On the streets of downtown Guatemala City, a series of plaques pays tribute to fallen students and professors from the University of San Carlos. Together they form a narrative of forty years of state terror directed at Guatemala's militant intellectuals.

On 6th Avenue, a well-worn bronze plaque marks the place where in 1956 security forces opened fire on the first public protest against the U.S.-sponsored Counterrevolution, killing five students. Nearby, on 4th Avenue, a similar marker recalls the day in 1971 when Law professor and congressional deputy Adolfo Mijangos López was assassinated by a paramilitary death squad. Near the city's central plaza, a monument commemorates where student leader Oliverio Castañeda de León was gunned down by the police in 1978. And on the Avenida Elena still another memorial recalls the night in 1992 when security forces sprayed students with gunfire after an argument, killing Humanities student Julio Cu Quim and injuring five others.

At the University's main campus, on the edge of town, an even more graphic spirit of struggle and mourning prevails: murals, graffiti and plazas honor different generations of university martyrs, a memory of a different time on a now quiet campus.

Violence against the University of San Carlos became so commonplace, and went on for so many years, that it would be difficult to create a monument to every student or professor killed for resisting, in one form or another, the military governments that long ruled Guatemala. For this reason, the following report is presented to honor the memory of the hundreds of dead and disappeared from the San Carlos. It documents the State's killings and abuse, so that they may never be denied nor forgotten, while providing a political and social context to explain how so many lives were lost during Guatemala's years of armed conflict.