Introduction
For nearly forty years, Guatemalan society has lived with a silence meant to conceal the excesses committed by the State: first, between 1954 and 1962 in the context of the process of institutionalizing violence, and then, from the early sixties to the present, under the aegis of its counterinsurgency policy. The Guatemalan government developed a policy of terror using the armed insurgency that emerged in 1962 as the excuse. Directed initially at the population in the eastern part of the country, it spread throughout most of the national territory beginning in 1975, with particular emphasis on the central and western highlands, home to the majority of populations of Mayan origin.
At the beginning of the eighties, with support and advice, in some cases overt and in others covert, from the United States, Israel, Taiwan, Argentina, Chile, and South Africa, the Guatemalan army adapted, developed, and implemented a counterinsurgency strategy. Based on the principle of "draining the sea," it sought to defeat the insurgent movement through the elimination of large segments of the civilian population in rural areas. This was based on the premise that the civilians were the water that the fish -- the insurgents -- needed to survive.
The results were catastrophic. United States anthropologist Shelton Davis compared the impact of the counterinsurgency strategy to the impact in Mayan communities of the sixteenth century Spanish invasion. He pointed out that the dimension of that "demographic, social, and cultural ‘holocaust’ would not be known until several decades later" when future generations of researchers had the historical distance necessary to assess the effects of the violence (Davis: 1991).
It is hoped that this work will contribute to the efforts of civil society in general, and particularly human rights organizations, to understand the causes and effects of the terror that enveloped Guatemala in the recent past, through an analysis of the information about acts of political violence contained in the data base compiled by CIIDH in conjunction with Guatemalan grassroots and human rights organizations and with the support of international institutions.
To place the information in the data base in context, as an input or instrument to investigate the socio-political situation in Guatemala, an analysis is presented of certain aspects of the Guatemalan government’s counterinsurgency policy in the period between July 1980 and June 1984 in the municipalities of Nebaj, El Quiché, in the Northwestern region; Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, in the Central Plateau area; and Santo Domingo Suchitepéquez, Suchitepéquez, on the Southern Coast. A portion of the information presented here is drawn from the collaborative effort between CIIDH and GAM.