Social Movements and the Government Response

In order to understand the social dynamics that led to the Guatemalan government’s use of terror as a form of social control, it is necessary to discuss two key phenomena regarding the organization and participation of the rural population in general, and the Mayan population in particular, in the political context of the country. The first is the agrarian crisis, with profound historic and social roots, that was exposed by the 1944 revolution and peaked during the post revolutionary period, lasting for more than two decades. The other, closely linked to the first, is the increased awareness and resulting organization of the rural population.

As already mentioned, these phenomena appeared, and were related in some ways to the processes associated with the 1944 Revolution and the counterrevolution of 1954. Without trying to discuss them in depth, we will summarize them briefly.

The acute crisis in Guatemalan agriculture is the result of the concentrated and exclusive economic model that prevailed until mid-century. During the revolutionary decade, the freedoms achieved revealed that 75 per cent of the country’s population -- the rural population -- lived in desperation caused by lack of access to land. This historic and social lack of access became more pronounced as population increases led to the fragmentation of small landholdings.

During the twenty-five year period from 1950 to 1975, the number of rural families unable to meet their basic survival needs due to insufficient land increased from 308,700 to 431,000, while the average size of the agricultural unit in the central and western highlands decreased from 1.3 to 0.85 hectares per person [Tr. note: one hectare is equivalent to 2.47 acres] (Davis: 1991).

The government of Jacobo Arbenz attempted to address the deepening rural crisis through an Agrarian Reform that expropriated 603,615 hectares of unused lands. The intended beneficiaries of the revolutionary policies could not be reached, however, since, in 1954, a CIA- sponsored invasion overthrew the government and the majority of expropriated lands were returned to their former owners by the new regime.

In addition to the political costs, the counterrevolutionary agrarian policies increased the number of rural poor. Over the next twenty years, this led to significant, accelerated seasonal migration from the highlands to the southern coastal region. From 1960-1970, some 300,000 highland residents emigrated yearly to coastal farms in search of work, remaining there for periods of two to six months (Davis: 1991).

Prestigious American linguist and analyst Noam Chomsky described this situation as follows: "The first democratic government in Guatemala’s history, modeled after Roosevelt’s New Deal, produced a bitter antagonism with the United States. In 1954, the CIA engineered a coup that transformed Guatemala into a hell on earth. This has remained the case ever since...." (Cited in Quan: mo date).

Intimately linked to the historical disparities in Guatemalan agriculture, the second phenomenon that must be considered is the "consciousness-raising" of the rural population, beginning with the first Revolutionary government. During this time, the peasant and indigenous populations had an unprecedented opportunity to freely organize through entities like the General Confederation of Guatemalan Workers (CGTG), and the National Peasant Confederation of Guatemala (CNCG), both were significantly involved in organizing in the departments, and forming rural unions during the early years of the Revolution (EAFG: 1995).

In response to the deepening agrarian crisis, and with the support of the Arbenz government, rural organization gained impetus. It was structured through Local Agrarian Committees which were the executive bodies of the Agrarian Reform decreed in 1952. These operated at the departmental, municipal, and community (villages, hamlets, and farms) levels, working administratively to facilitate peasant farmers’ access to state institutions (Paz C.: 1986).

The traditional exclusion of the rural population was interrupted abruptly by the revolutionary initiative. The participation of this important sector of the population in the political and social life of the country was accomplished through the 1,496 Local Agrarian Committees operating in 1953, mainly in the departments with the highest degree of disparity regarding land and where the Agrarian Reform was broadest. Through these committees, rural farmers could confront landowners, denounce the existence of untilled lands, and organize the distribution of the latter. The agrarian committee structure later became a target of repression when the government fell in 1954, to the extreme that most of the members of such organizations were murdered (Paz C.: 1986).

Despite the later dismantling of the committees and the rural divisions produced by the manipulation of political parties angling for power, rural organization played a decisive role in the country during the revolutionary decade. Sociologist Guillermo Paz C. believes that the Local Agrarian Committees were so influential that the roots of the struggles of rural populations as recently as the early eighties can be traced to them (Paz C.: 1986).

To counter this influence, the Castillo Armas government unleashed a "wave of terror" in the countryside aimed at exterminating the leaders and members of the committees and other grassroots organizations. At the same time, he appointed his own sympathizers, mostly military and landowners, as municipal mayors and departmental governors to ensure the return of properties confiscated under Arbenz and to effectively control the population (Jonas: 1994).

Although the original purpose of the repression was to dismantle rural and urban organizations and check the effects of the Agrarian Reform, it was not long before violent acts were extended to all those suspected of being "red," a term applied to those who were in some way linked, or merely had sympathized, with the Arbenz government. It is well known that in the political history of Guatemala, violence repeatedly has been used as a means of social control. However, many believe that terror was institutionalized during the counterrevolution of 1954 -in other words, the exercise of political power through threats and systematic, methodical repression.

The State response to incipient organizing processes in Guatemala does not appear to have been spontaneous. George Kennan, staff director of the U.S. State Department until 1950, stated that the use of force was necessary to counteract the impact on U.S. security of "communist" governments in Latin America. He remarked, "the ultimate response may be unpleasant...but we must not waver before police repression by local governments. This is not a disgrace since communists essentially are traitors....it is better to have a strong regime in power than to have a liberal government that is indulgent and relaxed, and infiltrated by communists," (cited in Quan: no date).

Far from stemming political turmoil, the terror unleashed by the government intensified the existing contradictions, which in turned strengthened grassroots organization. Although the movements associated with the CGTG and the CNCG virtually disappeared, their place was filled by the Catholic Action movement. The latter originally had been promoted by the counterrevolutionary government itself and the Catholic Church hierarchy as a means of combating the influence of the Agrarian Reform.

Ironically, once it had established its own course, this movement would challenge the established power structures and become the social base of the Christian Democratic party which advocated social change based on the social doctrine of the [Catholic] Church. This dynamic led to an important movement toward ethnic revival and rural modernization which, combined with a religious posture of renewal, prompted the emergence of a new cooperative movement and the Peasant Leagues (Ligas Campesinas), an organization to promote the participation, and defend the interests, of the indigenous population (Sierra and Siebers: 1990).

The Sixties and Seventies

The armed insurgency. Following the overthrow of Arbenz, some groups identified with the revolutionary regime of 1944, proposed armed struggle as the means to take power. Some years later, cadres of the Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT) added an armed branch called "October 20," a reference to the triumph of the 1944 Revolution. The scant military experience of the combatants defeated the initiative soon after it began.

Further, following the failed military uprising of November 13, 1960, to overthrow President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a group of army officers who had rejected the government’s offer of amnesty sought the support of student groups and PGT members to form a guerrilla group. This group, called the November 13 Revolutionary Movement (MR-13) emerged in early 1962. After a number of actions with little military impact, the MR-13 obtained the support of a considerable number of peasants in Izabal.

After attempting several isolated military actions, these organizations, the PGT, and the April 12 Movement made up of students, decided to form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) in December 1962. They were joined by some former army officers and agricultural laborers from the northeastern part of the country who were organized in the M-13 (Frank: 1979).

At first, the government lacked the military capacity to control the insurgency. However, it soon received U.S. assistance to incorporate new methods of counterinsurgency warfare, particularly beginning in 1966. These methods extended to the civilian population and their organizations, turning them into targets of state terror carried out by death squads and indiscriminate bombardments that included the use of napalm. After seven years of generalized repression and 30,000 mostly civilian deaths, the government succeeded in defeating the insurgent forces (Arias: 1984).

Following the defeat of the insurgency in the late sixties, some FAR members decided to continue the revolutionary struggle, but with a more comprehensive approach. This meant incorporating the indigenous population and building a broad social support base, first in rural areas and then in urban centers. Thus, beginning in 1972, The Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organization of the Armed People (ORPA) commenced a process of political -- military organization among the rural and indigenous population in the northern El Quiché department, Huehuetenango, San Marcos, and Quetzaltenango.

After several years of political work, the EGP emerged publicly in 1975 in the Ixcán region of El Quiché department. The ORPA emerged in 1979 in the western part of the country. In conjunction with these organizations, the FAR also renewed its political-military operations in the departments of El Petén, and part of Alta Verapaz. The PGT continued its political work in urban centers and the Southern Coast, participating in the armed struggle through a few military cells.

Grassroots Organization and Peasant Struggles. Meanwhile, in urban centers, the Guatemalan labor movement had coalesced into the National Committee of Labor Unity (CNUS). This organization, founded in April of 1976, maintained close ties with diverse rural organizations with which it coordinated a series of protests against the ongoing militarization of rural areas. The level of mobilization achieved exceeded government expectations when the 1977 march of indigenous miners from Ixtahuacán amassed 100,000 people, including residents of the northwestern part of the county and Guatemala city. Later, the level of organization and coordination between grassroots rural and urban movements was evident in the peasant protests in Panzós in May 1978, which culminated in the massacre of 105 people.

In this context, innovative organizational alternatives produced by the new doctrine of "preferential option for the poor" adopted by the Catholic Church after Vatican Council II in 1962 and the 1968 Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in Medellin, Colombia, created the possibility of organizing Christian Base Communities. A pastoral approach based on this model was designed with the goal of strengthening the ties between the rural population and the Church. This led, in 1972, to the Movement of Delegates of the Word of God (Ak’Kután: 1994).

This growing rural organization stemmed from the Delegates of the Word’s previous involvement in Catholic Action -- the platforms of development and demands that the Church had been promoting for years were not new to them. With growing poverty and increased terror, the rural population, and particularly the Mayan population, were seeking new organizational methods that would enable them to confront the economic, political, and social crises in the country. Their past participation in Church base organizations had contributed to their "consciousness-raising" or "sociological awakening" as Shelton Davis refers to this process, which broadened the horizons of grassroots demands (Davis: 1991).

As the economic crisis and repression became more acute, peasant leaders and rural laborers from different regions, but particularly the highlands and Southern Coast, organized to articulate their demands from a legal, but openly adversarial, platform, as the situation in the country required (Bran: 1985). The Committee of Campesino Unity (CUC) was founded in this way, made up primarily of members of the Movement of Delegates of the Word and the Peasant Leagues. The CUC emerged publicly in April 1978, although the idea, and early meetings regarding its formation, date back to 1974.

In this context, many labor, peasant, student, Christian, and community organizations expressed their opinions and their diverse struggles, eventually becoming a grassroots movement of an adversarial nature (CITGUA: 1988). This movement’s peak in terms of its level of organization and tremendous ability to mobilize coincided with the advance of insurgent movements in Central America in general, and in Guatemala specifically.

These circumstances led to the decapitation of the grassroots movement, which began systematically in 1979 and intensified in 1980 and 1981. At that time, using selective terror tactics, the State dismantled the National Workers Central, the CNUS, the Autonomous Labor Federation of Guatemala (FASGUA), the Guatemalan Workers Federation (FTG), and the Federation of Bank Employees and Insurance Unions (FESEBS) (CITGUA: 1988).

Meanwhile, in the countryside, amidst tremendous social upheaval manifested by countless peasant and grassroots protests that were repressed harshly by the government, the CUC showed its mettle: in February and March 1980, it paralyzed the economy by halting the operations of fourteen sugar mills and seventy large plantations on the Southern Coast. The demand for a daily wage of 3.20 Quetzales (equal to 65 cents) led 80,000 peasants, agricultural day laborers, men, and women to strike and to endure the ensuing governmental harassment and repression for seventeen days (CITGUA: 1988).

These kinds of demonstrations, besides their obvious ability to mobilize, became a symbol of the historical demands of the rural and Mayan populations. While repression precluded residents of the highlands from publicly demonstrating against the abuses they suffered, the CUC demonstrated openly in the agro-export regions, becoming the mouthpiece of those who endured terror in silence.

The rigidity of the Guatemalan agricultural oligarchy, and the political inability of the State to resolve social conflicts, impeded political solutions to the crisis. A CIDCA study found that "violence in Guatemala is directly related to the evolution of socio-economic struggles -- that is, class struggles -- and has particular impact on the working and lower classes," (CIDCA: 1980).

When the scant negotiating space still allowed by the government disappeared, most of the remaining peasant organizations desisted from their public activities and their leaders were obliged to remain in clandestinity. At the same time, thousands of indigenous peasants with no possibility of political participation chose to provide logistical support to the insurgent groups, or joined their ranks as combatants.

U.S. researcher Douglas Kincaid reasons that while economic factors such as the partial "proletarization" of the peasants and their labor struggles influenced their decision to join the armed struggle, this process was spurred by "organizational, political, and cultural factors: the growth of the cooperative movement, the internal transformations of indigenous communities, and the reaffirmation of ethnic identity within those communities," (Kinkaid: 1987).

English anthropologist Richard Wilson concurred with this perspective when he suggested that indigenous participation in the armed struggle cannot be explained solely by economic and structural factors. He cited a religious missionary obliged to leave Guatemala: "It was not just a matter of taking up arms to reach an economic objective, for the land. It was a religious and spiritual conversion that led people to organize themselves...a total change of life," (Wilson: 1994).

Kinkaid adds that enlistment, per se, was largely a self defense mechanism against the magnitude of repression suffered by the communities (Kinkaid: 1987). Nonetheless, most of the population remained defenseless, fleeing into the mountains, displaced to other regions inside the country, or seeking refuge in other countries.

The government decided to use military means to resolve the deepeningpolitical conflict. Faced with the need to contain the growth of guerrilla military units, the army extended its actions to rural areas presumed to be under guerrilla influence. It launched a series of strategic offensives to accomplish a dual purpose: create free fire zones, and restore government influence in regions where the political sphere was dominated by grassroots organizations operating through adversarial struggles and demands, in consonance with the political postures of the insurgent organizations which, in turn, dominated the military sphere.

The Military Offensives of the Eighties

As stated earlier, the political crisis reigning in the country since the end of the seventies exposed the government’s inability to find solutions through consensual means. A long tradition of the use of violence as a means of social control led it to declare war on its own people.

The growth of insurgent organizations led the army to combine methods of mass extermination with the selective terror already being applied in urban centers. This involved large-scale military operations whose primary goal was to prevent significant sectors of the rural population from joining the armed struggle and, only secondarily aimed to halt the military advance of the guerrilla fronts to areas adjoining those already under its control. If the principal goal of isolating the civilian population from the armed fronts were accomplished, the military effectiveness of the insurgency would decrease greatly.

The consequences of the military offensives against the civilian population from 1978-1983 have been characterized by some analysts, and by both the United States and Guatemalan governments, as resulting from the conflict between the insurgent forces and the Guatemalan Army. They affirm that the indigenous population was "caught" in the crossfire between both groups and accuse the insurgency of the massacres of thousands of unarmed civilians.

However, thousands of witnesses, survivors of those massacres, have accused the army of carrying them out. U.S. anthropologist Robert Carmack asserts that information that attempts to blame the insurgency generally comes from the army itself and from U.S. Embassy officials who overflew the conflict areas for a few hours in helicopters.

In the book Guatemala: Harvest of Violence, Carmack compiled several essays written by American anthropologists intimately familiar with Guatemala, who assert that almost all of the murders of indigenous peasants, as well as other acts of extreme violence against civilians, were carried out by the army or civilian groups linked to the army (Carmack: 1991).

Some of these authors believe that most of the executions attributed to the insurgency could be considered isolated incidents and not part of a plan or methodology of extermination, as in the case of government forces (Carmack: 1991). There are testimonies indicating that in some cases, operations were planned and executed by army units posing as insurgent units in order to confuse and deceive the population. Davis confirms this in two cases that occurred in the towns of Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché in 1982 (Davis: 1991).

Between 1975 and 1980, repression in urban centers as well as rural areas -- the highlands and Southern Coast -- was characterized by acts of violence based on intelligence operations focused on specific individuals. The targets were usually those who posed a potential threat to government interests or to specific powerful sectors, in other words, people in any type of leadership position. The clandestine or semi-clandestine nature of these incidents was intended in part to maintain the "secrecy" of the repressive apparatus, but also to create a generalized climate of uncertainty and arbitrariness that made a potential victim of anyone with some type of relationship with individuals or organizations that disagreed with the government, the political right, large landowners, and the power of the economic oligarchy.

The task of implementing selective terror was divided among different entities linked to government organisms, whether irregular groups such as the Secret Anticommunist Army and the "Death Squad" or paramilitary groups such as military commissioners or army and Government Ministry intelligence corps.

Within the strategic conception of terror during this period, the maintenance of an intelligence apparatus was imperative because it provided a series of repressive alternatives depending on the intensity of conflict in each area and the goals to be achieved in a given case. In other words, it allowed for selectivity in determining who, and how many, would be direct victims.

These intelligence structures operated on a very low budget in rural areas when one considers that the perpetrators of most incidents were civilians such as military commissioners, and later, civil patrols (PAC) who were not paid for their services.

Secret Agents [Agentes Confidenciales], known at the time as "ears" or "deputies" [orejas o judiciales], were members of the army and formed part of the Intelligence Branch of a given Command. They were not confined to barracks, but lived in their own communities, drawing salaries commensurate with their usually low rank in the military structure (EAFG: 1995). These structures continue to operate in the same way today.

Compared to the open, mass terror that would follow, clandestine, selective terror required no major infrastructure or logistics in rural areas. Intelligence networks were nourished by spontaneous collaborators often attracted by the corruption and plundering that accompanied the operations. These circumstances, together with impunity and immunity, facilitated the continuation of this type of repression from 1954 on. In fact, the creation of the Military Reserves Command, which military commissioners belong to, was attributable to the government’s need for social control over local authority by means of an intermediary body between civil society and the armed institution (EAFG: 1995). In this way, terror became a permanent fixture in the structure of Guatemalan society.

"Draining the Sea:" Overt, Mass Terror and Major Army Operations

The recourse to violence as a means of social control had never before been taken to the extremes experienced in the eighties. The qualitative effects of mass repression caused the breakdown of rural social organization of every kind. Quantitatively, the outcome cannot be compared to any other counterinsurgency strategy applied in Latin America in this century.

When the guerrilla fronts made significant advances in the rural highlands at the beginning of the eighties, the army high command was obliged to alter its counterinsurgency strategy by reinforcing the military component and adding economic, political and ideological components to the war. In the latter case, a new strategic approach was formulated based on Mao-Tse-Tung’s principle that the peasants are to a revolution what water is to fish. According to army strategy, the only way to stop the advance of the insurgency was to "drain the sea." In other words, to eliminate the potential social base of the insurgency -- the indigenous peasants (Gramajo: 1995).

As stated elsewhere in this report, the military offensives targeted the civilian population; men, women, children, inhabitants of numerous rural communities located in areas of significant insurgent presence.

The high number of dead and displaced that resulted are consistent with the defenselessness of the vast majority of communities attacked by the government contingents. The guerrilla forces engaged in some combat and harassment of government units. However, large concentrations of soldiers and the methods employed by the army during the offensives made it virtually impossible for the insurgents in some cases, or neighboring villages, to defend the civilian population. This situation was described in an insurgent publication which stated that "the civilian population suffered decisive blows in the 1981 and 1982 offensives that meant that the people’s movement (the guerrillas) lost the initiative. In many areas the counterinsurgency offensives struck severe blows against the grassroots organizations...." (cited in Davis: 1992).

Some of the population survived, however, among them the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR) in the Ixcán and Ixil regions, and in the Petén. These communities developed their own self defense mechansims in territories under guerrilla control. Although the military offensives concentrated their firepower on these communities, and persecution and material destruction remained a constant, they survived with comparatively few victims compared to their original communities and others that were unable to escape the army.

Other civilian survival tactics were to seek refuge in neighboring countries, primarily in Mexico where 40,000 refugees still remain, or to become internally displaced in other parts of the country and in urban centers, mainly Guatemala City.

In other words, the mass extermination and material destruction resulting from the "scorched earth" strategy were not in response to the civilian population’s violent or non-violent opposition to the government army units. The massacres and the material destruction had clear objectives from a purely military standpoint: on the one hand, the potential social base of the guerrillas was eliminated and, on the other, the alleged material base necessary to support the insurgents was destroyed.

From a different perspective, aside from the physical extermination of the population, mass, indiscriminate murders sought the destruction of fundamental, vital aspects of community life such as: community structure, ethnic unity, cultural values, community identity, and human dignity and its vital personal and collective pursuits.

Along these lines, the destruction of crops, harvests, and the natural environment, besides their immediate economic impact, also had an ideological impact on the community’s religious life, and vision of the universe caused by the destruction of corn, an essential part, and symbol, of life in Mayan culture (Payeras: 1991).

The high level of civilian casualties caused by the offensives was one of the intended strategic objectives of the army high command; the other planned component was the relocation of the survivors in militarized settlements created to keep them under "physical and psychological control" (Gramajo: 1986).

It is not difficult to surmise that those who planned and ordered the massacres were aware of their impact on the population. As Chilean psychologists Elizabeth Lira and María Isabel Castillo assert, "the use of mass killings as a way of resolving conflicts at a particular moment in history has an exemplary terrorizing effect, not only on the subjects and their families, but also on the organizations and their ability to mobilize people," (Lira and Castillo: 1991).

The strategic offensives "Operación Ceniza" and "Victoria 82"

When government repression increased dramatically in 1980 in response to the mass incorporation of the population into grassroots organizations and intensified armed actions by the insurgency, especially in rural areas, the possibility for a political solution to the crisis disappeared. It was then that the army high command, under pressure from, and later backed by, the economic oligarchy and sectors of the extreme right, decided to implement a counterinsurgency strategy that spared no social cost in the interest of maintaining the status quo.

As an initial measure, the army reorganized its operational infrastructure as a function of the tactical requirements of its new strategy. The execution of military actions required the creation of a brigade system and an operative model of Strategic Mobile Forces or Task Forces. The existing Military Zones were assigned administrative functions and civic action (Payeras: 1991).

The Military Brigades consisted of an infantry battalion whose personnel were drawn from one or more Military Zones, with permanent reinforcements from artillery units, calvary (vehicles with polarized windows) and, occasionally, aviation units (helicopters equipped with artillery). The estimated number of soldiers in a single brigade ranged from 800 to 1,500 (AVANCSO: 1990).

The creation of Task Forces, which were assigned to cover a certain area based on strategic criteria and enjoyed functional autonomy, was accomplished using troops and logistical support drawn from two or more brigades with regional coverage.

The Task Forces, in turn, were divided into smaller, operative units such as Advance Command Posts, Patrol Bases, or the Advance Combat Posts. These consisted of a company of some 170 infantry personnel and their coverage was based on tactical criteria, in other words, the type of operation they were to conduct, and the size and population of the zone or assigned geographical area. Figure 4 is an operative diagram of the Task Forces within the Guatemalan army.

Figure 4

Operative Diagram of the Task Forces 1981-1983

Source: CIIDH (Payeras: 1991; Gramajo: 1995; ICADIS: 1989)

With this new operative model, the army launched two offensives beginning in July 1981. Certain government officials previously had referred to these offensives as "Black July" (Esquivel: 1984). The preparatory work of the intelligence units had identified target areas for the "Iximché" Task Force which dispatched infantry columns of approximately 5,000 troops from San Martín Jilotepeque. They proceeded to surround several communities, cutting of the population’s escape. (Aguilera: 1982).

Similar operations were launched simultaneously on the Southern Coast, especially in the coffee-producing region located between northern Suchitepéquez department and southern Sololá and encompassing the municipalities of Patulul, Santa Bárbara, Río Bravo, Chicacao, and Santo Domingo Suchitepéquez; and, in the western bocacosta [literally the mouth of a river] region, also coffee country, including the municipalities of Colomba, Concepción Chiquirichapa, and San Martín Sacatepéquez in Quetzaltenango Department, and Tacaná and Tajumulco in San Marcos department.

Between November 1981 and March 1982, the military operations extended toward northern and western Chimaltenango where the Iximché Task Force was concentrated, forming a swath that encompassed northern Sololá, southeast El Quiché department, and the western part of Alta and Baja Verapaz. The "Cumarcaj" Task Force was operating in central and northern El Quiché department (Gramajo: 1995).

At the same time, infantry incursions and aerial bombardments were carried out, as well as the occupation of Nebaj by nearly one thousand "Kaibiles" in the so-called Ixil Triangle in northern El Quiché department. These operations as a whole were designated "Operación Ceniza" [Operation Ashes] by the army high command (ICADIS: 1989). Nearly 15,000 soldiers participated in this second phase of military operations (Aguilera: 1982). The following map shows the areas affected by the offensives conducted under the aegis of Operación Ceniza between July 1981 and March 1982.

Map 3

Areas Affected by "Operación Ceniza"

Source: CIIDH (Payeras: 1991; Gramajo: 1995; ICADIS: 1989)

English anthropologist Richard Wilson described as follows the apparent motives of the army in attacking the civilian population in indigenous Q’eqchi communities in Alta Verapaz: "Places did not have to be suspected of guerrilla sympathies for the army to attack them. The plan was to terrorize the indigenous population and remove them from their proximity to guerrilla troops," (Wilson: 1994).

As stated earlier, the principal mission of the large-scale military operations was to "clean out subversives" in specific zones, including their urban centers or principal settlements. The purpose was to restore government control and create potential bastions of counterinsurgency during the phases following the strategic offensive.

Despite having accomplished the principal objective -- the affected areas were left practically uninhabited -- "Operation Ceniza" did not succeed in halting the insurgent advance in northern El Quiché, nor did it isolate the guerrilla forces of the EGP, the ORPA, FAR, and PGT operating in Guatemala City and its environs.

These circumstances left open the possibility that the armed struggle would become generalized, principally in rural areas, endangering economic structures and their underlying political model. Consequently, a group of high level officers, but also important groups of young officers, certain sectors of the economic elite, and the extreme right felt it necessary to revisit the counterinsurgency strategy, making it more comprehensive so as to ensure a military victory that would enable them to remain in power.

In addition to the economic interests they defended, a series of both structural and immediate political factors led the above-mentioned sectors, represented by a group of young officers, to overthrow General Romeo Lucas Garcia on March 23, 1982.

Following the coup a new phase of counterinsurgency struggle began. With General Efrain Rios Montt as head of state the government prioritized all actions conducive to restoring the strategic conduction of the war and to continuing the military offensive initiated in 1981.

After the military junta took power, the Fundamental Statute of Government was issued empowering government security forces to conduct repressive actions within a pseudo-legal framework. One month later, the so-called National Plan for Security and Development (PSND) was put into effect as the juridical and political basis for the counterinsurgency policy. The PSND was premised on the fact that the crisis in the country was occurring at economic, political and social levels, meaning that the war must also be fought on the political, socio-economic and psychological fronts, in addition to the military. And, the central objective of the war must be the minds of the people.

The PNSD judged, among other things, that in the military sphere, the tactics and strategies employed by the army and other security forces had to be adjusted to confront the insurgency more efficiently. Systems and methods had to be perfected and intelligence operations extended to all areas of national life, and even outside the country, in order to detect the fields, areas, and conditions in which "subversive" groups could develop. And, an effective "psychological war" had to be carried out targeting all social strata with particular emphasis on the rural sectors and illiterate population (Gramajo: 1986).

The plan’s implementation included, in the first place, continuing the large-scale military operations initiated under the previous government. They would be accompanied by a series of economic and social projects and an intense psychological campaign to give a new face to counterinsurgency. The military component of the PNSD was implemented through the Campaign Plan "Victoria 82", a strategic offensive centered around three fundamental actions:

According to this analysis, the guerrilla forces had between 10,000 and 12,000 members. Other sources estimate that the total number of insurgents never exceeded 3,500 combatants (Carmack: 1991). Nonetheless, the principal objective of Victoria 82" would be the 100,000 civilians considered to be its social base so as to sever the tie that bound the insurgency to the civilian population.

U.S. journalist Allan Nairn asserts that the military offensives saw perfectly clearly that their target would be the unarmed civilian population and he asserts that "...far from smashing the guerrillas, the counterinsurgency has left its armed units intact, even while it has sown resentment among the surviving peasants," (Nairn: 1983).

All of the communities in areas of guerrilla activity were subjected to persecution or direct army attacks, but this was particularly the case in communities with local development organizations, cooperatives, schools, or any other type of institution not controlled by the army. Wilson adds that "from the army’s standpoint, these populations had the potential to become sympathizers of the revolutionaries, and that was enough to justify their destruction....Massacre survivors would later be concentrated in settlements where they could be controlled more easily," (Wilson: 1994).

Another mechanism used by the army to control the population was the creation, in 1981, of the civil patrols. This was an organizing structure wholly dependent on the army in which the civilian population had to act as victimizers and spies against their own neighbors and relatives. This new way of obliging the population to organize was also an attempt to characterize the counterinsurgency war as a civil war. Up until 1986, estimates of the number of peasants incorporated into this paramilitary structure hovered near one million, mainly in rural areas and in zones where Mayan populations lived.

The decision to incorporate the civilian population into the counterinsurgency war produced immediate results. Two years after their creation, the civil patrols had become the principal factor in the deconstruction of rural communities. The divisions between organizations, groups, and families based on terror and accusation, meant total social control over the population. The civil patrols, aside from their repressive missions, also had a role in surveillance, espionage, and capture of displaced populations Not to mention that one of their principal functions was to act as the vanguard for army units in battles with the guerrilla forces.

An army officer remarked that "we program the patrollers as follows: the distance for the patrols is always long, sometimes double, because they walk faster and better than we do since they are used to it and know the terrain better," (anonymous document).

Further, the link established -- whether or not by force -- between the army and this paramilitary body helped to reduce the costs of the war, increase the effectiveness of counterinsurgency operations, and secure the positions obtained by the army in the field.

The military operations under "Victoria 82" extended the area covered by the previous offensive into the north and west of the country all the way to the Mexican border. At the same time, offensives were carried out in western and central El Petén department and in the coffee- producing region of San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Retalhuleu and Suchitepéquez. The following map illustrates the areas affected by these operations, between April 1982 and July 1983.

Map 4
Areas Affected by "Victoria 82"

Source: CIIDH (Payeras: 1991; Gramajo: 1995; ICADIS: 1989)

The campaign plan "Firmeza 83" ["Stand Firm 83"] was conceived to complement the military offensives of 1982 and 1983 and consolidate their accomplishments. Its aim was to ensure military control over the civilian population through a "program of psychological operations to reinforce the nationalist sentiment of the population," (anonymous: no date). This plan focused on regrouping the population that had escaped the military operations of "Victoria 82" by taking refuge in the mountains or neighboring communities. The main objective was to consolidate the positions won from the insurgents by asserting total physical control over the population, and to intensify the so-called "psychological operations" through civic action programs conducted by S-5 [Civilian Affairs] units attached to each military command.

In this phase, the counterinsurgency strategy contemplated a gradual "return to normality" through the implementation of development-oriented programs and the creation of "Model Villages" and areas where the captured population would be concentrated for resettlement. These were known as "Development Poles."

The idea of relocating the population that had survived the military offensives to militarized settlements is summarized by an officer from the Civilian Affairs branch (S-5) in charge of a strategic hamlet. He said, "the people that come to this hamlet have a bad tape playing in their heads. We have to change that tape." (CEIDEC: 1990). An estimated 18,000 peasants were concentrated in this type of village, after a comparable number of people had been murdered and their communities totally destroyed.

Although the military operations decreased considerably as of mid 1983, as reflected by the almost total suspension of massacres and scorched earth actions, repression remained constant through massive captures of displaced populations, kidnapping, disappearances, and selective executions in rural areas. At the same time, threats, disappearances, torture, and selective murders occurred in urban centers, mainly targeting the leadership of organizations that had reemerged after the "wave of terror."

In summary, throughout the country, the military offensives and associated programs between 1981 and 1984, left a toll of 440 communities razed, 1.5 million people displaced, and 150,000 people refugees (AVANCSO: 1990; WOLA: 1985). GAM puts the number of deaths caused by government counterinsurgency policies at 150,000, with 45,000 disappeared. Guatemala’s Supreme Court of Justice estimated that 100,000 children lost one or both parents during the same period (Manz: 1986).

The figures cited above are not absolute or definitive. They are simply estimates made by different organizations in the hopes that the history of terror experienced in Guatemala be known and analyzed in order to avoid the recurrence of these acts of violence. In Chapter 4 the characteristics of terror in three municipalities is analyzed in greater depth. In these municipalities, each with their unique circumstances, the process of violence evolved under a certain broad strategic framework, but was also shaped by regional economic, political, social, and cultural characteristics.

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