Chapter 16: Age and Family

State violence in Guatemala caused a massive disruption in the lives of thousands of families. On top of economic crisis, families—parents, spouses, children, and others—faced in their process of grieving the task of trying to make sense of deaths that often made no sense at all, especially when they were committed by authorities who systematically abused the trust of the people through a drawn-out policy of extra-judicial murders.

The political repression was ongoing and lasted decades. This made families fearful to confront their grief in any but the most private way. It also turned the survivors into objects of government suspicion and further abuse, rejected by those who, in a militarized society, did not want to associate with neighbors marked by the taint of "subversion," however unjustified (REMHI 1998 I: 171).

Figure 16.1 gives an idea of the demographic impact of state violence on families. The terror in Guatemala affected people across the age spectrum, both direct victims and those they left behind. Sixty-five percent of named victims of known age were between 20 and 49, the principal age of parents of dependent children.

Figure 16.1. Histogram of named victims of killing and disappearance, by age, 1959-1995

At first glance, Figure 16.1 appears to suggest that young adults were hardest hit by the violence, especially those between 20 and 24. In Figure 16.2, the right side repeats Figure 16.1, presenting the gross number of violations for each age group. The left side of Figure 16.2 takes into account the different sizes of these age groups in the Guatemalan population. It suggests that all age groups between 20 and 49 were killed at essentially the same rate. The left side shows that older people were also killed at a high rate. The proportion of elderly people is low in Guatemala’s fast-growing population, so the absolute number of elderly killed was lower than for other groups.

Figure 16.2. Double histogram of victims and population in general, 1959-1995

The graphs confirm what a study conducted by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Juvenile Division of the Guatemalan Supreme Court found in 1984: that state violence created an enormous population of orphaned children. The report estimated that between 1980 and 1983 at least 100,000 and as many as 200,000 children, mainly in the western highlands, had lost at least one parent to the violence, and that 20 percent of these youth lost both their parents (quoted in Krueger and Enge 1985: vi). Young survivors of the state violence have high incidences of health and psychological problems, and tend to live in precarious situations (Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala 1986).

The lowest rates for victims of murder and disappearance correspond to the youngest age groups. Note, however, that Figures 16.1 and 16.2 heavily underreport children because they include only named victims. The great majority of child victims of state violence died in mass killings in the early 1980s for which few victims’ identities are known (see Figure 11.2). Within the population of victims of mass killings, children are perhaps the least likely to be identified by survivors giving testimony as they are less well-known in the community relative to adults.

Figure 16.3 shows the percent of all named victims of killing and disappearance who were aged 14 years or less (unnamed victims are almost never identified by age, so only named victims are used in this analysis). Except for an anomalous peak in 1973 which results from that year’s very small number of killings and disappearances that makes the percentages unstable, the graph follows from the analysis of indiscriminate killing. 1981 and 1982, the years with the greatest number of killings, are also the years with the highest proportion of child victims. Soon thereafter, the proportion of victims who are children declines to lower levels. During the early 1980s, the proportion of all victims who are 14 years old or younger rises above 12 percent. At the height of the army’s counterinsurgency, approximately one in every eight victims of killing and disappearance were children.

Figure 16.3. Percent of victims of killing or disappearance who were 14 years old or younger, 1970-1995

The mass killing of children is one of the most disturbing aspects of state terror during the Lucas García and Ríos Montt regimes. In giving testimonies about indiscriminate massacres, peasant sources often wondered what kind of "sin" (pecado) children could possibly be guilty of to justify their murder by state forces. Yet the army treated many Indian communities as uniformly hostile. Their rhetoric described all residents, even infants, as dangerous "communists," and worthy of death.

It is difficult to comprehend this type of official behavior, or to see its rationale. The government may have slaughtered children to avoid dealing with an even greater orphan problem than the one it had already created. Another reason may be the army’s stated belief that allowing children in hostile villages to live would only lead to the growth of future generations of vengeful guerrilla fighters. In any case, the early 1980s government policy of killing unarmed civilian children shows how little it cared about the human consequences of its fight against the insurgency. Often the Army was willing to destroy entire communities to facilitate its own survival.