when a CIA-sponsored military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and thwarted the country's decade-long campaign for agrarian reform.61 For the next forty years, a series of military officers ruled the country. As in Nicaragua and El Salvador, opposition groups in Guatemala during this time frame challenged the institutions that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small percentage of the population. Two percent of the population controlled 72 percent of all private land,62 while 60 percent of Guatemalans earned roughly two dollars a day harvesting export crops such as coffee, sugar, and cotton. Workers and their families endured inhumane conditions at home and at work: inferior housing with no running water, sewers, or electrification; and access to health care and education was limited. Workers were offered few legal protections, and attempts at unionization were violently discouraged.
The Maya of the highlands of Guatemala, who comprised half of Guatemala's population of eight million and were the backbone of the agricultural economy, were especially poor and victimized. Multinational corporations, with the encouragement and support of various dictatorships, confiscated Indian land for oil production, mining, and cattle raising. Consequently the vast majority of Maya families were either landless and forced to work for others, or farmed holdings of less than seven hectares (the bare minimum needed to support a family). Mayas had the highest infant mortality rate in the country (134 per 1,000 live births compared to 80 per 1,000 for the ladinos),63 and their life expectancy was sixteen years lower than for ladinos. Only 19 percent of Mayas were literate as compared to over 50 percent of the rest of the population. They were a voiceless and heavily exploited majority, whose intense poverty made them, the government feared, prone to insurgency. As early as the 1960s, the army moved into the highlands and kidnapped and killed those suspected of trying to form agricultural cooperatives, unions, or political groups.64 Between 1966 and 1976, fifty thousand people were murdered.65 Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, the “Butcher of Zacapa,” who assumed the “presidency” in 1970, was among several of Guatemala's leaders who exemplified the strategy. He is reported to have stated: “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.”66
Various guerrilla groups operated during the 1960s and 1970s to challenge the dictatorships. In 1982, the four principal guerrilla armies joined to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). Their platform included agrarian reform and price controls; equality between Indians and ladinos; democratic representation; and civil liberties such as freedom of expression and religion.67 The government tried to control the population and erode the guerrillas' popular base through special programs such as the euphemistically called frijoles y fusiles (beans and rifles) and techo, tortillas, y trabajo (housing, tortillas, and employment), which provided food and other aid in exchange for service in the patrullas de autodefensa civil (civilian defense patrols). At the height of the civilian patrol system, the patrullas counted nine hundred thousand members.68 The violence against the opposition reached new levels of barbarism from 1981 to 1984, during the governments of Generals Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Oscar Mejía Víctores.69 The army burned fields and killed livestock to destroy the guerrillas' food supplies. Individuals remotely suspected of assisting the guerrillas, no matter how young, were viciously tortured and killed.70
The Mayas were especially targeted. Accused of harboring or supporting the rebels, entire villages were burned to the ground by the kaibiles, the government's elite counterinsurgency units, many of whom were young Indians forced to wage war against their own people.71 Entire communities were slaughtered. Soldiers used guns, knives, and machetes, or doused their victims with gasoline and burned them alive. Bodies were mutilated before and after death: limbs and heads severed, women's breasts cut off and stuffed into the mouths of their dead children. Even fetuses were cut out of their mothers' pregnant bodies to ensure that there would be no survivors.72 One scholar has appropriately called this period “the time of mass terror.”73
As one example, on July 17, 1982, five hundred Guatemalan army troops entered the tiny Chuj Indian village of San Francisco, rounded up the men, women, and children, and brutally murdered roughly 350 villagers. The four men who survived the massacre did so by hiding in the mounds of corpses to await the chance to escape into the jungle, and into Mexico. “I was under about ten bodies,” reported one fifty-seven-year-old survivor. “Then the soldiers began shooting again…. I lay still, my face covered in blood, and they lifted me and said, ‘This one is done,’ and threw me on a pile of bodies.” Later that night he escaped the village and traveled nine hours on foot to reach the border of Mexico.74 Throughout the early 1980s, Mexican campesinos in Chiapas reported that the rivers flowing from Guatemala were filled with so many corpses—many exhibiting the visible signs of torture—that it became impossible to bury them all. The smell of burning and rotting corpses became an everyday fact of life along the Guatemala-Mexico border.75
The army called such actions “scientific killings” designed to eliminate the rebels' base of support. (Many of these atrocities were chronicled by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú in her controversial memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú.)76 Survivors and nearby villagers fled deeper into the mountains to avoid a similar fate, or crossed the border into southern Mexico, where they hoped to find refuge among kindred cultural groups. Those who appealed for amnesty or who were caught by the Guatemalan military and allowed to live were “reoriented”: interrogated for information on the guerrillas and then subjected to “reeducation” classes for twelve to fifteen hours every day for several months, where they were lectured on the “falsehoods” of the guerrillas' political campaign. Finally, in strategic areas, the so-called polos de desarrollo, inhabitants of towns and villages, were relocated to heavily patrolled “model villages,” where their actions were strictly regulated.77
The government's policy of indoctrination and cultural annihilation continued in the model villages. Residents were allowed to speak only Spanish, and Catholicism and indigenous rituals were strongly discouraged in favor of some form of evangelical Protestantism—particularly that espoused by Ríos Montt himself—that taught subservience to authority.78 The traditional Maya government was replaced with army-appointed commissioners and the civilian defense patrols that spied on camp residents and controlled the movement of the villagers. As part of the government's rural pacification policy, the Maya populations were forced to engage in public works projects, including rebuilding the structures and communities that the army had so assiduously burned down.79
From 1978 to 1984, approximately 100,000 Guatemalans were killed and 40,000 “disappeared” (their whereabouts unknown and presumed dead); 440 villages were destroyed, and 750,000 people internally displaced. Over a quarter-million people fled the country.80 The Catholic Church was one of the few institutions to denounce the human rights violations. In one of their many official protests, the Conference of Guatemalan Bishops denounced the “massive assassination” of Indians and campesinos, as well as the lack of democratic institutions that could guarantee the welfare of the Guatemalan people. “Guatemala has experienced, and continues to live and endure a grave crisis,” wrote the bishops in one 1984 document, “and [the country] is sinking further into the abyss.”81 As in El Salvador, clergy, nuns, and missionaries became popular targets for the counterinsurgency units, forcing many to flee the country and form the Guatemalan Church in Exile.82
US aid to Guatemala shifted according to human rights reports and the domestic pressure that these elicited. Military aid was temporarily suspended in 1977, but the United States continued to train officers in the Guatemalan armed forces, facilitate corporate investments, and provide humanitarian and development assistance to those in power. After a meeting with General Ríos Montt in Honduras in 1982, President Reagan remarked that Ríos Montt was a man of “great personal integrity” whom human rights monitors had given a “bum rap.”83 Military aid was reinstated a few years later. But in March 1990, under domestic and international pressure, the Bush administration recalled its ambassador in protest over
