government, local militias
Motive

The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide,[3] or the Silent Holocaust[4] (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco, Genocidio maya, or Holocausto silencioso), was the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive US-backed Guatemalan military governments.[5] Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of.[6][7][8] A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror".[9] Human Rights Watch has described "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.[10]

The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against them began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s.[11] The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict[12] and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A March 1985 study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court estimated that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war, and that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed between 1980 and 1985.[13] Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982.[14]

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the war, including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared".[2] 92% of civilian executions were carried out by government forces.[2] The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) documented 42,275 victims of human rights violations and acts of violence from 7,338 testimonies.[15][16] 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino.[17] 91% of victims were killed in 1978 through 1984, 81% in 1981 through 1983, with 48% of deaths occurring in 1982 alone.[1] In its final report in 1999, the CEH concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the Armed Forces of Guatemala, and that US training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation", but that the US was not directly responsible for any genocidal acts.[18][11][19][7][20] Former military dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide. He was convicted in 2013 of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Indigenous group,[21] but that sentence was overturned, and his retrial was not completed by the time of his death in 2018.

  1. ^ a b "Guatemala". Mass Atrocity Endings. Retrieved 8 November 2023.
  2. ^ a b c Guatemala: Memory of Silence (PDF). Guatemala City: Historical Clarification Commission. 1999. pp. 17–23.
  3. ^ a b Foster, Lynn V. Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World (PDF). p. 84. While only limited violence has accompanied the on-going Zapatista movement in Chiapas, a holocaust occurred in Guatemala. Highland Maya civilians were the victims of a 36-year civil war in which 900,000 of them were displaced from their lands, many of them becoming refugees in Mexico, Belize, and the United States, and another 166,000 were killed or 'disappeared'. By the time a cease-fire was declared in 1996, the Maya constituted 83 percent of the war dead. A United Nations study stated that Guatemala's war policies had been tantamount to Maya genocide.[permanent dead link]
  4. ^ "Guatemala 1982". Peace Pledge Union Information. Archived from the original on 3 February 2004. Retrieved 11 September 2016.
  5. ^ Malkin, Elisabeth (16 May 2013). "Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 July 2023. The U.S. played a very powerful and direct role in the life of this institution, the army, that went on to commit genocide
  6. ^ Group says files show U.S. knew of Guatemala abuses. The Associated Press via the New York Daily News, 19 March 2009. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
  7. ^ a b Navarro, Mireya (26 February 1999). "Guatemalan Army Waged 'Genocide', New Report Finds". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 November 2016.
  8. ^ Blakeley, Ruth (2009). State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South. Routledge. pp. 91-94. ISBN 978-0415686174.
  9. ^ Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984, pp. 2–3
  10. ^ "Human Rights Testimony Given Before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus" (Press release). Human Rights Watch. 16 October 2003. Retrieved 3 September 2009.
  11. ^ a b Cooper, Allan (2008). The Geography of Genocide. University Press of America. p. 171. ISBN 978-0761840978.
  12. ^ The Secrets in Guatemala’s Bones. The New York Times. 30 June 2016.
  13. ^ "Civil Patrols in Guatemala: An Americas Watch Report". America's Watch: Page 6. August 1986.
  14. ^ Schirmer 1988, p. 55.
  15. ^ Nelson, Diane M. (2018). "Bonesetting: The Algebra of Genocide". In Oglesby, Elizabeth; M. Nelson, Diane (eds.). Guatemala, the Question of Genocide. Routledge. pp. 37–54. ISBN 978-1351401326.
  16. ^ Guatemala: Memory of Silence (PDF). Guatemala City: Historical Clarification Commission. 1999. p. 17.
  17. ^ Guatemala: Memory of Silence (PDF). Guatemala City: Historical Clarification Commission. 1999. pp. 17, 85.
  18. ^ Guatemala: Memory of Silence (PDF). Guatemala City: Historical Clarification Commission. 1999. pp. 19, 38–41.
  19. ^ Guatemala, 1981–1984 Archived 26 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine. Rutgers–Newark Colleges of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
  20. ^ Valentino, Benjamin A. (2005). Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Cornell University Press. p. 27. ISBN 978-0801472732.
  21. ^ "Guatemala's Rios-Montt found guilty of genocide". BBC News. 11 May 2013.


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