Guatemalan genocide

The Guatemalan genocide (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco), also referred to as the Maya genocide (Genocidio maya), or the Silent Holocaust (Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S.-backed military regimes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians. Anti-communism was one of the main justifications for the mass killings with the military conflating Maya identity with communist subversion.

In the 1970s, the Guatemalan military began a genocidal campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces. They accused the Maya of siding with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor who operated in the region. While massacres had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against the Maya began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out at least 626 massacres against the Maya during the civil war. They also acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages just between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of all villages were evacuated or destroyed by the army. Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982. A 1984 report by HRW discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". In fact, the rights abuses were so severe that even the U.S. with its fervent anti-communist policy "kept its assistance comparatively limited. For most of the 1980s the Guatemalan army relied on fellow pariah-states like Argentina and South Africa for supplies."

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the war, including at least 40,000 persons enforced disappearances. A March 1985 study by the Juvenile Division of the Guatemala Supreme Court estimated that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war, and that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans had been killed between 1980 and 1985. The United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) found that 92% of civilian executions were carried out by government forces. The CEH documented 42,275 victims of human rights violations and acts of violence from 7,338 testimonies. 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino. 91% of victims were killed between 1978 and 1984, with 48% of deaths occurring in 1982 alone. In its final report in 1999, the CEH concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the Armed Forces of Guatemala, and that U.S. training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation".

Former military dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide. He was convicted in 2013 of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Indigenous group, but that sentence was overturned, and his retrial was not completed by the time of his death in 2018.