Guatemalan Genocide: Draft of Case Study paper

Genocide in Guatemala

How can the human rights discourse aid the cessation and prosecution of human rights violations in sovereign nations? Taking the period of armed confrontation in Guatemala as a case study for the use of human rights, the human rights discourse emerges as an important tool in ending repressive violence, both for the international community and for victims of abuse. The human rights discourse provides a framework with which to quantify the immorality and criminality of human rights violations and to shame repressive regimes. In Guatemala, it allowed the international community to define the violence against the indigenous Mayan population as genocide and to shame the Guatemalan military regime and the governments that supported it.

The Period of the Armed Confrontation: 1962 - 1996

In its report, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) analyzes the violence in Guatemala from 1962 to 1996 and defines these 34 years as the period of armed confrontation, although conflict between the indigenous Maya and the ladinos has a deeper historical context. The armed confrontation was prefaced by the 1954 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-organized coup, which overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. The period of internal conflict amongst Guatemalans began legitimately in 1962 with the initiation of military activity by the insurgent group MR-13 (Revolutionary Movement November 13), student movement protests against the government, and the formation of the military cabinet.

In The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, Greg Grandin argues that the State’s counter-insurgency campaign “was experienced in racial terms” (222). His book explores Guatemalan race relations from the 18^th century to the present day, and how the combination of post-World War II factors led to the changing power relationships in the Guatemalan social system, the insurgency of indigenous Mayans, and their violent repression. Although he doubts that, “had the western highlands been populated with Ladino insurgents instead of Mayan rebels, the scorched earth campaign would have been any less vicious or inhumane,” he concedes that the “Indians experienced the repression as Indians” (222). In other words, the indigenous Mayan population experienced the repression within the context of a history of colonial violence and oppression. The CEH notes that, from 1963-1967, the military acquired “intelligence apparatus and mechanisms of social control for the rural area” and extended the “[o]perating area of the Ambulatory Military Police . . . to include rural areas” (Appendix A). These actions brought the indigenous Mayan population under increasing military surveillance and scrutiny, and in 1965 the “first massacre of civilians” occurred in the eastern region of Guatemala (Appendix A). Simply put, the violence in Guatemala began as a continuation of the colonial repression of the indigenous Mayans, not just as a counter-insurgency initiative against communist guerrillas.

According to the CEH, the repression in Guatemala resulted in the death or disappearance of approximately 200,000 people, and “state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of the violations” (Conclusions 2, 15). Guerrilla groups who opposed Guatemala’s military government – most specifically, the MR-13 (Revolutionary Movement November 13), the FAR (Rebel Armed Forces), the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), and the PGT (Guatemala Workers Party) – initially bore the brunt of the State’s counter-insurgency operations; however, “the Army’s perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them,” leading to their “extermination en masse” (Conclusions 85). The abhorrent methods of repression and violence the army used suggest that they intended to exterminate the Mayan people, not simply control political insurgency. The CEH registered 626 “massacres and so-called scorched earth operations . . . [which] resulted in the complete extermination of many Mayan communities” (Conclusions 86). These massacres “were committed with particular cruelty” and the CEH recorded horrific atrocities, such as:

“the killing of defenceless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.” (Conclusions 87)

The CEH regards the period from 1978-1985 as “the most violent and bloody part of the entire armed confrontation” (Conclusions 26). After the 1976 earthquake, the formation of reconstruction groups gave rise to “considerable organisational growth in rural and urban areas,” but the intensification of social mobilisation from 1976 -1980 resulted in increased state violence and repression (Appendix C). This violence began in 1978 when the army massacred the Q’eqchi’ peasants of Panzós, Alto Verapaz, “who were making claims to land rights” (Appendix C). From 1978 to 1980 the State selectively assassinated community leaders in rural areas and disappeared leaders of the social movement and opposition political parties, and in 1980 the army massacred twenty-seven protestors and ten hostages at the Spanish Embassy. From 1981-82, “military operations aimed at dismantling insurgent structures in the capital and massive repression against civilians . . . destroy[ed] the social base of the guerrillas in rural areas” (Appendix C). Although peasants had always made up the majority of victims, during this period the victims were “principally Mayan” (Conclusions 27).

From 1983-1985, the military established model villages and development poles “to relocate and control displaced members of the population” (Appendix E). From 1986 – 1990 the government began to promote “a negotiated solution to the confrontation,” but the continuation of massacres – Santiago, Atitlán on December 2, 1990 – reveals the prolongation of the violent period. In 1994, peace negotiations with a United Nations monitor continued and the Government signed both the Global Accord on Human Rights and the accord on the establishment of the Historical Clarification Commission. Nevertheless, in 1995 the military massacred a community of Guatemalan returnees in Xamán. On December 29, 1996, the Accord for Firm and Lasting Peace was signed, ending the official period of armed confrontation and establishing, contrary to its title, a tenuous peace (Appendix F, G).

The CEH analyzed and documented the human rights violations of the armed conflict period. In “Truth Commissions in Guatemala and Peru: Perpetual Impunity and Transitional Justice Compared,” Joanna Crandall argues that the CEH “was highly restricted in what it could do, as it did not possess subpoena powers, it had no right to grant amnesty and could not name individual perpetrators” (5). Crandall recognizes that the CEH had an effectively “weak mandate,” but also concedes that this powerlessness “was not a mistake” and was at times an asset, allowing the report “to emphasize different types of violence, thereby providing a broader perspective and analysis” (7). Instead of holding accountable individual perpetrators, which its mandate did not support, the CEH “looked to the causes of the armed conflict and denounced an entire system” – namely, the historically colonialist and racist oligarchy, which held power in Guatemala ever since the 1871 founding of the liberal state. After publishing the final report in 1999, many of the mostly international CEH staff members left Guatemala out of fear of the “possible repercussions for their participation in the Commission” (8). Crandall suggests that this exodus signalled “that the pervasive power of the military was in still intact” (8): although the report came out after the end of the armed conflict, the threat to human rights in Guatemala was still palpable at the time it was published. Under these conditions, the report employed the discourse of human rights to articulate the specific violations and immorality of the Guatemalan State and sought to expose the State’s criminality to the international community.

Theory: Creating a Framework and Instilling Shame

The human rights discourse offered Guatemalans and the international community two distinct means of overcoming the violence in Guatemala. First, it provided a framework with which to express and measure the horror of the situation. Second, it articulated the importance of testimony and memory in overcoming impunity and bringing shame to violators of human rights. The CEH uses the first element, the framework of the human rights discourse, to condemn the State’s actions and to compare the Guatemalan situation to other incidents of mass violence against a racialized and marginalized group. The CEH specifically cites the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which

“defines the crime of genocide and its requirements in the following terms: ‘... genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’” (Conclusions 109)

This framework allows the commission to define both the immorality and criminality of Guatemalan state’s actions. The immensity and horror of the Guatemalan situation, and other similar cases of genocide and human rights violations, often defy quantification. The framework provided by the Geneva Convention offers a system of measurement in these cases of overwhelming abuse, affording the victims of violence and genocide, and the international community horrified by this violence, a method of quantifying the previously un-quantifiable. Simply put, human rights provide a discursive yardstick with which to measure, and prosecute, systemic violence. Without this yardstick, the Guatemalan State could have denied the genocidal nature of their campaigns.

In “War, Peace, and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala,” Rachel Sieder argues that defining the violence in Guatemala as genocide allowed the CEH to charge the Guatemala state with “crimes against humanity” (190). She notes how the CEH report countered the Law of National Reconciliation passed in 1996, which protected perpetrators from prosecution of “a political crime or a politically motivated common crime related to the armed conflict” (190). Sieder explains that this “amnesty was explicitly ruled out for the internationally proscribed crimes of torture, genocide, and forced disappearance” (190). The human rights discourse provided the framework for articulating the actions of the Guatemalan State as more than political crimes, and allowed the CEH to move beyond its restrictive mandate by validating human rights groups’ claims that military impunity represented an aberration of justice.

In contrast to the human rights discourse the CEH used, the Guatemalan state used the counter-insurgency discourse of the Cold War fight against communist guerrillas to justify their actions and legitimize their motives for aggression. This battle of discourses represents the second application of the human rights discourse in Guatemala, the use of memory and testimony to bring shame to repressive regimes. In the case of Guatemala, the question arises, to whom was the military regime justifying and legitimizing its actions under an anti-communist rhetoric? The U.S. government, among other countries (France, Israel, and South Africa), offered military support and training to the Guatemalan regime (Grandin, Last 13). With the support of these countries, one could assume that Guatemala need not have worried about its international reputation. Seemingly, in light of the 1980 massacre at the Spanish embassy, Guatemala was contemptuous of international opinion. Yet, the international community ultimately brought about the end of the confrontation by articulating the State policy of repression in Guatemala as a violation of human rights. If Guatemala had the support of the governments of the U.S., France, Israel, and South Africa among others, it did not necessarily have the same support from the electoral body of these democracies. These governments depend on the strength of their reputation with the voting public. If enough people in the U.S. begin interpreting the violence in Guatemala as genocide or a violation of human rights rather than as the necessary control of communist insurgent groups, public opinion will limit and perhaps reverse the U.S. government’s support of Guatemala. In fact, Sieder notes that the CEH report set an “important precedent” in inciting international accountability. In 1999, Bill Clinton expressed “regret at U.S. involvement in human rights violations in Guatemala” (194), a small concession but an important indicator of the role international reputation plays.

The pioneering work of Rigoberta Menchú compelled the Guatemalan military to attempt to justify and legitimize its aggression to the international community. In her book, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Menchú shares her experiences of the human rights abuses in Guatemala. Although some scholars, most notably David Stoll, have challenged the accuracy of her narrative, Menchú’s account of her life in Guatemala, both before and during the dictatorship, expresses her personal perception of the day-to-day reality for Mayan Guatemalans. Additionally, her personal history exposed the human rights abuses of the Guatemalan regime to the international community, using the form of testimony. Whether the events she describes are all historically accurate in the Western positivistic sense remains unimportant because her descriptions represent her subjective perception of her experiences. Rather than articulating the definitions of human rights abuses and measuring her experience against that framework in a quantifiable way, Menchú narrates her subjective experiences to her audience. This technique allows the reader to engage with Menchú and sympathize with her plight, and the plight of “all poor Guatemalans” (2). Using this style of narrative – a conversational biography – Menchú becomes personalized and individual rather than an abstract statistic. Particularly in the Guatemalan case, where ethnic barriers between the indigenous Mayans and the “white” developed world have led to the international communities ease in ignoring human rights abuses against indigenous peoples, Menchú connected with her readership, incited public outcry, and ultimately won the Nobel Peace Prize. As is obvious from Guatemala’s history, this public outcry and the shame it placed on Guatemala’s counter-insurgency policies took time to show affect. Menchú’s book was published in 1983, but it took another thirteen years to see the end of the armed confrontation. Since the conflict in Guatemalan was never wholly internal – international actors, particularly the U.S. government, had always played key roles in instigating, organizing, and supporting the violence and repression – Menchú’s personal testimony of the human rights violations in Guatemala influenced primarily the international community who had the power to support or impede Guatemala’s military policies.

The human rights discourse provided a vital means of framing the violence in Guatemala, and allowed the CEH, with a specific mandate against prosecution, to condemn the Guatemalan regime and articulate the criminality of its actions. As well, the international community, which often plays a role in condoning or supporting human rights violations, has the power to shame abusive governments by framing their actions as immoral in the context of human rights. Testimony and memory play a key role in the human rights discourse because they help bring the violations to light and create awareness in the international community, and they empower the victims by allowing them to express their experiences and break the legacy of silence.

Works Cited

Burgoes-Debray, Elisabeth, ed. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Trans. Ann Wright. New York: Verso, 1984.

Commission for Historical Clarification. Guatemala: Memory of Silence. 1999. American Association for the Advancement of Science: n. pag. 18 Nov. 2006. <>.

Crandall, Joanna. “Truth Commissions in Guatemala and Peru: Perpetual Impunity and Transitional Justice Compared.” Peace, Conflict and Development 4 (2004): 1-19. 18 Nov. 2006 <http://www.peacestudiesjournal.org.uk/docs/perpetualimpunity.PDF>.

Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Sieder, Rachel. “War, Peace, and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala.” Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict. Ed. Nigel Biggar. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2001. 185-206.

tag: last301