Chapter 10: Naming the Victims

The CIIDH database is not a complete record of the political violence in Guatemala. But it does give a sense of how state violence was understood as it developed from a limited attack on a modest opposition to an indiscriminate assault on civilians living in a region where guerrillas attempted to spark an insurrection. As a reflection of victims’ and witnesses’ understandings of the terror, Figure 10.1 presents the known versus anonymous character of victims of killing and disappearance that appear in the database.12

As shown in Figure 10.1, for every year during the 1960s and through the mid-1970s a majority of the State’s victims are named. In 1978, the percent of named victims falls sharply. The database for that year includes the army slaughter at Panzós, for which the identities of the approximately 130 victims are not known in the database. The proportion of named victims remained low for the next few years, especially during 1981 and 1982 when rural mass terror was at its peak. For 1982, only 13 percent of all victims are named, the low point for the entire armed conflict.

Figure 10.1. Percent of all killings and disappearances for which victim is identified, by year, 1969-1995

During the worst state repression, many mass killings were made public months or years later. In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims.13

Oftentimes, few witnesses were available to relate the deaths and disappearances of so many victims. Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names.

Anonymous victims tend to be rural and Indian, versus named victims, who are disproportionately urban and white or Ladino. The situation in the countryside contrasted with that in the city, especially at earlier periods when state violence was far more selective, and the popular response to terror was far more organized.

In June 1977, for example, the urban popular movement was shaken by the death squad murder of Mario López Larrave, law professor and legal adviser to various unions. A key figure in constructing the opposition coalition, his death was widely reported in the press. Six weeks later, two young student leaders, Aníbal Caballeros and Robin García, disappeared on their way home from a secret EGP event near Guatemala City. The cadaver of Caballeros soon appeared in Zone 11 of the capital. After years of relative calm, members of the popular movement organized to oppose the resurgence of state terror. Over the next few days the papers were filled with denunciations of the kidnappings while high school students throughout the country surrounded government buildings and filled public parks, proclaiming "We want Robin back alive."

A week after he disappeared, Robin García’s mutilated body appeared by the side of a rural highway. Robin García did not join the ranks of anonymous victims, as might have happened a few years later. Instead, he became a public martyr. His funeral shut down the capital as 50,000 mourners accompanied the casket carrying red carnations, a symbol of friendship that Latin American popular movements converted into a symbol of struggle (CIIDH and GAM 1999).

Soon there would be too many victims to make each into a martyr, and too much fear and too few survivors to give them all the funerals that they deserved.

13 An exception is Ricardo Falla’s timely work on the army’s July 1982 mass killing at Finca San Francisco in Huehuetenango (Falla 1983).