Chapter 8: Urban Versus Rural Violence

This chapter compares the different patterns of state violence in urban and rural regions of Guatemala.11 Figure 8.1 indicates the heavy concentration of rural killings that began in 1980. Urban killings are much more spread out over various years, as Figure 8.2 shows. Note the different scales on the two graphs: the rural scale peaks at 18,000 while the maximum urban value is 700. Rural killings outnumber those in the city even for most years outside the 1980 to 1983 peak of rural terror.

Figure 8.1. Number of killings and disappearances in rural areas, by year, 1959-1995

The top five years for rural killings and disappearances are all between 1980 and 1984. This was the period when the military concentrated its troops in the western highlands and terrorized the guerrillas’ potential civilian base of support. During these five years the Guatemalan State committed fully 82 percent of rural murders for the entire 36 years of armed conflict (see Appendix A4).

Figure 8.2. Number of killings and disappearances in urban areas, by year, 1959-1995

For urban killings, various peaks appear: in 1966, when mass disappearances were first employed; in 1979 and 1980, when the government undertook a widening terror campaign against the urban popular movement; the 1982 to 1985 period when the government again attacked opponents in the city, including armed guerrillas and activists in the incipient human rights movement; and finally in 1987 to 1990, after the return of civilian rule, when the State again tried to silence a strengthening urban popular movement.

Figure 8.3 illustrates how state violence became progressively (if not steadily) more rural. During the first few years of the armed conflict, the majority of killings and disappearances recorded in the CIIDH database occurred in the metropolitan area. In 1966 the army intensified its attack on areas of guerrilla activity in rural areas of eastern Guatemala. That year, the percent of killings committed in rural areas rises dramatically to approximately 75 percent, where it stays for the rest of the conflict. During the 1970s, the percent rural of violations decreased slightly as security forces concentrated their violence in the capital, as a weakened guerrilla movement retreated to the capital and as organizing by an urban-based mass movement began to threaten the power of the military government and the economic elite.

Figure 8.3. Percent of killings and disappearances occurring in rural areas, by year, 1960-1995

The sharp increase in percent rural of violence in 1978 reflects the army slaughter at Panzós, Alta Verapaz in the country’s northeast on May 29 of that year (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs 1978). This tragedy inaugurated the government policy of rural mass killings, one that it returned to in earnest in 1981 and 1982. In the early 1980s, especially under Ríos Montt, the percent rural approaches 100 percent as the scale of rural violence transcends the level of urban killing, despite the continuation of terror in the city.

The urban share of violence increases somewhat during the transition to civilian rule under Mejía Víctores and Cerezo Arévelo when the government tried to repress the reemergence of the popular movement, especially in the city. But Figure 8.3 shows that the level of state violence in the countryside remained greater than in the city throughout the different periods of conflict, despite the difficulties of reporting rural violence.

Over the course of the armed conflict, most of the State’s victims have been rural civilians, peasants of humble means, a fact frequently recognized by human rights groups even when the more visible violence was occurring in the city (on the 1966 to 1976 period see CIDC 1980 and Amnesty International 1976; on 1977 and 1978 see Amnesty International 1978). Maya peasant communities became a convenient battleground for the struggle for state power. This occurred even though most of the leading protagonists of this struggle were from the capital, and even though Guatemala City and the agro-export zones were in many ways the prizes the protagonists were fighting over.