Crime in Guatemala

Rates of crime in Guatemala are very high. An average of 101 murders per week were reported in 2016, making the country's violent crime rate one of the highest in Latin America. In the 1990s Guatemala had four cities feature in Latin America's top ten cities by murder rate: Escuintla (165 per 100,000), Izabal (127), Santa Rosa Cuilapa (111) and Guatemala City (101). According to New Yorker magazine, in 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala, and 97% of homicides "remain unsolved." Much of the violent nature of Guatemalan society stems back to a thirty-year-long civil war. However, not only has violence maintained its presence in the post-war context of the country following the Guatemalan Civil War, but it has extended to broader social and economic forms of violence.

The Guatemalan Civil War began in 1960 between the government and leftist actors, and it resulted in over 200,000 deaths. Sources cite the history of conflict in Guatemala as rendering communities accustomed to violence today, and the extension of incompetent or corrupt state institutions facilitates the impunity associated with such violence. During the civil war, the country witnessed a “generalized fear shaped by state terror and institutional violence.”

Most civil war victims were Maya whose deaths were not reported to Ladino audiences via newspapers. Many of these deaths came in brutal fashions like rapes, forced abortions, and burnings. Sexual violence was strategically employed by state officials as a genocidal weapon against indigenous women. The distrust of indigenous still permeates Guatemalan culture today.

The fear of students by government takes much history into account. It was students who led the revolution in 1944 that instituted the only ten years of democracy in the twentieth century that Guatemala experienced. One school, the University of San Carlos, the state viewed with particular distrust during the civil war, because the revolutionary government during democratic period of 1944-1954 had reserved it complete autonomy. After the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, a majority of the 8,000 San Carlos students possessed leftist views in line with the outgoing government. Therefore, throughout the subsequent civil war, the state placed an emphasis on repressing, often disappearing, students of San Carlos.

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