Chapter 18: The Perpetrators

Over the past 40 years, most political violence in Guatemala formed part of a planned, centralized campaign of state terror, aimed principally but never exclusively at destroying an armed insurgency.

The military high command has historically led this campaign, and its troops have carried out much of the terror. Nevertheless, in carrying out its policy of extralegal killing, the government has employed different security forces, both military and civilian, official as well as non-official.

Figures 18.1 and 18.2 demonstrate this graphically.28 In the CIIDH database, for cases in which the perpetrator is known, testimonies and documentary sources attribute the greater share of killings and disappearances to army personnel. Other types of government perpetrators include civil patrollers (PACs), military commissioners, clandestine death squads, the National Police and even the Treasury Police.29 The CIIDH database contains few cases of violations by the different guerrilla armies. While opposition violence is an important issue, it is not included in this analysis.

Figure 18.1. Number of killings and disappearances by type of perpetrator for rural areas (for violations with known perpetrators), 1959-1995

Figure 18.1 shows that army personnel were responsible for most of the terror in rural areas. A significant minority of these killings were carried out by the army together with the participation of civilians, both civil patrols and military commissioners. Sixty-nine percent of rural cases attribute the killing to a known perpetrator, despite the generally poor reporting of the rural violence discussed in Chapter 9 (see Appendix A6). In the countryside, the State’s campaigns were usually carried out by uniformed soldiers openly carrying out extra-judicial murder.

Figure 18.2. Number of killings and disappearances by type of perpetrator for urban areas (for violations with known perpetrators), 1959-1995

In Guatemala City the agents of state violence were forced to operate in a less open manner. Only 18 percent of cases of urban killing or disappearance attribute the violence to a known perpetrator. Figure 18.2 shows that for the few cases for which the killer is known, police killings outnumber those by the army over the course of the armed conflict. Still, many of the police groups that participated in the counterinsurgency, such as the National Police’s Comando 6 (headed by Pedro García Arrendondo, in 1998 the mayor of Cuilapa, Santa Rosa) and the Judicial Police (headed by Manuel de Jesus Valiente Tellez), followed orders given by the army command when carrying out terrorist and counterinsurgency functions.

Paramilitary death squads also participated in the government terror campaign, especially in the city. The data on known perpetrators presented in the figures greatly underreport murders by paramilitary groups. Such uncertainty was exactly the reason for creating the death squads: so that witnesses and survivors would not be able to know for certain that the government was responsible for the terror.

The death squads could never have operated without the State’s permission, and it is now clear that different groups operated under official control. According to Marío Sandoval Alarcón, one of the death squads’ early ideological architects, many of the killers were "army members passing as civilians" (REMHI 1998 II: 52-3, 110). Military intelligence officers have recently referred to their "G-2" directorate as "a death squad; it is a squad that is directly for killing," confirming what many army critics have maintained for years (Schirmer 1998: 288). On the other hand, the Secret Anticommunist Army (ESA) was allegedly run through the office of police chief German Chupina (Dunkerley 1988: 472). In 1982, police Chief of Detectives Valiente Tellez admitted, after resigning and fleeing the country, that security forces were involved in many killings attributed to the death squads (Amnesty International 1982: 8).

In rural areas, the army developed different kinds of paramilitary organizations, those involving a large number of civilians from all over the countryside: first a network of military commissioners, then a widespread system of civil patrols.

Military commissioners were once limited to army recruitment and locking up drunks. But in the 1960s, on the recommendation of U.S. advisers, the army named thousands more commissioners, extending the network to almost every village and hamlet in the country. Though officially unpaid, commissioners could acquire substantial power. They were authorized to detain suspects and carry guns, even machine guns, and were charged with reporting on the presence of insurgents as well as political organizers.

As the commissioners’ power expanded, reports of abuses multiplied. In the 1960s, in the plantation belt along the south coast, military commissioners acted as private police for the rural elite. Meanwhile in the guerrilla zone of Zacapa the government armed and supported vigilante groups to help fight the insurgents. In some cases they came to function as semi-independent racketeers or hit squads that attacked labor and political organizers. These were different types of political violence, but all were sanctioned by the State (Amnesty International 1976: 3; Black 1984: 46; McClintock 1985: 65-6).

By the early 1980s peak of violence, military commissioners and other army spies (orejas) provided an important rural intelligence service for the army. In many communities commissioners went far beyond reporting on local political activity and joined in the violence, becoming involved in torture, murder, and disappearance. Guerrillas, meanwhile, tried to either co-opt or eliminate the commissioners, the most exposed members of the military hierarchy.

The guerrillas had a much harder time dealing with the civil patrol system, militias in which nearly every adult male remaining in the settled communities of the countryside was obliged to participate. As Figure 18.1 suggests, and as discussed in the next chapter, many village patrols went beyond a purely defensive role to participate in some of the worst mass killings in the entire armed conflict.

29 In 1987 and 1988, members of the Treasury Police (Guardia de la Hacienda) cruised the city in white vans and kidnapped, tortured and assassinated various student and union activists in the infamous Panel Blanca murders (Americas Watch 1988; Amnesty International 1989; Velásquez and Blanck 1997).