[Professor’s name appears here]
[Date appears here]
Genocide in Guatemala: An Outline
Guatemala is mostly hilly country in Central America. It was erstwhile the heart of the well-known Mayan civilization, which was prevalent till the 10th century AD. When Spanish voyagers invaded Maya in the 16th century, the indigenous Mayans were enslaved in their own native soil. They are even now the most underprivileged majority of the Guatemala's population. Such kinds of inequalities and cruelties of Mayan people led to bitter Civil war in Guatemala which resulted in the mass genocide of this community.
In 1970s, the Maya vigorously participated in protests against the oppressive government backed by the USA. It demanded equality and rights for the Mayan people in the country. In 1980, the Guatemalan government launched “Operation Sophia,” with the help of her armed forces to crush insurgent guerrilla conflict and also killing thousands of civilians who supported them.
For many years, the Guatemalan army devastated hundreds of villages and over 200,000 people were killed and dislocated and in addition hundreds of thousands sought refuge in Mexico and the USA.
As well, the Guatemalan government launched a scorched earth policy, devastating and torching buildings and crops, killing of livestock, polluting water supplies and desecrating sacred places and cultural symbols of the Mayan civilization. A lot of these operations were carried by the army, in particular through special units known as the Kaibiles, besides private death groups, who generally followed the Guatemalan army. The US government gave significant support to the oppressive regimes. The genocide experienced by the Mayans climaxed between 1978 and 1986. After more than three decades the genocide came to an end in 1996 as a result of a peace accord.
This report gives a brief description of the genocide of the Maya people in Guatemala as well its aftermath impacts.
Genocide in Guatemala: Its Historical Background
The origin of the Guatemalan genocide can be traced for about 5 centuries of ethnic violence and discrimination in this country. The country was a Spanish colony and it substituted the socioeconomic order of the earliest Mayan civilization with a severe agricultural economy founded on forced manual labor. Despite the fact Guatemala got independence in 1821 from Spain, it was constantly being run in a sequence of military rulers linked with the landed aristocracy (CEH, 1999).
In 1944, a civilian government in Guatemala came to power with the promise of grand land reforms. Nevertheless, the government reforms soon clashed with the interests of the influential international companies. The American CIA assisted in orchestrating an overthrow in 1954 and inducted a right-wing military ruler. For the next four decades Guatemala plunged into critical political chaos.
Internal Conflict
Throughout the 1970s, Guatemala’s military despots tried to eliminate their political rivals, and in view of the fact the reform movements had been invalidated, the Left increasingly militant and started an all-out civil war against the government establishments. The leftist guerrilla groups primarily got the support of some native Maya, who considered the guerillas as their major support for solving the economic and political elimination from the mainstream communities. Nevertheless, this connection between the Maya and the guerillas finally became a major concern for the Guatemala government, who spread a thought that considered all Maya as natural followers of the rebellion, and hence were dubbed as enemies of the country. The natural sequel of this widespread creed was the deliberate targeting of the Maya population, with the aim starving guerrilla groups of their mass support. This basic principle of counterinsurgency approach got a strong basis in the political domain of the country, which soon became a lab for 'dirty war' campaign. In 1966, Guatemala launched the tactics of forced disappearances. A US-trained death force seized many rebellious Maya, tortured and killed them, and then dropped their dead bodies into the Pacific Ocean. This kind of American activities would reemerge all over the Latin America in the coming years.
1978-1983
The internal conflict in the country saw a significant rise with the induction of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García as the country’s ruler in 1978. In accordance with the Historical Clarification Commission, studied the cases of extra-judicial deaths in the country increased from 100 in 1978 to more than 10,000 in 1981.
Thus, there were widespread protests against the of massacres and a consequence a group of Mayan leaders attacked the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in 1981. In spite of the Spanish government appeals to shun the violence, Guatemalan armed forces forced entry into the embassy. As a result of the turmoil, a fire was broken out and killed many people. Amongst the dead was the protester Vicente Menchú, father of Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the future Nobel Peace Prize-winner. He filed the criminal complaint in Spain against the tyrannical Guatemalan forces responsible for the mishap.
‘Scorched Earth’ operation against the Maya
In 1982, a new ruler General Efraín Ríos Montt ousted Lucas García as head of the country. He had an intimate relationship with the American Administration and with many Christian conservatives in the USA. Ríos rule from March 1982-August 1983 was the worst period in Guatemala's history in which many people were killed. All over that period, the Guatemalan government led an operation to eliminate large parts of the country's Maya populations: about 70,000 people were killed or vanished. In 1982, Ríos Montt initiated a ‘scorched earth’ operation against the Maya people. The Guatemalan armed forces and its paramilitary units – comprised of 'civilian patrols' of compulsory recruited indigenous men who systematically-planned attack for more than 600 villages. The people were assaulted, tormented and killed. More than 300 hundred villages were wholly destroyed. Buildings were devastated; crops and potable water were polluted. Many classified CIA cables from the period – revealed years afterwards – recorded the Guatemalan military's sweeping through Mayan towns. In one cable giving account of a attack on a Quiché village, the writer noted that the guerilla were generally a ghost adversary, and that the army's duties were to slaughter civilians for their alleged rebel sympathies: "The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike" (Doyle and Osorio, 1982).
Terrified by the rampant violence, about 500,000 and 1.5 million Mayan people escaped to other parts of the country or became immigrant abroad. Ríos Montt was eventually removed in a coup d'état in 1983. Afterward, in 1986, a civilian government ratified a new constitution and finally started a gradual peace process that climaxed in the ratifying of a U. N. -Brokered peace agreement in 1996 (Robin, 2004).
Guatemala’s Genocide: An Introduction
The operational mode of the Guatemalan genocide was typified by the synchronized commitment of systematic and severe kinds of violence against the Maya people. Under the rule of General Lucas García (1978-1982), a brutal counterinsurgency “scorched earth policy” was carried out against both the guerrilla, especially in the Guatemalan capital and the urban regions. As well against its most indigenous civilian base in the rural regions of the country. In the successive authoritarianism of General Ríos Montt (1982-1983), while military action in metropolitan areas was minimized, hence there were flagrant human rights violations in rural Guatemala, as the military tried to eliminate the rebels’ social base. Thus, the main military strategy and purpose behind the counterinsurgency operation then was to crush the guerrilla. The government departments and organizational structure throughout the five-year period were hijacked by the military. In 1980 there was no space for people mobilization or for planned opposition to the tyrannical regimes as the judicial system was critically curtailed, and was made subordinate to the cruel and subjective processes of military justice. As a result, organized civil society did not offer a united front against counter-insurgent act of the mass killings.
The government forces considered Maya peoples in highland communities as the combined internal enemy, irrespective of the existence of the rebel combatants. The military operation finally hastened the devastation of hundreds of villages, the killings of no less than 20,000 local farmers, organized mass assaults, forced sterilization and the internal dislocation of about 1.5 million people.
Moreover, the genocidal brutality was shown by acts of critical types of violence. Indeed, it is claimed that those Guatemalan forces that carried the genocide against its own people did so by clearly targeting and afterward looking for exterminating Mayan peoples. Such activities were considered to be essential to cleanse and construct a strong whitened, identical nation-state, a scheme that had not been effectively realized since independence of Guatemala in 1821. The genocide in the country symbolized the growth of a nation-building project that had thus far was unsuccessful to remove, assimilate or incorporate the indigenous other: where the conventional Maya was to be ladinized, and neutralized. This hostility was under-girded by the structural, organized and socio-cultural discrimination that has prepared social, political and economic relationship in the country ever since Spain ruled the country.
Hence, the Guatemalan State helped the disgrace of the Maya people and the ensuing acts of planned massacres of them as a result of the intentional generation and the functioning of the belief in their natural and absolute inferiority and the generation of a racial hierarchy founded on fabricated biological, cultural and ethical disparities. In short, Maya were, and always had been, sub-human, unreliable, naive dull and spiteful and that they were guerrillas, and consequently all of them had to be killed.
Thus dealing with the Maya people with such spiteful ways, the State machinery validated and helped the brutal military violence carried out by non-indigenous forces against the Maya. The military force that thought their enemy was, in effect, sub-human. At the same time, organizational and structural bigotry helped in the growth of the genocide. The Maya population was deliberately sidelined from all fields of the State organs, from local government, as well from the mainstream traditional cultural and economic life. Therefore, the prospects of legal option were in effect null and void. Lastly, the geographical marginalization and organized absence of infrastructure within Maya regions, were strongly run by the armed forces, which implied that in a framework of State media censorship, massacres as a result of the counterinsurgency operation were indiscernible to the callous racist society. The legal impunity in Guatemala was strengthened by social impunity: a most aggressive and apathetic, urban Ladino society had no motivation in, nor had empathy for Maya victims of mass genocide thought to be guerrilla supporters – a situation that continued to the present times.
Planned and ordered by Guatemala’s repressive government, with clear support from the US administration, by 1983 the counterinsurgency was successful in dis-articulating the guerrilla and invoking its military defeat by literally demolishing their support base in actual fact was a war with few battles. In spite of military setbacks, with the major support of the world community and the growing victims’ movement, guerrilla groups still dynamic in some metropolitan regions and in neighboring Mexico were able to make use of the Central American peace process, and supported a negotiated agreement in a process monitored, shaped and funded by the global community, comprising of the UN.
Notably, the peace process in Guatemala, in which many agreements were signed, and was meant to bring an ultimate end to the causes and the sequel of the genocidal conflict, and would become the main motivation for the country’s democratization. Significant measures intended to redress the historical prejudice and social, political, economic and cultural marginalization of Maya people were applied. Such acts were as a consequence of factors, comprising of the pressure of the Maya movement that surfaced following their genocide, and global pressure indicating the need to deal with the Maya people as a sine qua non to the peace agreement and post-conflict rebuilding in Guatemala. The new government was to be plural in character, as laid down in the agreements, endorsed in March 1995, showing an ethnically diverse country.
Nevertheless, the peace process and the clauses of the peace agreements did not react directly or effectively to the fundamental structural rationales of armed clashes, consisting of traditionally entrenched horizontal disparities. The deliberation over land distribution and horizontal disparities, key rationales of the conflict, important justice means, comprising of the trial of the perpetrators, and the Maya territorial independence, was in fact marginalized, at worst clearly ignored, with the aim of minor resistance of the parties to the accords to sit at the negotiation table and sign the peace accords. Moreover, the process was under-girded by the framework of universal individual rights over and above social, economic and cultural rights, rights that would have gone some way towards dealing with particular structural reasons of brutal genocide. Neoliberal economic policies, that were intended to offer loans to the needy, mainly May peasants, were launched to initiate the peace process and as the essential rule of poverty riddance.
Peace, along with a rights cascade, was forced upon a generally indifferent society by the world community. Indeed not dealing with the core rationales of genocide, the design of the peace process itself hindered the prospects to generate favorable conditions for preventing future genocides, in addition to the process that initiated the new violence within the ensuing multi-cultural political democracy that was made legalized and endorsed by the world community. Ever since the conclusion of armed conflict in Guatemala, as a manifestation of homicide rise, the conflict seems no longer to be ideologically based. Violence has constantly been changed and expanded, as new agents, comprising of organized crime, drug dealers and youth gangsters create violent social and economic clash. In Guatemala’s gloomy peace, poverty and acute poverty, marginalization, food shortage, maternal mortality and constant infant undernourishment, all of which impact mainly the Maya population, have risen, as has resource mining in Maya communities. Such conditions show the organized abuse of Maya peoples’ economic and social rights and the utter infringement of their right to their freedom.
Following the 30 years of the mass atrocities that typified Guatemala’s “successful” genocidal counterinsurgency operation, a genocide end continued at the best elusive and deficient. The prevention of the annihilation of Maya peoples in Guatemala seems to be no longer expressed through the normative outline of the typified crime of genocide. Nevertheless, Maya peoples continue to endure the regular abuse of their right to autonomy in a nominally functioning political democracy, and being dislocated from their lands to allow the globally funded mining projects. While the mass atrocities might have altered and the methodical killings of Maya people might no more be clearly identifiable, the eventual end of genocide of Guatemala’s Maya population, is not, in itself, been successfully stopped.
Aftermath of the Genocide
The modern Guatemala has developed from a history of bloodshed and genocide, particularly from the Civil war which started in the 1960s and finished with the peace agreements in 1996. As a consequence of the genocide against the Mayan community much of the rural population endured intense hardships, as well an estimated deaths of 200,000 whilst thousands of people fled to other countries to seek refuge. Throughout the Guatemalan civil war the Maya population was critically placed in a vortex of terror (Godoy, 2006). The common people were caught in a quagmire of vicious fighting between government forces and the guerrilla rebels (Morrison and May 111-132).
At the peak of the civil war, between 1981 and 1984, a change in the in-fighting occurred and caused extensive genocide from the Gautemala’s army's scorched earth policy (Morrison and May 114). In a short period of time, the Guatemala’s army offensives caused many massacres and devastation of more than 400 Mayan villages (Jonas 253-284; Loucky and Moors, 2000). The genocidal violence caused intense poverty as well economic insecurity for Guatemalans, generally the whole families, leaving Guatemala for a better life (Stonich, 2001).
Though peace agreements were ratified and the Guatemalan civil war officially has ended, there has been a repercussion. It must be noted the conclusions of the civil war does not merely symbolize an end for those who experience it. Indeed that delineation in time, the peace agreement ending the conflict, is more a representative index for the history while the personal reminiscences of genocide for many survivors continues to haunt even today. "The problems of the past—extreme hunger and poverty, high levels of violence and human rights abuses, distrust and fear—still remain today" (Flynn 63). Godoy (2006 106-107) presents the accounts of Maya in Guatemala and summed up how people showed their need to flee the country as a result of such cruel conditions (See Arnold 205-218; Conway 26-45; Jones 1-8; Levitt 926-945; Monto, 1994).. Whilst there was much killings as a result of the civil, hardship and hunger continued to this day. Not only were the Mayas killed though whole villages burned and fields devastated and families divided, many never to return again to their birthplaces.
Works Cited
Arnold, Fred. The contribution of remittances to economic and social development. In Mary M. Kritz, Lin L. Lim & Hania Zlotnik (Eds.), International migration systems: A global approach (pp. 205-218). Oxford; Oxford University Press. 1992.
Conway, Dennis. Consequence of migration and remittances for Mexican transnational communities. Economic Geography, 74 (1), 26-45. 1998.
Doyle, K. & Osorio, C. "Counterinsurgency Operations in El Quiché" Central Intelligence Agency, secret cable, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 11 U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966-1996. 1982. Available at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/
Flynn, Michael. Is this peace? The civil war ended six years ago. Although Guatemala's uprooted are trying to rebuild their lives, extreme poverty, violence, distrust and fear remain. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 58 (6), 62-69. 2002.
Godoy, Angelina S. Popular injustice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2006.
Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH). Guatemala: Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarifications. 1999. Available at: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html
Jonas, Susanne. Guatemala. In Harry E. Vanden & Gary Prevost (Eds.), Politics of Latin America: The power game (pp. 253-284). New York: Oxford University Press. 2002.
Jones, Richard C. Introduction: The renewed role of remittances in the new world order. Economic Geography, 74 (1), 1-8. 1998.
Levitt, Peggy. Social remittances: Migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion. International Migration Review, 32 (4), 926-945. 1998.
Loucky, James and Moors, Marilyn M. (Eds.) The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan roots, new American lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2000.
Monto, Alexander. The roots of Mexican labor migration. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 1994.
Morrison, Andrew R and May, Rachel A. Escape from terror: Violence and migration in post-revolutionary Guatemala. Latin American Research Review, 29 (2), 111-132. 1994.
Robin, Corey. "Dedicated to Democracy". London Review of Books, November 18, 2004. Available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/robi02_.html
Stonich, Susan C. (Ed.) Endangered peoples of Latin America: Struggles to survive and thrive. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. 2001.
