Chapter 19: Civilian Against Civilian

One of the most destructive aspects of state terror in Guatemala was the State’s widespread use of civilians to attack other civilians. This practice began with the military commissioner system, but became fully realized in 1982 with the country-wide imposition of the civil patrol system.

In 1981, during the guerrilla movement’s expansion in western highlands, the army under new Chief of Staff Benedicto Lucas García (the President’s brother) began to search out communities in which to organize pro-government citizen militias to counter the guerrillas’ organization of the population through its Local Irregular Forces (FIL). When Ríos Montt took power he expanded the "civic action" aspects of the counterinsurgency, including the peasant militias, under the name of the "civilian self-defense patrols" (PACs).30

By forcing villagers to patrol or flee, the State established a convenient method for separating the peasantry into compliant and "hostile" populations. It also created a hierarchy of vigilance and control that allowed the army to withdraw from communities suspected of harboring sympathy for the guerrillas. While soldiers retreated to their barracks, villagers were made to turn on each other (Americas Watch 1986a).

The army claimed that the patrols sprang from the spontaneous desires of peasants to protect themselves from the guerrillas (Americas Watch 1989: 7). Still, almost no village resisted the army order. One community that did was Cantel, a K’iche’ textile factory town in Quetzaltenango with a long tradition of labor organizing. In response to Cantel’s expression of independence, government forces systematically eliminated many of the community’s leaders (Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala 1984; Americas Watch 1986a: 88-97; Grandin 1997).

Though supposedly for village "self-defense" from the guerrillas, the army frequently used the patrols as an offensive force. Some of the earliest militias accompanied soldiers during mass killings of communities not yet under army control; for example, the infamous Xococ patrol in the case of the massacres in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz (Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala 1995). Others served as army outposts in areas of hostility, as in the Ixil villages of La Perla (the site of the first EGP political murder in 1975) and Chacalté (later the site of an EGP massacre) (CIIDH database: cb0001521). Later, as the patrols became obligatory throughout the highlands, participants regularly helped the army go out and hunt down refugees who had fled the settled villages (Americas Watch 1986a: 56).

Through "scorched earth" terror and the imposition of the civil patrols, the army successfully divided the highlands into collaborating villages and enemy territory, and then forced patrollers to accept these distinctions. In doing so, the army also exploited ethnic distinctions.

For example, in late 1982 and 1983 patrollers from Chiantla, Aguacatán, Sacapulas, Cunén and Uspantán (a string of municipalities that only months before had formed part of the EGP’s area of expansion), accompanied the army north over the Cuchumatán range into the Ixil region of northern Quiché (the EGP’s core base of support). There these Ladino, Awakateko, Sakapulteko, Uspanteko and K’iche’ patrollers participated in mass killings in resistant Ixil villages. They also helped capture (or kill) members of the displaced populations (REMHI 1998 III: 173).

In the CIIDH database, most killings and disappearances with civil patrol participation took place in conjunction with regular army personnel.31 In quite a few villages patrollers acted alone, though typically with military encouragement, to eliminate support for the guerrillas. In other instances patrol enthusiasts acted on their own initiative, doing far more than the army compelled them to.

The army gained the loyalty of some patrol leaders by allowing them to benefit materially from their role in the counterinsurgency. In 1982, CUC denounced the patrols as nothing more than a new paramilitary band, saying that "the army has offered those joining the patrols the lands, harvests, belongings and women of the peasants massacred" (quoted in Amnesty International 1982: 5). Even if not a stated government bargain with patrollers, arming peasants in politically divided villages clearly led to an expansion of civilian-on-civilian violence.

The patrol obligation represented a harsh punishment for the most vulnerable of state terror’s victims. Survivors were forced to perform unpaid service for the same army that had destroyed their lives. The situation was even more onerous for those associated with the political opposition, including those who had fled the army and were thus considered somehow "guilty" of subversive tendencies. In some communities patrol leaders extorted money from displaced people wanting to come back to their lands (Krueger and Enge 1985: 21). Later, in areas of organized refugee returns, civil patrollers, those who never left, treated refugees and other displaced persons with hostility (Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala 1993; Human Rights Watch/Americas 1996).

Patrollers’ victims included not only those who challenged government rule, but also those who resisted local patrol authority. Other victims were simply personal rivals of patrol commanders. Older disputes over land or local political competition could turn deadly due to the presence of the patrols and the army’s guns. In much of the highlands, the civil patrols represented the triumph of militarism and militarist approaches to social problems, contributing to high levels of "secondary violence" (Krueger and Enge 1985: 20).

Figure 19.1 shows how patrol participation in killings and disappearances began in 1981 and peaked in 1982, the year the patrols expanded throughout Guatemala. By the late 1980s, most of the highlands had been pacified, the civilian government declared the patrols "voluntary," and civil patrol violence lessened considerably.

Figure 19.1. Number of killings and disappearances committed with the participation of civil patrols, by year, 1981-1995

Figure 19.2 (on a different scale) shows more clearly how killings and disappearances rose again after 1989, in the period of civilian rule. The civil patrols remained obligatory in many rural communities even though the armed conflict had abated. The resurgence of political opposition, accompanied by persistent military control, produced new tensions over the patrol obligation.

Figure 19.2. Number of killings and disappearances committed with civil patrol participation, by year, 1984-1995

In communities where support for the guerrillas had been strong, especially in southern Quiché, human rights and popular movement organizations began to insist on their right to exist as a legal political opposition. These groups included CUC, GAM, CONAVIGUA, and CERJ (a group set up specifically to resist the patrol obligation). The army demanded that communities in such regions continue to patrol, as if to prove their ongoing loyalty. It instructed patrollers to treat activists as though they were armed guerrillas (Americas Watch 1988: 41). Although many of the human rights and popular movement leaders shared the political strategy of the URNG, the army not only failed to distinguish between political opposition and armed combatants but the difference was consciously confused.

The Thesis of National Stability, promoted within the military beginning in 1986, conflated political and military rivals into one category, "opponents of the State." According to the Thesis, opponents would still be dominated by violence, albeit violence employed more selectively and through proxies (Schirmer 1998). The result was a rise in civilian-on-civilian rural violence between 1988 and 1995, committed by civil patrollers yet promoted by the State (Americas Watch 1989a; Americas Watch 1990b; Comité Pro-Justicia y Paz 1988; Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center 1993; Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center 1995).

The army’s civil patrols helped sustain an atmosphere of violence even after the direct government-guerrilla conflict had subsided. In 1993 and 1994, for example, most of the abuses registered by the human rights group Human Rights Watch were committed by civil patrollers (Human Rights Watch/Americas 1994: 11).

Figure 19.3 demonstrates this graphically. It distinguishes between killings committed by civil patrollers alone and when patrollers accompanied army personnel on a mission. During the early years of the patrols in 1981 and 1982, the majority of patrol violence occurred as part of an army action. In many cases patrollers acted as army guides and not in a direct combat role. Over time, the level of civil patrol killing fell, though the patrols’ independence increased. Figure 19.3 shows a rise in the proportion of killings committed by patrollers’ alone for the period of civilian rule beginning in 1986. This finding does not mean that patrollers ceased to be influenced and controlled by the army. Rather, it suggests that by the last decade of the armed conflict, the State had turned some village civil patrols into more independent instruments of repression.

Figure 19.3. Percentage of civil patrol killings and disappearances committed without other organizations, 1980-1995

The patrol system may have helped the government pacify the countryside, but it also deeply wounded the social fabric of communities that long operated independently from the government. Only pro-military forms of community organization were permitted, while patrol leaders could use their army backing to take advantage—politically, economically and even sexually—of other members of their village. The civilian participation in the violence forced many victims of state terror to live close to their victimizers, adding to the trauma of survival (REMHI I: 134).

31 The REMHI project found a similar pattern of civil patrol participation in the violence (REMHI 1998 II: 3).