Chapter 6: Terror and Regime 

From 1960 to 1996, state repression and political killing occurred in Guatemala across all presidential regimes, military as well as civilian, elected as well as imposed. But Guatemala’s governments have used the recourse to extra-judicial killing to different degrees.

Figure 6.1 shows a steady increase in state violence through the regimes of the 1960s and early 1970s, then a brief decline during the Kjell Laugerud García years. Killings and disappearances soar during the Lucas García and Ríos Montt presidencies, as the violence became more rural and less discriminating, especially during 1982.

Figure 6.1. Number of killings and disappearances by regime, 1959-1994

The graph shows that after the Ríos Montt government pacified the countryside and caused a guerrilla retreat, the level of violence declines steadily during later regimes. Political violence after 1982 tended to be directed against citizens working to challenge military control and defend the rule of law (Chapter 11). Thus the effects of state repression continued to devastate Guatemalan society and its political culture. Figure 6.2 shows the dates for the regimes.

In the turbulent history of modern Guatemala, not all presidents have served a traditional four-year term. Figure 6.3 shows the intensity of state terror during each regime, presenting the average number of murders and disappearances per month in office. Here again we see a sharp rise during the Lucas García regime of July 1978 to March 1982, a time of constant political repression.

Figure 6.2. Dates of presidential regimes, 1959-present

But Lucas García’s deserved legacy as a mass murderer is dwarfed by that of General José Efraín Ríos Montt. The database documents over 800 killings and disappearances per month during Ríos Montt’s 17-month occupation of the National Palace. The actual numbers must include tens of thousands of murders not documented by any database project, certainly higher than those reported here. Documented monthly killings increased by more than three times between these two military regimes. In less than a year and a half, security forces under Ríos Montt were responsible for 43 percent of the state killings with known date that appear in the CIIDH database committed during the entire 36-year armed conflict.

Remarkably, Ríos Montt, now retired from the army, remains a leading political figure in his country, heading the country’s largest opposition party, the Guatemala Republican Front (FRG). Today many Guatemalans consider the former general a savior who brought the open conflict with the guerrillas to a close.

Figure 6.3. Mean number of killings and disappearances per month, by regime, 1959-1995

The popularity of Ríos Montt, despite his use of state terror, was due, in part, to how different communities have understood the history of the armed conflict in Guatemala. In addition, his image was actively enhanced by forces both inside and outside the country.

First, Ríos Montt must be understood in relation to his predecessor. It was Lucas García who nearly destroyed the urban political opposition. And it was Lucas who instituted the indiscriminate terror in the countryside, what Amnesty International called a Government Program of Political Murder (1981). By March 23, 1982, the day Ríos Montt took power, much of the country was living in a state of terror. Even a recently concluded electoral process had not provided Guatemalans with a respite from the violence. In rural areas, the abusiveness of soldiers and military commissioners reached an all-time high as they searched for any sign of guerrilla support.

After Ríos Montt took over, the level of violence increased. Figure 6.4 shows how the number of state killings and disappearances rose even higher in April 1982, Ríos Montt’s first full month in office. The 3,330 documented deaths and disappearances in the CIIDH database that month represent the highest one-month total number of documented violations of the right to life for the entire armed conflict (the actual total is higher). For the first hundred days of the Ríos Montt regime, mass killings continued throughout the highlands, especially in El Quiché and Huehuetenango. Americas Watch, using data from the Peace and Justice Committee and the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, detailed 69 massacres during this period (Americas Watch 1984).

As Figure 6.4 shows, killings peaked again in July 1982. In June of that year, Ríos Montt had declared a 30-day amnesty, ostensibly to give the political opposition the chance to surrender. When the month ended, the General promised a "state of war" in the highlands. The brief respite was over and the methods of violence became even more gruesome. A new army campaign, Victoria ’82, soon reached the border region with Mexico. Human rights reports from the period demonstrate that in isolated regions of the country, the army under Ríos Montt in its fight against the guerrillas tended towards overkill, beheading their victims or burning them alive, and smashing the heads of children against rocks (Chapter 13). Amnesty International also observed that the rape of women survivors, even when pregnant, became more common under Ríos Montt (Amnesty International 1982: 4-5; Nairn 1983; Falla 1983).

Figure 6.4. Number of killings and disappearances by month, 1979 – 1984

Furthermore, the government continued the Lucas García policy of using indiscriminate killings to force peasants to reject the guerrillas or flee their villages. Jesuit priest and anthropologist Ricardo Falla reports that in mass killings in the Ixcán cooperatives at this time, army troops made no distinctions between collaborators, sympathizers and people who were either indifferent or opposed to the insurgency (Falla 1994: 183).

Sustaining a different view, anthropologist David Stoll argues that state violence became less chaotic and much more predictable under Ríos Montt, at least in the hard-hit Ixil country of northern Quiché (Stoll 1993: 111). Unlike the Lucas García government, Ríos Montt offered peasants a way out of the uncertainty of the army-guerrilla conflict. In the wake of army massacres, he instituted forms of "civic action" that encouraged civilians to turn away from the guerrillas and towards what continued to be a murderous government. He also expanded the civil patrol system started under Lucas García, forcing villagers in contested areas to turn on their neighbors and become active participants in the counterinsurgency violence.

In some areas such as northern Huehuetenango, patrollers initially refused to serve the army. Instead, they used the patrols to pass information to the guerrillas and refugees hiding out from government forces (Falla 1984). But in areas where the guerrillas had not established deep support for their revolutionary project, many remember Ríos Montt as having "organized the people" through the patrols, making villagers themselves actively renounce the guerrillas, thus allowing them a sense of control over their lives and their communities.

In much of the highlands, resistance to the government quickly evaporated once the civil patrols began. In return, the army decreased its hostility. Many rural people thus view the Ríos Montt coup d’état as an historical turning-point, rather than a continuation of state terror as data for the whole country would suggest (and as illustrated in Figure 6.4). To this day, ex-civil patrollers in rural areas pacified by Ríos Montt remain his FRG party’s political base (Kobrak 1997).

Furthermore, Ríos Montt’s image has also been actively enhanced by subsequent military governments and their allies in the United States. After 1982, in both its official publications and its indoctrination of civil patrollers and captured refugees, the Guatemalan army frequently acknowledged the excesses of past regimes, while contrasting them to the "developmentalist" governments of Ríos Montt and his successor General Oscar Mejía Víctores. The army recognized the suffering it had caused rural people while insisting that the survivors give their loyalty to a "new" army (Ejército de Guatemala 1984, Gobierno de Guatemala 1984).

In the United States, the switch to Ríos Montt allowed Ronald Reagan’s administration to lobby for a restoration of military aid to Guatemala (cut off by the U.S. Congress in 1977) and an expansion of U.S. intervention throughout the Caribbean Basin. The State Department had previously been reluctant to criticize the Lucas García government. After the March 1982 coup it changed direction and condemned the ousted leader as a terror against his own people, while portraying the Ríos Montt regime as a significant improvement for human rights in Guatemala. In December 1982, President Reagan described Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment" who is "totally dedicated to democracy" (Schirmer 1998: 33). In resuming military aid to Guatemala, Reagan made it clear that the General could fight the war against his internal opposition as he wished, without regard to human rights considerations and without fear of losing his U.S. funding (Department of State Country Reports 1983; Americas Watch 1985b: 7-8).

Still another reason for Ríos Montt’s popularity may be that Guatemala’s 1982 state terror, and especially the army campaign of rural mass killings, went largely unreported, the subject of the next chapter.