Chapter 9: Reporting Urban Versus Rural Violence

Testimonies and documentary sources in the CIIDH database establish that the violence increased, and became increasingly rural, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Press coverage in Guatemala completely missed this story.

Figure 9.1 demonstrates that in the 1960s and through much of the 1970s newspaper reports of the violence roughly followed the pattern of rural versus urban killing. For example, in 1970 to 1973 the increase and subsequent decrease in reported rural violence corresponds to the pattern of reported urban violence.

Figure 9.1. Number of killings and disappearances reported by the press, 1959-1995

But from 1979 on, as state terror shifts to the western highlands, the solid line in Figure 9.1 that represents rural killings falls to zero and then stays very low. In 1982, press sources collected in the CIIDH database report only 31 rural killings, while the database as a whole details over 18,000 rural victims. The State’s campaign of terror against Maya communities took place largely in silence, especially within Guatemala.

The press was not completely shut down during the Lucas García and Ríos Montt governments. The dashed line in Figure 9.1 shows that the press did manage to publish some accounts of the violence in the early 1980s, but they were almost exclusively about urban killings.

Figure 9.2 presents this information a different way. At the same time that documentary and interview sources begin to pick up the increasingly rural character of state violence (the percentage rural represented by the solid line), press coverage which had previously done a better job capturing rural violence grows silent (the dashed line). The percent of violence committed in rural areas reported in the press falls close to zero all the way through 1985. This is precisely during the years that rural mass killings became a deliberate state policy. For Guatemalans who depended on newspapers for their information, the state terror in the highlands barely registered.

Figure 9.2. Percent of killings and disappearances occurring in rural areas, by year and by source, 1960-1995

The interests of the urban readership may explain part of this phenomenon. Even if Guatemalan newspapers had felt free to publish the whole story of the government’s atrocities in the countryside, space for reporting the terror would have been limited by the need to appeal to middle-class readers, who preferred news about the economy, sports and social events. Many better-off city people have little interest in what happens on the country’s rural margins. For many, the existence of Maya communities speaking their own languages and observing their own customs is a point of national embarrassment (if occasional folkloric pride). Some, especially those who supported the government’s pacification campaign, may have wanted to know as little as possible about massacres of rural people in the name of stopping a "communist" insurgency.

Furthermore, few urban-based journalists have successfully covered the lives of Guatemala’s rural majority. Living in both geographic and cultural isolation, Maya communities were hard to get to and hard to get into, especially for reporters without local contacts.

News of some of the atrocities in the countryside reached human rights groups in Mexico and elsewhere, and occasionally received mention in the foreign press. Noticias de Guatemala, a popular movement periodical, regularly published news of state repression and the rebel uprising, though in 1981 and 1982 this news source was unavailable to most Guatemalans not living in exile. The same was true for Inforpress Centroamericana, a Guatemala City publication that retained considerable independence during the terror, although it had a very limited circulation. It was, says one contributor, "the elite of the left writing for the elite of the right" (CIIDH interview).

Within Guatemala, press coverage and political debate remained more open in the public University of San Carlos. Its autonomy from the rest of the State allowed it to publish opposition literature, even during times of greatest repression. In 1978, the administration of rector Saúl Osorio Paz began publication of Siete Días en la USAC. In addition to University news and left-wing political analysis, this weekly frequently printed denunciations of state violence. It concentrated on the repression of the urban popular movement, but also covered happenings in the countryside. Still, by the end of 1980, just before rural violence crested, the death squads had driven Saúl Osorio into exile and Siete Días stopped denouncing state ter-ror. A series of interim rectors who followed Osorio tried to improve relations with the Lucas García government. As a result, Siete Días began to criticize radical students as much as government repression. By the time Ríos Montt took power little remained of a critical press to cover the peak of state terror (CIIDH and GAM 1999).

Thus few Guatemalans were fully aware of the mass killings taking place in 1982. Even in the western highlands, in the areas of greatest repression, survivors lived in isolation from one another. Many were afraid to discuss the massacres or mass disappearances. Even if they dared to talk, there was little opportunity to denounce the government’s crimes. They might have known what had happened in their immediate area, but had little idea of events elsewhere in the country. Villagers’ understandings remained local, and dependent on their own experiences. Only in exile or in the Communities of Population in Resistance were victims able to come together and develop a general critique of the state terror (Chapter 18). Even today, much of the story of the state killings in the Guatemalan countryside remains untold.