Chapter 11: Selective Versus Mass Killing

Many of the victims of state violence in Guatemala were killed selectively, one at a time. Figure 11.1 classifies victims according to the size of the group in which they were killed. More people were killed alone than in any specific other group size. However, a majority of the government’s victims were murdered in large groups, usually in a very indiscriminate manner. Twenty-nine percent of the victims of killing were assassinated individually and twenty-three percent were killed in groups of between 2-50 victims. Forty-eight percent of all victims were killed in groups of larger than 50 people, victims of the government destruction of entire rural communities.

Figure 11.1. Histogram of number of victims killed, by size of group, 1959-1995

Following the analysis from the last chapter, Figure 11.2 shows how victims of mass killings tend to appear anonymously in the database. Almost 80 percent of the victims of selective killings are identified by name in the database; only about one in a hundred victims killed in groups of ten or more are properly identified.

Figure 11.2. Percent of victims of killings who are named, by size of group, 1959-1995

Figure 11.3 reveals that for each victim group size the greater share of violence occurred in the countryside. Reading across, the graph distinguishes the patterns for rural and urban violence.

The darker bars show how the government committed many selective killings in rural areas: the CIIDH database documents more than 7,000 selective killings, as represented in the first darker bar for group size of one. The second darker bar shows fewer people killed in groups of two to nine. The overwhelming majority of victims of rural killings, more than 20,000 people, died in groups of ten or more.

Figure 11.3. Number of killings, by geographic area and size of group, 1959-1995

The lighter bars show that although mass killings occasionally occurred in Guatemala City, the State killed most of its urban victims one at a time. The largest of the three lighter bars is for group size of one. The bars representing the number killed in groups of two to nine victims and for groups of ten or more are progressively smaller. Compared to the indiscriminate terror in the countryside, government forces chose their targets more carefully in the city.

In both rural and urban areas state violence became less selective as the repression intensified. In Guatemala City in the late 1970s, the repression began with individual killings of key opposition figures. In 1980, as selective assassinations became even more frequent, mass killings also occurred in the city, beginning with the Spanish Embassy massacre on January 31.

One of the principal targets of the terror was organized labor, the historical nemesis of Guatemala’s business interests. On June 21, 1980, state agents disappeared 27 union leaders from the headquarters of the CNT (National Workers’ Central), a labor movement coordinating body. State terror made attending a labor meeting highly dangerous: on August 24, 17 more trade unionists were disappeared from the Finca Emaús in Escuintla (Guatemala 80 1980).

At the University of San Carlos, on the morning of July 14, moments after guerrillas had ambushed and killed a police colonel, men in plainclothes opened fire on students arriving at the main bus stop. The University was at the time a center of support for both the popular movement and the armed insurgency. However, few of the victims of this terrorist act were politically involved. Seeking revenge, security forces indiscriminately attacked the University as a whole (CIIDH and GAM 1999).

A similar pattern holds for hard-hit areas of the countryside. In the mid-1970s, army repression of cooperatives in the Ixcán jungle of northern Quiché consisted of secret or open disappearances of cooperative leaders allegedly linked to the EGP rebel organization. By February 1982 the army began to openly burn entire villages in the region, killing trapped residents with little or no distinction between those who did or did not support the guerrillas (Manz 1988: 76-8; Iglesia Guatemalteca en el Exilio 1992; Falla 1992).

For the army’s goal of containing the rebel movement, selective killing proved less effective than mass terror. In the capital, the first targeted assassinations only served to convince many militants of the danger of opposing the government in a public, legal manner. In the wake of these killings, the guerrilla organizations quickly increased their urban ranks (CIIDH and GAM 1999).

The same pattern occurred in the countryside. In 1979 and 1980, in the K’iche’ heartland around Santa Cruz del Quiché and in the Ixil region to the north, individual killings of community leaders and guerrilla organizers made people fear the army, but these acts of repression also inspired family and friends of these early victims to become guerrilla combatants, both for self-protection and to avenge the deaths of their family members. The government responded not by improving relations with the civilian population, but by increasing the scale of violence. By the end of 1982, an army campaign of mass terror had depopulated most villages in northern Quiché. Together with the civil patrols, mass terror convinced most survivors to distance themselves from the rebels. Thus the army stopped the growth of the EGP, but at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives (Carmack 1988b; Stoll 1993).

The above examples reflect the country-wide pattern of mass versus selective killings. Figure 11.4 illustrates how, starting in 1978, killings in groups of ten or more became a greater share of government violence. After 1982, the percentage of large-scale killings and disappearances began to drop as selective assassination began to dominate the pattern of state repression. A few isolated mass killings in the 1990s increased the proportion of 10-plus killings during the low-violence years at the end of the armed conflict. But the years of systematic rural mass killing were over.14

Figure 11.4. Percent of victims in group of indicated size, by year, 1959-1995

Amnesty International reported that government murder began to take place on a more selective basis under the Mejía Víctores government (1987: 125-6). State terror continued during this regime, especially in late 1983 and through 1984 and 1985 as student leaders, unionists and human rights defenders once again became frequent government targets. Remarkably, this spate of selective killings represented a significant improvement from the situation in Guatemala a few years earlier.

14 The experience of state violence in the department of Sololá reverses this pattern. ORPA guerrillas most active in this region avoided trying to organize whole villages. During the height of the counterinsurgency the army and its paramilitary death squads largely limited their terror to individual killings, including those of community activists from the municipality of Santiago Atitlán. One of the most notorious mass killings occurred in Santiago, but not until after the 1980s. On December 2, 1990, army soldiers opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protesters who were demanding that the army leave their town, killing 13. Only after the local protests and international outrage caused by the massacre did the army close its base in Santiago. Resistance to the army by town residents became one of the key elements in the growing struggle for demilitarization in Guatemala (Americas Watch 1988: 11, 92; Americas Watch and Physicians for Human Rights 1991: 53-64; Carlsen 1997).