Violence and Genocide in Guatemala[1]

By Victoria Sanford

vdlsanford@aol.com

Senior Research Fellow

Institute on Violence and Survival, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Assistant Professor

Department of Anthropology, Lehman College, City University of New York

CHART 3 (Northern El Quiche – Total Number of Victims): Through an analysis of the pattern of massacres in El Quiché and Baja Verapaz during the last twelve months of General Lucas Garcia's regime (March 1981-82) and the first twelve months of General Rios Montt's reign (March 1982-83), I demonstrate that (1) massacres were not the result of rogue field commanders; (2) massacres were a systematic and strategic campaign of the army as an institution; (3) Rios Montt not only continued the campaign of massacres begun by Lucas Garcia, he actually further systematized the massacre campaign; and, (4) this sustained campaign of massacres was the army’s first genocidal campaign.

The Ixil and Ixcán areas are located in the northern part of El Quiché with the Ixcán jungle north of the Ixil mountains. Between March 1981 and March 1983, the Guatemalan army carried out seventy-seven massacres in the Ixil/Ixcán region. There are 3,102 known victims of these massacres. If we locate the number of massacres and victims by date on the calendar of the regimes, Lucas Garcia is responsible for forty-five massacres with 1,678 victims from March 1981 to March 1982 and Rios Montt is responsible for thirty-two massacres with 1,424 victims from March 1982 to March 1983.[2]

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[1] This draws from Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (Guatemala City: FyG Editores, 2003) and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). The author thanks Allison Downey for her assistance in developing the massacre databases, Raul Figueroa Sarti for publishing this critical material in Guatemala, and Ben Kiernan for making it available on this website.

[2] Analysis on massacres in El Quiché in this section is based on massacre data presented in CEH, Memoria, vol. 10.