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 6 (El Quiche Data): If we broaden our analysis to the entire department of El Quiché, our conclusions about the strategies and patterns of massacres in the Ixil/Ixcán areas during the regimes of Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt are systematically reaffirmed.[2] Under Lucas Garcia, from March 1981 to March 1982, 2,495 Maya were victims of ninety-seven army massacres in the department of El Quiché. Under Rios Montt, between March 1982 and March 1983, 3,180 Maya were victims of eighty-five massacres in El Quiché. Here again, while there is a thirteen percent drop in the number of massacres under Rios Montt, there is a twenty-five percent increase in the number of massacre victims during the first year of his regime. Again, under Rios Montt, there is an increase in the efficiency of the massacres with thirty percent more victims per massacre, on average. And again, I want to emphasize that this thirty percent increase represents the systematic inclusion of women, children and elderly as massacre victims.

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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] CEH, Memoria, vol. 10.