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
IMAGE in
CHART 13 (Chapel in memory of
victims of the 1982 Plan de Sanchez massacre in Baja Verapaz): In July, 2004, the Inter-American Court made public its condemnation of
the Guatemalan government for the July 18, 1982 massacre of 188 Achi-Maya
in the village of Plan de Sanchez in the mountains above Rabinal, Baja Verapaz.
In this judgment, and for the first time in its history, the Court ruled
that a genocide had taken place. The Inter-American Court attributed the
1982 massacre and the genocide to Guatemalan army troops. This is the
first ruling by the Inter-American Court against the Guatemalan state for any
of the 626 massacres carried out by the army in its scorched earth campaign in
the early 1980s.
Beyond the importance of this judgment for the people of
Plan de Sanchez, the Court’s ruling is particularly significant because the
following key points were included in the judgment:
• There was a genocide in
Guatemala;
• This genocide was part of the
framework of the internal armed conflict when the armed forces of the
Guatemalan government applied their National Security Doctrine in their
counterinsurgency actions; and,
• These counterinsurgency
actions carried out within the Guatemalan government’s National Security
Doctrine took place during the the regime of General Efrain Rios Montt who came
to power through military coup in March of 1982.
Further, regarding the
massacre in Plan de Sanchez, the Court indicated that the armed forces of the
Guatemalan government had violated the following rights, each of which is
enshrined in the Human Rights Convention of the Organization of American
States:
• The right to personal
integrity
• The right to judicial
protection
• The right to judicial
guarantees of equality before the law
• The right to freedom of
conscience
• The right to freedom of
religion
• The right to private property.
The Plan de Sanchez case
was considered by the Inter-American Court at the request of the Inter-American
Commission which received the original petition from relatives of the massacres
victims. These survivors requested consideration within the
Inter-American Court because of the lack of justice in the Guatemalan legal
system. Since the Plan de Sanchez case was initiated in 1995, there have
been more than 200 exhumations of other clandestine cemeteries of massacre
victims in Guatemala. Each of these exhumations has included the filing
of a criminal case with forensic evidence against the Guatemalan army and its
agents. To date, only the Rio Negro case has been heard in a Guatemalan
court (in 1999) and no army officials were included in the case which found
three low-ranking civil patrollers guilty.
The Guatemalan
government is currently seeking military aid from the United States.
Sadly, most Guatemalan political parties include former military
officials implicated in the genocide - the most prominent being the powerful
FRG party headed by Rios Montt. Moreover, the government has yet to
fully purge the armed forces of the intellectual and material authors of
genocide. Before sending guns or money to the Guatemalan army, the US
government should consider the Guatemalan legal system´s failure to address
these army massacre cases as well as its failure to bring Efrain Rios Montt and
other intellectual authors of genocide to justice.
[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.