The Guatemalan Civil War
Guatemala's civil war ran from 1960 to 1996 and killed around 200,000 people, the great majority of them Maya civilians killed by the state. Its origin was the coup of 1954, in which the CIA removed the elected president Jacobo Árbenz, whose land reform had expropriated uncultivated holdings of the United Fruit Company with compensation at the value the company had declared for tax. A succession of military governments followed, and the reform was reversed. The war began in November 1960 with a failed revolt by junior officers, some of whom took to the mountains and formed guerrilla movements. The insurgency was never large. The counterinsurgency was enormous. American advisers helped build the intelligence apparatus; death squads operated from within the security forces; and disappearance became a systematic technique — Guatemala is where the term desaparecidos was first widely used. The worst period was 1981 to 1983, under Generals Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt, when the army applied a scorched earth campaign in the Maya highlands. Over 600 villages were destroyed and their inhabitants killed on the reasoning that the population was the guerrillas' base. The UN-backed truth commission reported in 1999 that state forces were responsible for 93 per cent of the documented violations and that acts of genocide had been committed against Maya groups. Peace accords were signed in December 1996. Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013; the conviction was annulled ten days later. Bishop Juan Gerardi was beaten to death in 1998, two days after presenting the Catholic Church's own report on the killings. The accords delivered demilitarisation and little of the promised land reform or indigenous rights. Guatemala's homicide rate after the war remained among the highest in the hemisphere.
- Year: 1960 CE
- Category: Civil War
