Chapter 14: The Victims

As the armed conflict developed in Guatemala, state violence attacked different populations in different ways. Previous chapters have discussed how, as the violence reached its peak in early 1982, it became more rural and less selective, and its victims more often indigenous and unnamed.

For much of the period of armed conflict, state terror was directed at active government opponents, principally those committed to the use of violence in the struggle for political change, the armed insurgents. The CIIDH database includes little information about whether the victim in a specific case was a member of a guerrilla group. Much of the documentary human rights information and most of the testimonies were collected during the period of armed struggle when few sources were forthcoming about victims’ political-military activity. Even today, after so many years of government terror, many if not most Guatemalans still consider discussing the guerrilla movement dangerous. Still, press reports and documentary sources included in the database suggest that many of the 1960s victims of the State’s political violence were armed combatants.

By the 1970s, the State expanded its list of appropriate targets for death or displacement to include people who had never disobeyed the law but in some way threatened the interests of the military government or its upper class sponsors. Both critics of official corruption and leaders of the popular movement were murdered, especially during the Arana Osorio and Lucas García regimes. By the end of the decade, this repression encouraged members of the unarmed political opposition to become active supporters of the armed insurgency (Levenson-Estrada 1994).

So did guerrilla recruitment of embattled activists in the mass opposition movement. For example, each of the different guerrilla organizations had recruited members of Guatemala’s union movement, and the PGT and FAR in particular viewed the organized working class as their revolutionary vanguard. The violence against unionists may in certain cases have represented an attack on individuals committed to the overthrow of the government. However, the systematic repression of strikes, and indeed all forms of labor organizing in Guatemala, also served to inhibit any challenge to the private control of production (Levenson-Estrada 1994).

In other cases, the State killed unarmed civilians as an easy way to respond to guerrilla actions. For example, in 1980 the police and death squads responded to rebel violence in the capital by killing students at the University of San Carlos. In the countryside, the army often reacted to a rebel ambush by attacking nearby peasant villages. Unarmed university students and peasant villagers, different in so many ways, were similar in being accessible targets for government revenge.

By the early 1980s, most victims of state violence were unarmed Indian peasants living in the guerrilla zones of operation. At first the army focused its rural violence on community leaders, often members of religious, peasant or cooperative organizations that had thrived in the country’s highlands and in the Ixcán jungle during the 1960s and 1970s.

Some of these community leaders had adopted a rhetoric of revolution, such as those who signed the Declaration of Iximché in 1981 (Arias 1990) or who belonged to organizations that shared the goals of the guerrilla movement, like the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC). But the army appears to have killed many other catechists, health workers, bilingual teachers and other community organizers simply because they were agents of change or an example of a new assertive ethnic identity in a politically repressed region—the western highlands and adjacent lowland jungles—precisely at the time guerrilla armies began to focus their attention there. That is, the State attacked Maya community leaders because they represented the potential union of the rebels and an organized Indian peasantry (Carmack 1988b; Le Bot 1995).

Figure 14.1 shows that for killing victims who are known to have belonged to an organization, a majority belonged to peasant groups. Much of the CIIDH data were collected through popular organizations with a peasant orientation, especially the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPRs).

Figure 14.1. Number of victims of killing and disappearance by organizational sector, 1959-1995

On the other hand, the Catholic Church’s Recuperation of Historical Memory report, using data collected through the Church’s local organizations, emphasizes that many victims were members of religious organizations, especially Catholic base groups (REMHI 1998). In the CIIDH data, members of religious groups were the second most frequent category of victims with identified affiliations. It is often hard to identify a leader by one particular affiliation. Many community leaders killed or disappeared by the State had many different organizational roles at once -- as leaders of village development committees, members of cooperatives, indigenous activists, catechists, and members of other kinds of peasant organizations.20

By the beginning of 1982, terror turned massive as the government attempted to halt the guerrillas’ expansion in western Guatemala. In some areas, army intelligence coded villages as "red": those where rebel support was allegedly total, or wide-spread enough for the army to resort to mass terror (Davis 1988). In such zones (and there were many), anyone who crossed the army’s path could become a victim. For example, in 1981 the EGP reported a series of ambushes on a rural highway running through an isolated region between the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiché (Noticias de Guatemala 1981, 1982, nos. 72-77). In the nearby village of Llano del Coyote, several people died when they ran into an army patrol. They were abused and intimidated so that they would provide information on rebel movements, and then forcibly disappeared or killed on the spot. Others were shot as they tried to escape (case cm0001745).

More common was the army occupation of specific villages. Soldiers often arrived with a list to identify suspect residents or brought along a hooded informant to do the job on the spot. In "red" communities the whole community was the target, and the army made no distinction between active guerrilla collaborators and those who merely lived in a village where guerrilla influence was strong. Soldiers might take the accused away, never to be seen again, or execute them in front of their neighbors, to impress upon survivors what happens to "bad apples."21 Such actions served to destroy support for the guerrillas, both directly by eliminating guerrilla supporters, and indirectly by terrorizing survivors. Many others died as they tried mass movement to flee an army incursion, and even more were hunted down in their mountain hiding places (Chapter 20).

Maya villagers and their local organizations played a key role in the expansion of the guerrilla movement in the highlands. But only a minority of the army’s rural victims had more than a limited role in the armed opposition. And as the guerrillas would soon realize, not all the rebels’ peasant collaborators had a deep commitment to revolutionary change, at least not deep enough to withstand the intensity of repression. For the army, many rural victims’ "crime" (delito) was to have attended guerrilla organizational meetings, or to have lived near where the guerrillas operated. Others were falsely accused and in this way became victims of the militarization of the highlands.

20 In the CIIDH database, as in others, what organizational sector victims were ascribed to depends on to whom they gave their testimony and under what conditions. For the CIIDH data, 1984 and 1985 were the peak years for killings of persons with an organizational affiliation (many of the victims being members of the CPRs). This is after the peak in the early 1980s, when many other people in organizations had been killed, but for which scant information of group affiliation appears. Thus, the rural poor continued to organize after the height of the terror, though more often in the human rights and popular movement groups, and less frequently in religious community base organizations.

21 Both army officers and civil patrol enthusiasts employed the metaphor of “rotten fruit,” justifying purging villages of alleged guerrilla sympathizers so that other villagers would not also go bad (Kobrak 1997; REMHI 1998 II: 123-4).