Chapter 17: Ethnicity

Part II of this report discussed how political violence in Guatemala lasted so long and how the scene of political violence shifted from the city to the countryside in the 1960s, then back to the city and back again to the country over the next decade. As Figure 1.1 showed, the level of killing rises sharply in the early 1980s, when both guerrillas and their government adversaries moved their conflict to the peasant Indian communities of the western highlands.

The CIIDH database includes victims from 14 of Guatemala’s 22 linguistically-distinct Maya populations. For victims for which ethnicity is known, 81 percent are identified as indigenous.25 This chapter addresses why indigenous communities suffered so much of the human cost in Guatemala’s fight for state power.

One explanation is that the guerrillas’ ambition and their popular support increased at the same moment that repression in the Guatemala City hastened their displacement to the western highlands. In the wake of the 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, and contemporaneously with the guerrilla offensives in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala’s rebels saw their opportunity. Guerrillas had been organizing for years in the highlands, and their presence in certain areas coincided with the growth of local movements for Indian liberation. But in a spirit of "triumphalism" that later became a source of self-criticism, the guerrillas, in particular the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, felt that victory was imminent and began a mass incorporation of civilians on a scale unlike anything seen previously during the armed conflict (Payeras 1991).

But whatever the role of the guerrillas in attracting the government’s attention to the western highlands and Ixcán cooperatives, it was the Guatemalan State that chose to lay waste to entire regions of the country in order to drive the guerrillas out. Only after a sustained period of indiscriminate mass killing in 1981 and early 1982 did army strategists begin to consider social action programs like food for work programs and the civil patrols that, however coercive, allowed civilians in disputed areas their right to life.

The use of mass terror in western Guatemala is clearly related to the class and ethnic position of the victims involved. The government could kill Maya peasants indiscriminately because there was little political price to pay. The country’s elites on whom the regime depended raised little protest to Lucas García and Ríos Montt’s scorched earth campaigns.26 This occurred in part due to the coercive power of these military regimes. But it was also a result of the historical absence in Guatemala of any sense of common humanity by non-Indians towards Indians. Most of the government’s victims belonged to communities whose basic civil rights had, for nearly 500 years, rarely been recognized.

Instead, Maya communities have been viewed by the upper classes as either a means or a hindrance to the accumulation of wealth. To the degree that their exploitation was recognized, they were treated as a potential source of rebellion to be repressed (Martínez Peláez 1971; McCreery 1994). The association of guerrilla insurgency with the highlands population awoke among the privileged classes historic fears of an Indian uprising. That is, the early 1980s destruction of hundreds of Indian communities was not unusual in Guatemalan history, but the product of a much longer pattern of repressive rule (Castellano Cambranes 1985; Lovell 1988; Smith 1990).

Guatemala’s ethnic divisions facilitated political violence in different ways. The army used troops from the Ladino regions of the Oriente to carry out many of the massacres in Indian communities. By 1982, the army was recruiting and conscripting heavily in the western highlands itself. Similar to armed forces in other parts of the world, the army began to use Guatemala’s history of social exclusion to present itself as a means of upward mobility for young indigenous men. Recruiting Indians into the army also helped establish a government connection with the population in contested regions (Wilson 1991).

The hostility between Indian communities and privileged Ladinos also pulled many communities into a cycle of violence. Sheldon Annis relates how aggression and legal trickery helped Guatemala City lawyer Horacio Arroyave Pantiagua dispossess many Kaqchikel Indians of their land in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Sacatepéquez. In the late 1970s, community members tried to use the courts to defend their lands, but to no avail. Their tactics were violent on occasion, but nothing like the reaction of Arroyave and his government allies. Activists from CUC and the guerrillas were attracted to the Indians’ cause. Soon thereafter a death squad began to assassinate community leaders. Other deaths in San Antonio included those of Arroyave’s presumed spies (Annis 1988).

In militarized Guatemala, state violence could also arise from disputes between Indians, to land disputes between peasant communities, to internal tensions produced by class difference. In the mid-1970s, for example, Sebastián Guzmán, an Ixil labor contractor and traditional religious leader from Nebaj, El Quiché, approached the government of Colonel Arana Osorio to ask it deal with the presence of "communists" introducing cooperatives and Catholic Action programs in the region (and challenging Guzmán’s livelihood). By January 1976, Guzmán and his associates had passed lists of peasant activists to the military base in Santa Cruz del Quiché. According to one author, violence against those denounced by Guzmán began soon thereafter (Arias 1990: 247-8).

The security forces also murdered non-Indians. At certain moments, such as in the aftermath of the 1976 earthquake and during the 1978 transit strike, and in regions like the south coast rural export agricultural zone, the government attacked poor Ladinos organizing for social change. Nor were the middle classes immune from the terror. The government extra-judicially and selectively executed well-off members of the political opposition, especially students and militants in the revolutionary movement.

But in battling insurgency, state forces used indiscriminate terror almost exclusively in isolated Maya peasant communities, directed at times at merely potential bases of rebel support.

Figure 17.1 uses the murder of women and children to measure the degree of indiscriminateness in government attacks on different ethnic groups. The darker bars show that, for cases where the victim’s ethnicity is known, a much higher percent of indigenous victims were female than for non-indigenous victims. If we assume that men were the main protagonists in the armed conflict and that male heads of households were considered primarily responsible for the political orientations of their families, then these data suggest that the government used less discrimination when operating in indigenous areas.

Figure 17.1. Percent children and percent women for indigenous and non-indigenous victims of killings and disappearances, 1959-1995

The data for children are even clearer. The lighter bars in Figure 17.1 present the percent of children aged 14 years or younger killed by the State for the two ethnic categories. Few children of this age took an active part in Guatemala’s political opposition or in the armed insurgency. For Indians, the proportion of victims so young is over four times greater than non-Indians. The State, especially under Lucas García and Ríos Montt, did little to insure that their campaigns of political violence spared those who were not involved in the opposition movement, especially when attacking populations with ethnic origins distinct from their own.27

Chapter 9 of this report argues that these governments got away with this policy by inhibiting the reporting of mass killings. Chapter 11 suggests that part of the army’s rationale for mass killings was due to the ineffectiveness of earlier selective killing in the highlands, which had often pushed survivors into the guerrilla camp.

But the government’s recourse to mass violence was not simply a product of terror’s effectiveness. The State’s weakness and its ignorance also facilitated attacks on entire rural villages. Army intelligence might have known of rebel activity in a certain area, and ambushes of army personnel gave troops an immediate reason for wanting to destroy nearby support for the guerrillas. But the army often had little specific knowledge about the enemy’s organization. Mass killings of civilians may have simply been the easiest way for the army to fight the elusive guerrillas.

In early 1982, army chief of staff General Benedicto Lucas García, the President’s brother, explained his approach to a foreign journalist in the language of the ethnic outsider: "These people [the guerrillas] are difficult to distinguish from most of the rest of the population... Because of that, well, the population suffers" (Simons 1982).

Later, during the Ríos Montt government, the government’s thinking became even more callous. Presidential adviser Francisco Bianchi, in an oft-quoted remark to another U.S. reporter, said: "The guerrillas have won over many Indian collaborators. Therefore, the Indian are subversives. And how do you fight subversion? Clearly you have to kill the Indians because they are collaborating with subversion. And then it would be said that you were killing innocent people. But they weren’t innocent; they had sold out to subversion" (Amnesty International 1982: 6-7).

These quotes suggest that killing Indians indiscriminately may have also been a product of the government’s having little idea of, and little control over, what was going on in culturally-distinct, geographically-isolated Indian communities.

During the Lucas García government, the army depended on the network of military commissioners to denounce guerrilla collaborators in their villages. But in many long-ignored Indian communities, local commissioners joined the rebel cause. In others, commissioners used their position to create a protection racket to shake down their neighbors, or they turned the army on personal rivals instead of denouncing local leaders of the revolutionary movement (Paul and Demarest 1988). Chief military commissioners that lived in the central towns in the Maya highlands (often members of the local Ladino elite) also denounced entire Indian villages as friendly to the "subversives."

With such dubious intelligence, the army often cast its net widely, killing people with little relation to the insurgency, apparently in the hope that such a display of unchecked power would frighten villagers into submission. The State showed little hesitation in ignoring the moral or human considerations of their policy.

Residents of Indian peasant communities appear to have been the most vulnerable among targets of the government terror. Social exclusion and government repression made joining the revolutionary movement an attractive choice for many Indians. But for rebels doing the organizing, it was the geographic isolation of Maya villages that made them most appealing, and this isolation contributed to these villages’ victimization by the army. Indian peasants living in small communities, many neither literate nor conversant in Spanish, were largely cut off from happenings elsewhere and few had knowledge of what had already occurred in the previous two decades of guerrilla-government conflict. In the early 1980s, at the start of mass killings in the highlands, most Indians had only a vague idea of the scale of the repression to come (Kobrak 1997).

Once government forces did arrive, a lack of mobility further increased civilians’ susceptibility to danger. Living close to subsistence and tied to the land both economically and culturally, many families facing army attack initially felt that they had no place to go and resisted taking flight (Manz 1988). In Chapter 20 we discuss some of those civilians who did leave: the Communities of Population in Resistance. For their resistance to army rule they faced government hostility well into the 1990s.

Another factor operating against the poor, especially the indigenous population, was the absence of allies that they could go to for protection or to plead for mercy. During the conflict, some middle-class opponents of the government survived the experience of detention when relatives or outsiders intervened on their behalf. In 1962, for example, Rodrigo Asturias (later ORPA commander Gaspar Ilom) was one of the few survivors of the army’s annihilation of the 20th of October Front, aided, no doubt, by the fact that his father was Miguel Angel Asturias, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and that his godfather was General Manuel Ydígoras, the country’s President (CIIDH and GAM 1999).

Under Ríos Montt, while the government openly murdered thousands of Indian peasants, a coordinated campaign of international human rights pressure helped win the liberation of two doctors at the University of San Carlos medical school, Juan José Hurtado Vega and Gustavo Castañeda Palacios (American Association for the Advancement of Science 1986). For many of those detained or disappeared, what made the difference between life and death was having some type of personal connection with the government (especially the military), or some direct means of publicizing their case to the international community.

25 Only ten percent of victims of killings and disappearances in the CIIDH database have their ethnicity listed. Documentary sources and newspapers did not often mention ethnic origins. Even testimonies from the Maya communities of western Guatemala regularly fail to determine what language group victims belonged to. Non-reporting may a greater problem for non-Indian victims, as there is no clear ethnic category for them. “Ladino,” for example, is an identity not accepted by many to whom it is ascribed.

26 Nor did the international community protest state violence in Guatemala in an effective way, not even the U.S. government which has long treated the region as its political “backyard.”

27 Both generals came from Ladino families that lived in largely Maya parts of the country, Lucas García in Alta Verapaz and Ríos Montt in Huehuetenango, where ethnic hostility between Indians and Ladinos can often be more immediate and open.