Chapter 1: State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996

Figure 1.1 presents, over time, 34,363 killings and disappearances in Guatemala, committed by the State and part of a deliberate government policy of extra-judicial killing.5 This graph highlights how the level of state terror peaked in 1982, a year when the Guatemalan army murdered tens of thousands of civilians in the country’s western highlands and decimated hundreds of Indian communities.

What the scale of this graph obscures are the ups and downs in the intensity of state violence, before and after the 1980 to 1983 peak. The rest of Part II presents the contours of this violence, decade-by-decade: the 1960s and the first period of guerrilla-government struggle; the repression of a rising popular movement in the 1970s; absolute military rule and the government’s extermination of the political opposition in the 1980s; and the decline of counterinsurgency in the 1990s.

Figure 1.1. Number of killings and disappearances by year, 1960-1995

State violence in Guatemala was distinguished by how deliberate it was and how long it lasted. Over time, the armed conflict shifted from the city to the country to the city and back to the country again. State terror took different forms, from paramilitary death squads that murdered their victims one at a time, to massacres directed against entire rural villages.

Part III uses the CIIDH database to analyze these shifts: in urban versus rural violence; selective versus mass killings; the different methods of repression; and how the violence was reported in the press and thus understood at the time. It also explores how the intensity of violence varied by president. While the 1978 to 1982 regime of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García was extremely violent, both the absolute number of violations and the monthly rate of killing and disappearance rose even higher during General José Efraín Ríos Montt’s program of pacification.

Part IV examines characteristics of the victims, both the direct targets of government repression as well as survivors affected by that repression. The State attacked, at different times and in different ways, students, intellectuals, unionists, journalists, catechists, priests, politicians, and peasants. This last category of victims was by far the largest throughout the armed conflict. We also describe the perpetrators, including the government’s regular and irregular forces. The section concludes with an analysis of Guatemala’s civil patrols, in which civilians became part of the repressive apparatus, to highlight the enduring legacy of violence and militarization for many survivors.

5 Figure 1.1 only includes cases of forced disappearance and killing in the CIIDH database for which the year is known. Figures in this report cover 1959 -1995 because the CIIDH collected data on cases that fell in this period. The narrative covers the period of the armed conflict, 1960-1996. Adding cases of unknown date increases the total to 36,906 (see Appendix A1). Even this larger number presents only a fraction of the deaths attributable to the Guatemalan State during the years of armed conflict. Documentary sources as well as information not included in this database (for example, that included in the work of the official Historical Clarification Commission and the Catholic Church’s project for the Recovery of Historical Memory, REMHI) suggest that the government extra-judicially murdered a much higher number between 1960 and 1996. On the basis of one non-random, non-probabilistic sample, however, we hesitate to estimate total numbers of Guatemalans killed or disappeared during the conflict.