In the early 1980s, the bodies of thousands of victims of state violence were buried in clandestine cemeteries or left to rot by their assassins. Ten years later, forensic anthropologists and community survivors began a series of large-scale exhumations in rural Guatemala, in order to provide the dead with a decent burial, but also to gather evidence for possible court cases against the state agents responsible.

Exhumations represent the assertion of victims’ power and usually take place where survivors have organized to struggle for their rights. Opposing this are those who have the most to lose from allowing survivors to confront the past, including the army and local army agents who participated in the massacres or came to identify with the counterinsurgency. Since the December 1996 peace accords, state repression of political opponents has declined relative to previous years, but it has nonetheless continued.

For example, in San Andrés Sacabajaj, El Quiché, members of CUC and CONAVIGUA organized a 1997 exhumation of relatives interred in the town Catholic Church, victims of an army massacre in which local military commissioners and civil patrollers helped select the victims. The army visited San Andrés many times during the exhumation process, allegedly to invite local youths to join the armed forces, though members of CONAVIGUA felt the army’s intention was to dissuade villagers from proceeding with the exhumation. CONAVIGUA accused former patrollers and military commissioners of accosting local widows. The former state agents have argued that with the peace accords, human rights investigations are no longer necessary, and they have warned that exhumations will polarize the community and bring the return of violence (interviews with CONAVIGUA representatives Fermina López and Dina Moscoso; Amnesty International 1998).

Similar opposition emerged during attempts to investigate the case of the army and civil patrol mass killings in Río Negro, Rabinal. A 1993 exhumation of the March 1982 murder of 177 women and children yielded the remains of 143 different victims. Three leaders of the Xococ, Rabinal civil patrol were arrested and charged with murder. The following year, as the case began to proceed through the courts, army soldiers arrived in Pacux, where the survivors from Río Negro now live. Soldiers demanded to know who was promoting the exhumations, and warned local widows not to associate with church and human rights groups (Russell 1996: 27-9).

Still, the survivors persisted. With the help of CALDH, they pressured the Public Ministry in Cobán to bring the captured patrollers to trial. After years of delays, on November 30, 1998, the three—Carlos Chen, Pedro González Gómez and Fermín Lajuj—were sentenced to death for ordering and carrying out the killings of the three victims in Río Negro that could be positively identified.

It was first prosecution involving any of the mass killings committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict. But it was only the latest in a series of guilty verdicts against civil patrollers for their role in the counterinsurgency violence. Others serving jail sentences for murder include patrollers from Joyabaj, Chajul, and San Pedro Jocopilas, all in El Quiché, and from Colotenango, Huehuetenango (Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center 1999). However, patrollers typically committed violence on the orders of the military. In 1982, at the high point of violence, more than 80 percent of all killings in which the civil patrols were implicated were committed in combination with the army (Figure 19.3). Even where acting on their own, patrollers were encouraged by army sponsors to terrorize their neighbors. In the case of Río Negro, patrollers from Xococ carried out the killings themselves, though the court established that the army was present throughout the massacre, acting in a supervisory role and to protect the patrollers (information provided by CALDH).

Once again, Guatemala’s poor are paying the greatest price for the armed conflict, not just as victims but also among those punished for carrying out the government campaign of terror. Despite gross violations of the law during the counterinsurgency, the army high command, as well as members of Guatemala’s political class, continues to evade responsibility for its deliberate long-term policy of extra-judicial murder, even for the army’s well-planned early 1980s scorched earth policy (Washington Office on Latin America 1989; Americas Watch 1991; Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala 1991; Amnesty International 1993; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1998).

Another measure of impunity is that those who work to clarify this history still face repression. On April 24, 1998, the Catholic Church presented its REMHI report on the armed conflict, detailing both the operation and the effects of the state violence. Two days later Juan José Gerardi Condera, the Church’s Bishop for Human Rights, was murdered inside his parish garage. The government has shown little seriousness in pursuing those responsible, who presumably objected to the report’s explicit denunciation of the terror.

There are signs that impunity in Guatemala may not go on forever. A number of human rights groups are developing cases against members of the military. As those of lesser rank get punished, the chance increases that they will turn against their commanders. With all the disappearances and mass killings that the State carried out over the last 36 years, some from among the many Guatemalans obligated to participate in these crimes will come forward to speak the truth.

As an example, a number of troops involved in the army’s 1982 mass killing at Las Dos Erres, El Petén have agreed to provide court testimony in exchange for protection. On December 7, 1982, a few months after FAR rebels ambushed an army patrol in the area, killing 18 soldiers and recovering 18 army guns, 16 elite Kaibil fighters and 20 auxiliary troops from the army base at Santa Elena arrived at Las Dos Erres to search for the guns. The troops, dressed as civilians, claimed that they had come to provide vaccinations, then lined up the community members and conducted a house-by-house search. The army found no guns or any sign of guerrilla involvement. Undeterred, troops tortured residents for information about the guerrillas, raped many of the community’s women and girls, and then proceeded to blindfold and bludgeon to death almost the entire village population. During a 1995 exhumation, 162 cadavers were found stacked in a well in the hamlet. Others were dug up from clandestine cemeteries further away. Survivors estimate over 300 people died that day at Las Dos Erres (information provided by FAMDEGUA).

Guatemala’s Public Ministry has opened an investigation into the Dos Erres case. Sixteen members of the military, including then-President Ríos Montt, have been called to testify. So far they have exhibited a profound case of collective historical amnesia, and many deny remembering who their commanding officer was at the time.

Despite the evasions, this process represents a victory of sorts for the survivors of state violence. Many of the military officers appeared visibly shaken during their testimony and some could not contain their tears. "Never before have members of the military been made to declare publicly about the massacres and disappearances," says Aura Elena Farfán, former GAM leader and current member of FAMDEGUA, whose brother Rubén was disappeared in 1984. "For we family members of the victims, it gives us satisfaction, however small, to see them sit there, nervous and trembling."

In Guatemala, leaders of the counterinsurgency live comfortably. As shown in Chapter 6, former General Ríos Montt ruled during the most indiscriminate period of state terror. More state killings occurred during Ríos Montt’s regime than during any other (Figure 6.1), and in the same period the monthly rate of violence was more than four times greater than for the next highest regime (Figure 6.2). Despite this legacy, Ríos Montt continues to exercise power as the head of the Guatemalan Republican Front.

Half a world away, General Augusto Pinochet faces extradition from England to Spain to possibly stand trial for crimes against humanity during his campaign of terror against Chile’s political opposition. No matter the result of that case, human rights defense has achieved a greater, more global importance at the end of the 20th Century. The days of privilege for the agents and architects of Guatemala’s state violence may also be coming to an end. Says Farfán, "The fact that [Pinochet] is being accused all over the world as an assassin, that gives us in Guatemala great comfort and inspires us to continue our struggle."