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 12 (Responsibility Under Rios Montt): Plan Victoria, developed under Rios Montt, increases the centrality of the PACs to army strategy.[2] Less than one month after Rios Montt’s coup, the army began an intensified and systematic forced recruitment of Maya into the PACs. It weasn;t long before one million men were forcibly recruited into the PACs.[3] This further systematized the inclusion of civil patrols in the counterinsurgency begun under Lucas Garcia. Thus, it should not be surprising that army massacres with PAC participation more than doubled to account for forty-one percent of army massacres under Rios Montt and that the number of victims of army/PAC massacres more than tripled to account for forty-seven percent of army massacre victims. This systematic pattern of incorporation of army-controlled civil patrols participating in army massacres at the same time that the army's official Plan Victoria campaign calls for increased organization of these PACs indicates "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that (1) massacres were carried out by army platoons and army platoons with PAC participation; (2) the pattern of army and army/PAC massacres from Lucas Garcia to Rios Montt indicates massacres as a result of widespread army strategy and command responsibility; (3) this pattern reveals a highly coordinated army campaign which increasingly and systematically included PACs in massacre operations under army command; (4) this pattern could only have existed as the result of a widespread army strategy with incorporation of PACs as a strategic component of the 1982 Plan Victoria; and, (5) both Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, as well as Gramajo and other army officials in the High Command, had command responsibility and are the intellectual authors of army and army/PAC massacres of the Maya during their military regimes. This sustained campaign of massacres was the army's first genocidal campaign against the Maya.

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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] For excellent analysis on the history and systematic incorporation of PACs into military strategy, see CEH, Memoria, vol. 2:158-234; ODHA, Nunca Más, vol. 2:113-158.

[3] Ejercito de Guatemala. 1984. Las patrullas de autodefensa civil: La respuesta popular al proceso de integración socio-economico-politico en la Guatemala actual. (Guatemala City: Editorial del Ejercito, 16).