Guatemalan Genocide

This article's content is marked as Mature The page Guatemalan Genocide contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page.

The Guatemalan Genocide, also referred to as the Maya Genocide or the Silent Holocaust, was the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan military government's counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War. It is arguably the best known example of a genocide of indigenous peoples in Central America.

Background

Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1954 when military rule began in Guatemala following Carlos Castillo Armas's rise to power via the U.S.-backed coup d'état. Systematic repression and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which U.S. officials were aware of, but genocide of the Mayan population didn't officially begin until the 1960s.

A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". Human Rights Watch has described "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.

The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the leftist EGP guerrillas operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya – traditionally seen as subhumans – 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 civil war, the systematic use of terror against them began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. Many killings were carried out by the Mano Blanca death squad.

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. Children were often targets of mass killings by the army including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982.

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared". 93% of civilian executions were carried out by government forces. Of the 42,275 individual cases of killing and "disappearances" documented by the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino. The CEH in 1999 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.

Former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide. He was convicted in 2013, but that sentence was overturned and his retrial was not completed by the time of his death in 2018.

Fernando Romeo Lucas García, Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, and Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores also presided over the genocide during their respective tenures as President of Guatemala, but none of them were ever convicted of any crimes.