Guatemalan genocide

Guatemalan Genocide
Part of Guatemalan Civil War
Excavation of the corpses of victims of the Guatemalan Civil War.
Location	Guatemala
Date	1960–1996 especially 1981–1983
Target	Maya peoples
Attack type	Forced disappearance, Genocidal massacre
Deaths	170,000
Perpetrators	Guatemalan government, local militias
Motive	Suppressing alleged Leftist rebels

The Guatemalan genocide, Mayan genocide, or "Silent Holocaust" refers to the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan military government's counterinsurgency operations. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators at the hands of US-backed security forces had been widespread since 1965 and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of. A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror." HRW have described extraordinarily cruel actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.

The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the EGP guerrillas operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya – traditionally seen as subhumans – as being supportive of the guerillas and began a campaign of wholesale killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of Indian peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against the Indian population began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military had carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict. The Guatemalan army itself acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983, during the most intense phase of the repression. In some municipalities such as Rabinal and Nebaj, at least one third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court sanctioned in March 1985 revealed that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the killings, of whom 25% had lost both since 1980, meaning that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed during the period from 1980 and 1985. This does not account for the fact that children were often primary targets in many village massacres. Former military dictator General Efrain Rios Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide.

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalan civilians were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War – 93% by government forces – including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared". Of the 42,275 individual cases of killing and "disappearances" documented by the CEH, 83% of the victims were Maya, meaning that up to 170,000 Maya were killed in the Guatemalan genocide. A UN sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification in 1999 concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the US-backed Guatemalan army, and that US training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation."