4 Terror

Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982-1983
Virginia Garrard-Burnett
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379648.001.0001
Published: 2009 Online ISBN: 9780199869176 Print ISBN: 9780195379648
CHAPTER
4 4 Terror 
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/6763/chapter/150870047 by University of Edinburgh user on 17 January 2023

Virginia Garrard‐Burnett
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379648.003.0004 Pages 85–112

Published: December 2009
Abstract
This chapter takes a close‐grained look at the impact of violence on Mayan communities during the
scorched‐earth campaign of the early 1980s. It explores one massacre in detail. The chapter o ers
observations about the culpability of soldiers and policymakers involved in such events, but it also
examines kinds of motivations and self‐interest that compelled local villagers to support the military
in its assaults on their own families and communities. This chapter seeks to complicate our
understanding of state violence by emphasizing the degree to which ordinary people readily engage in
what has been called “autogenocide” in order to protect their own self‐interests. This chapter uses
primary and secondary sources to interrogate the impact of violence at the local level. It uses human
rights accounts, personal interviews, and reports by nongovernmental organizations and the Catholic
Church to explore the ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational aspects of violence.
Keywords: massacre, scorched‐earth campaign, gender, violence, Maya

Subject: History of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology of Religion, Religion and Politics
Los Colores
Si tuvieran que pintar la guerra,
¿de que color la pintarían?
Una dijo, de verde
Otra, de rojo,
Y otra, de negro.
—Humberto Ak’abal, Raqonchi’aj: Grito
In exploring the events that took place in Guatemala under General Ríos Montt’s tenure in o ce, we nd
that the overwhelming theme that binds all of it together is violence, which runs like the warp and weft of a
Mayan weaving throughout this period of history. It bears notice that, while the focus of much of this work
is on state‐sponsored violence, violence in Guatemala in the early 1980s was not in any sense unidirectional,
nor did it operate solely in the political arena. Instead, it played out between the political Right and the
political Left, the ruling class and the campesinos, and between neighbors and communities. While the
focus of this chapter is on the direct e ects of the military’s scorched‐earth campaign of 1982–1983, Fusiles
y Frijoles, it also seeks to shed light on the meta‐e ects of violence and the evolution of a culture, even a
1
pathology, of violence that extended far beyond the immediate reach of political goals and ideologies. Here,
p. 86 we use the phrase not as a metaphor, but in a literal sense to understand how violence—whether meted
out over the long term or in explosive bursts—can radically alter the fundamental DNA of a culture, in terms
of human interactions, motivations, and desires.

Fusiles y Frijoles
It was midway through the rainy season of 1982 that Ríos Montt initiated a systematic and aggressive plan
2
for the paci cation of the highlands. On July 1, 1982, Executive Decree 44–82 declared Guatemala to be
3
under a state of siege, and authorized the division of the country into military zones (zonas militares). This
decree laid the legal groundwork for the military strategy designed to deliver the guerrillas a decisive and
nal defeat, the Plan Nacional de Seguridad y Desarrollo. The heart of this security plan was Plan de
Campaña Victoria 82, commonly known as Victoria 82. The rst component of this was the Plan for
Assistance to the Areas of Con ict (PAAC), known as Fusiles y Frijoles (literally, ri es and beans, or, more
alliteratively, “beans and bullets” in English)—an operation designed to eliminate the guerrillas by
destroying their access to the general population as a base of support and, at least theoretically, to provide a
4
safe haven for pro‐government campesinos from the armed con ict.
In principle, Fusiles y Frijoles, as we have seen in chapter 3, was designed to punish the guilty and reward
the innocent, thus providing a moral basis for counterinsurgency. Ríos Montt himself described this
military action as one enacted “with severity, with compassion, with extremity, with true justice, with
5
interest in people who wish to improve their lives.” The Guatemalan government conceived of Fusiles y
Frijoles to demonstrate the Janus faces of Guatemalan military power, issuing rewards and punishment to
the rural population according to its necessity. The moral mandate of Fusiles y Frijoles, theoretically,
extended from the Alto Mando of the army all the way down to common foot soldiers: as agents of a
bene cent government, all soldiers took a pledge of good conduct in which they vowed, among other things,
6
to respect women, children, and the elderly, and to refrain from stealing or destroying crops or property.
Despite these lofty goals, however, out in the eld Fusiles y Frijoles operated under simpler rules. As one
army o cer succinctly explained the formula: “If you are with us, we’ll feed you; if you’re against us, we’ll
7
kill you.”
In strategic terms, the Fusiles y Frijoles policy represented a shift away from the earlier Lucas García
approach to counterinsurgency, which called for 100 percent random slaughter (“blindness and madness,”
p. 87 in the words of General Hector Gramajo, one of the authors of the Ríos Montt–era paci cation plan and
later minister of defense, “brute force and nothing more”), to a more systematic policy that called for a 30
percent “total kill” in the zones of con ict, combined with 70 percent “soft” paci cation, including
8
psychological operations and development projects.
The Victoria 82 campaign was measurably more methodical and less chaotic than Lucas Garcia’s
counterinsurgency, but it was also more deadly. From a basic military perspective, it was also signi cantly
more e ective. With this policy of “intelligent killing,” the stage was set for the military campaign that
would commit, over the course of seventeen months, according to the CEH and REMHI reports, nearly half
of all the massacres and scorched‐earth operations that took place over the course of Guatemala’s entire
9
armed struggle.
The sweep of the Fusiles y Frijoles campaign was massive, extending across the breadth of the altiplano, but
concentrating much of its fury on the northern part of the department of El Quiché. It struck hard in the
Ixcán area where the cooperative movement had once been strong and where Catholic Action had
established deep roots, especially in the Ixil Triangle (the Ixil Mayan villages of Cotzal, Nebaj, and San Juan
Chajul), areas where the URNG, speci cally the EGP, enjoyed substantial support. Although in its public
rhetoric the Guatemalan military adamantly insisted that the guerrillas did not control any geographic
territory, the EGP (brie y) claimed a signi cant amount of popular support in northern El Quiché and
10
remote Huehuetenango, which it declared to be territorio liberado. Privately, the Guatemalan military
conceded that the EGP enjoyed substantial support in the north, particularly among the Ixiles, a lethal
perception that caused the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala to make a chillingly accurate prediction to his

colleagues in the State Department. “The well‐documented belief by the Army that the entire Ixil Indian
population is pro‐EGP,” he wrote in a secret memo, “has created a situation in which the Army can be
11
expected to give no quarter to combatants and non‐combatants alike.”
Fusiles
The REMHI report discusses the evolution of the government’s massacre policy in some detail, noting that
killings on a mass scale (a “massacre” being de ned as the killing of ve or more people in the same
incident) went into e ect as de facto government policy in September 1981, during the Lucas
administration. At that point, the army launched its rst major assault on the Guatemalan highlands in
12
Chimaltenango, known as Operación Ceniza (Operation Ash), setting o a wave of state‐sponsored
p. 88 violence that would continue to build through the remainder of the Lucas period. Massacre‐level violence
escalated during Ríos Montt’s Fusiles y Frijoles campaign and then began to de‐escalate during the last
13
quarter of 1982. Rural violence increased dramatically in mid‐February 1982 (approximately four weeks
before the March coup brought Ríos Montt into power) when the army launched its rst large‐scale sweep of
the Ixil Triangle. Reporting on this brutal and indiscriminate assault, the CIA noted in an intelligence memo,
“the commanding o cers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which
14
are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of resistance.”
During the rst 100 days of Ríos Montt’s tenure in o ce, in which he remained at the head of the three‐man
junta, the Lucas model of mass and indiscriminate killing continued in the highlands, especially in El Quiché
and Huehuetenango. After Ríos Montt assumed sole executive power, however, the counterinsurgency
program shifted dramatically. After a brief lull (the May–June 1982 amnesty), Ríos Montt set out to
reorganize, expand, and advance the military sweep of the highlands through the Fusiles y Frijoles program,
the heart of his Victoria 82 military campaign. Fusiles y Frijoles reached a violent climax in July and August
1982; by the last months of the year, the military had whipped the highlands into virtual submission. It is
the pattern of this arc—the dramatic acceleration in chaotic and frenetic violence under Lucas, followed by
more violence, but in a more predictable pattern, that eventually gave way to an enforced peace—that
probably accounts for why many Guatemalans associated Lucas with violence and Ríos Montt with peace in
15
the years immediately following this period.
While the shift from selective to mass killings took place under Lucas, it was under Ríos Montt that this
policy took its most e ective and e cient form; while Ríos Montt did not originate the policy of mass
killing, he rationalized it to the extent that it produced a decisive victory for an army that had been unable
up until that time to decisively put down the two‐decades‐old insurgency. In particular, under Ríos Montt,
one of the hallmarks of the Lucas period, selective forced disappearances (such as kidnapping by death
squads), largely disappeared, giving way to large‐scale massacres—a deadly policy shift that nevertheless
left less ambiguity than disappearances, which left family members in limbo, wondering over the nal
16
disposition of their loved ones. After a massacre, by contrast, any family members who survived were left
with no doubts about what had happened.
It is important to note that many of the most notorious massacres of the period of la violencia occurred on
Lucas’s watch, between September 1981 and March 23, 1982, the date of the Ríos Montt coup, and that it was
17
p. 89 Lucas, not Ríos Montt, who actually initiated the scorched‐earth campaign. However, the most violent
month of the entire thirty‐six‐year civil war was April 1982, during Ríos Montt’s rst six weeks in power,
when in a single thirty‐day period 3,330 people died at the hands of their own government. Shortly before
this onslaught, in mid‐May 1982, the conservative editor of the daily El Grá co, Jorge Carpio Nicolle, who
was later assassinated himself, signed his name to two incendiary editorials in which he denounced the
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escalating violence. “How is it possible to behead an eight‐ or nine‐year‐old child? How is it possible to
murder in cold blood a baby of less than a year and a half?” Carpio demanded. “This new resurgence of mass
murders sends the message that Guatemala is very far from peace.” Despite this uncharacteristic

outspokenness, Carpio’s explosive editorials were not enough to jolt urban, middle‐class Guatemala,
comfortable in the city’s newfound security, in journalist Jean‐Marie Simon’s words, “from its desire to
believe that the situation had improved,” even as violence in the countryside increased to unprecedented
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levels.
After the month‐long lull for amnesty, violence again escalated dramatically in June, July, and August 1982,
signaling the beginning of the most virulent military phase of Fusiles y Frijoles. By September, the incidence
of massacres began to taper o , although several large‐scale massacres did occur later, toward the end of
20
1982 and early 1983. The decline of government‐sponsored violence in late 1982 and early 1983 re ects the
success of Ríos Montt’s military exit strategy for the decades‐long armed con ict: the virtual annihilation of
the guerrillas and their base of civilian support. By the end of 1983, drained of all rural and most of their
urban strategic support, the shes no longer had a sea in which to swim.
Were massacres as such an explicit element of the military’s counterinsurgency policy in 1982 or simply an
unfortunate by‐product, when blooded and undisciplined soldiers, fueled by ancient hatreds, racism, and
testosterone, ran amok in the fog of war? Certainly, this interpretation underscores much of the early
explanation of the period in the o cial literature, although the army also took considerable pride in the
disciplined training of its soldiers. When the Guatemalan army declined to admit to any massacres at all, the
U.S. Embassy o ered the following explanation in late 1982: “Although the Embassy believes it likely that
the Guatemalan Army has indeed committed some atrocities, the assertion that they committed all the
massacres attributed to them is not credible, especially since analysis indicates the guerrillas are
responsible in many cases. If the GOG were indeed responsible for a ‘mad, genocidal’ campaign in the
highlands, one must wonder why Indians are joining civil defense patrols in great numbers…. In sum,
p. 90 Embassy believes that what is being planned, and successfully carried out, is [a] communist‐backed
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disinformation campaign.”
In a press conference held to refute genocide charges on July 12, 2006, Ríos Montt o ered his only public
explanations for the obloquy wrought by the violence of his counterinsurgency campaign. In this statement,
which is notable not only for its brevity but also for its careful use of the subject‐ambiguous passive voice,
Ríos Montt denied command authority for the massacres, although he was both a (retired) general and chief
of state at the time, although no longer a member of the actual army high command. “During my
government, the Army followed orders,” he said. “But when they were not given orders, abuses were
22
committed [se cometió desmanes], but I was never informed.”
If the General’s high o ce allowed him to distance himself from the violence, the same was not true of his
close associates. In 1982, his press secretary, responding to charges of human rights abuses, o ered this
circumlocution: “The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators. Therefore, the Indians were
subversives. And how do you ght subversion? Clearly you had to kill Indians because they were
collaborating with subversion. And then it would be said that you were killing innocent people. But they
23
weren’t innocent; they had sold out to the subversion.”
The tautological language of this response, when placed against the inalterable background of events,
indicates that terror was central to the government’s successful prosecution of its counterinsurgency war,
and that massacres, therefore, were an essential element of a strategy that originated under Lucas and was
perfected under Ríos Montt. The General himself elaborated on the geometric challenges of the struggle,
explaining, “The problem of war is not just of who is shooting. For each one who is shooting, there are ten
24
working behind him.” In a very real sense, the scorched‐earth campaign marked the logical culmination of
a long‐term strategy of state‐sponsored violence against an armed movement that at that historical moment
seemed (perhaps) otherwise poised on the brink of success.
Ríos Montt seems to have been fully aware that the killing of citizens on a large scale did further damage to

Guatemala’s already abysmal international human rights record and that it also (potentially) damaged his
reputation as an enlightened evangelical leader. In light of these concerns, he did his best to create an
administrative distance between himself and the military’s excesses in the countryside while still laying
claim to its successes. In July 1982, he met with his senior unit commanders to inform them that Plan
Victoria 82 was ready to be implemented and that they—the eld commanders—were responsible for
p. 91 making it succeed. According to an American military attaché who attended this high‐level meeting, Ríos
Montt “emphasized the fact that the plan was made very general to permit each commander as much
freedom of action as possible in his assigned area.” The American military o cial elaborated: “B[rigadier]
G[eneral] Ríos Montt said he was leaving the details up to them and that he expected results. Civilians and
their properties were to be respected. He wanted each commander to take special care that innocent civilians
would not be killed; however, if such unfortunate acts did take place he did not want to read about them in
25
the newspapers.” Against such a statement, Ríos Montt’s declarations of ignorance of the many abuses
that occurred on his watch, at the very least, defy credulity.
REMHI classi es the massacres that occurred after September 1981 as including each of the following
characteristics: (1) an element of surprise; (2) increased persecution in mountain areas; (3) indiscriminate
killings, including large numbers of women and children (presumed to be political nonpartisans); (4)
destruction of the natural environment; and (5) a more frequent use of clandestine cemeteries than in early
26
periods of violence in the country. REMHI also notes a critical change in the nature of massacres under
Ríos Montt: the military assault assumed a less random quality, with Victoria 82 primarily targeting the
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guerrilla forces and the population thought to support them. This single factor may account for the
perception, which many Guatemalans held at the time, that the Ríos Montt government o ered a kind of
“protection” and “law and order” that contrasted sharply with the violent chaos of the Lucas era.
By and large, this study declines to contribute to the pornography of violence by sharp‐focusing the details
of the many massacres that took place during the Fusiles y Frijoles campaign. Nevertheless, it seems
worthwhile to chronicle at least one massacre, in order to give some sense of both the logistics behind it and
the scale of human su ering brought about by the implementation of a single political policy. As priest‐
activist‐anthropologist Ricardo Falla notes, “If we are not victims of [a] massacre and if our senses are not
28
impacted by the facts, the event is not felt with any depth.”
The massacre I examine in close detail here is the one that occurred at Finca San Francisco Nentón, which
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took place on July 17, 1982. This massacre is one of twelve cases that the Inter‐American Commission on
Human Rights of the Organization of American States brought as evidence in charges of genocide against
the Ríos Montt government in June 2001. Nevertheless, the brutality and scope of this massacre is no worse
than many others and the number of people killed is only slightly greater than the number of people
murdered at other locations around the same time. There are, for example, two other large‐scale massacres
p. 92 that took place only one day after the Finca San Francisco Nentón event. These are the massacre at Plan
de Sánchez, Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, where between 170 and 268 died, and the one at Los Encuentros, Rabinal,
30
where counterinsurgency forces killed over 250 people, both on July 18, 1982.
The tendency for large‐scale massacres to take place in geographic and chronological clusters o ers a clear
indication that they were an integral element of policy, rather than simply an unfortunate by‐product of
overzealous eld commanders. In mid‐July 1982, four massacres took place in which the army reportedly
killed 200 people or more; these include the massacres listed above as well as one at Rio Blanco, Sacapulas,
31
where 200 people died. The fact that each of these events took place within a proscribed geographic area,
the Transversal del Norte, and within a span of only two days (July 17–18, 1982) forces the unavoidable
conclusion that these events represented the implementation of a speci c and concrete tactic of
counterinsurgency that included the intentional massacre of rural (Mayan) people within a single
geographic area.

To take a closer look at this policy, the events that took place on that July day in 1982 at Finca San Francisco
Nentón can serve as a helpful benchmark. As Ricardo Falla suggests, “Perhaps, an in depth study of one
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massacre will enable readers to imagine what the others might have been like.”
Finca San Francisco Nentón, moreover, is an incident for which there is substantial documentation from
both sides. The following account is taken from eyewitness survivors as recorded by two separate
33
anthropologists, Ricardo Falla and Paul Kobrak, as well as the CEH and REMHI reports. Of these four
sources, Falla’s work is by far the most detailed and immediate. Working as a Jesuit priest and activist
among refugees in Comitán, Chiapas, in 1982, Falla began to collect stories of San Francisco Nentón when
an ordinary request to collect the names of the dead for a requiem Mass produced a startling list of 302
names. Falla pursued this lead during his pastoral work among the survivors, who helped him write up a
detailed anthropological account of the massacre. This he presented as an academic paper at the American
Anthropological Association in December 1982, thus making the massacre at Finca San Francisco Nentón
one of the rst speci c Ríos Montt–era massacres to receive international attention, if only from an
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academic audience.
The fact that his listeners understood Falla, a Jesuit who was much inspired by liberation theology, to be
openly sympathetic to the Left did not at all undermine the immediacy of what he had to say. Falla’s record
of the testimonies of the massacres from three male survivors, taken relatively freshly after the event had
taken place (in September 1982, about six weeks later), also probably avoids some “rhetorical mediations”
p. 93 and “mimetic devices” that cloud well‐rehearsed testimonies that survivors sometimes o er many
35
months, years, or even decades after a traumatic event has taken place. The quoted sections of the
description below are direct translations of the survivors’ testimonies, taken verbatim.
Julio Negro: The Massacre at San Francisco Nentón, July 17, 1982
On June 22, a patrol of soldiers came into the Finca San Francisco Nentón, a locality near San Mateo Ixtatán,
Huehuetenango, which the military correctly or incorrectly identi ed as being sympathetic to the EGP.
Gathering the villagers together, the soldiers issued the following warning: “Be careful. Do not involve
36
yourselves with the guerrillas or you are going to die for their crimes [delitos].” According to survivors, the
soldiers at this time presented a friendly face (cara amable), o ering candy and canned sardines to the
37
townspeople, thus lending credence to the idea that it was best to stay put if and when the army returned.
The army did return to the village during the early morning hours of July 17, but this time there were
perhaps as many as 600 soldiers, and they did not have friendly faces. “Their faces were like those of crazy
38
men.” According to survivors, the villagers wanted to cooperate with the soldiers and not the guerrillas,
who they said they did not trust; the villagers had earlier sent a group to the regional capital at Nentón to
acquire a Guatemalan ag and to request formation of a civil patrol, but the group had not returned.
Therefore, when the army came into town, no one felt they had reason to ee.
When three helicopter gunships appeared in the air around 10 A.M ., the people began to feel afraid and
wanted to show the military commander that they were supportive of the government. One of the
commanding o cers shouted, “‘We’re going to have a esta!’ and ordered the people to come together in the
39
center of town. They told the people, ‘We’re going to give you some good food and nothing is going to happen.’”
But there were intimations of things to come. The people began to suspect the worst when, without another
word, the soldiers pulled out the women and children and locked them in the chapel. They rounded up the
men and the local judge and gathered up their bags to take their money and watches. “The women came with
all the children—two years old, three years old, four years old. They came with their children all together. And he
40
[the commander] came: ‘Get inside the church!’ It was already lled up. All the women.…”

About one in the afternoon, the women were taken away from the church in groups, without their children.
41
p. 94 The soldiers took the women to houses and raped them there. The men could hear their women’s cries
but could do nothing. But the cries stopped when the sounds of bullets and hand grenades commenced.
42
“Crack, crack. There was a lot of noise. All the little children were crying, crying.” When all the women were
dead, the soldiers burned their bodies inside the houses. After they nished with the women, the soldiers
went back to the church where they had locked the children, who were crying for their mothers and
screaming for their fathers. The fathers could hear them but could do nothing, because they were locked in
the nearby courthouse. The older children had some grasp of what was happening, but the younger ones did
not, and “some of them hugged each other when the soldiers brought them out of the church. Others simply
43
walked out towards their sacri ce.”
The soldiers took the children out of the church in groups. “They brought out the little kids—two, one and a
half, three years old—they took them out holding on to each other. The ten, twelve, eight, ve and six year old they
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also brought out in groups. They took the groups and killed them with knife stabs.” “They picked the smaller
ones up by their feet, ‘like you would a hen.’ They smashed their heads against pitchforks and against a cypress tree
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planted in front of the chapel.” The soldiers ripped open the children’s bellies with knives and tore out their
intestines, tossing the small bodies into one of the houses located close to the church. “When they brought
out the last child, and he was a little one, maybe two or three years old, little—I saw this myself. They brought him
out and stabbed him and cut out his innards. The little kid was screaming and because he wasn’t dead, right there
the soldier grabbed a thick hard stick and bashed his head. They cut out his guts and threw him away like shit.
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That’s how the cabrones did it.” “It’s possible they killed the children like that so as not to waste their munitions,
47
or perhaps as a game for the soldiers.”
By about three in the afternoon, it was time for the men, starting with the ancianos, the elders, who were
still locked up in the courthouse. First the soldiers killed a bull that the villagers had given them when they
rst arrived, cutting its throat so that they could eat it later. The slaying of the bull presaged what would
soon happen to the elders themselves. “Three old men. One, they stuck the unsharpened machete here [the
throat], like you kill a sheep. ‘Aaaay,’ they say. ‘Aaaay,’ they say. Just as we were watching they killed him.…Inside
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the courthouse where we were—me, all of us.” The old men’s death cries amused some of the soldiers. “Like
killing an animal; it made them laugh when they were killing. Poor people, the poor old men, they were crying and
49
su ering.”
Finally, they divided up the hombres de trabajo—working‐age men—into groups of ten, taking them out one
group at a time from the courthouse. “They blindfolded their eyes and forced them to lie down, face down. Then
50
p. 95 the soldiers shot them in the head.” Those who remained in the courthouse waited and prayed. “When
they nished taking out the brothers, we began praying there inside the courthouse asking God that he would bless
us. Why did brothers come, the brothers themselves, to kill us? It was not a sickness. God was not sending us a
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punishment.” Apparently tiring of taking the men out in groups, the soldiers then began to re on the men
waiting in the courthouse. They threw grenades into the courthouse and red bazookas. “They killed one
man…the poor man was already dead. Then [a soldier] went down on him again like this [gesture of ripping
52
open the stomach]. That is how he opened him up and took out his heart. To eat or to carry o ? Who knows?”
The soldiers then dragged the bodies of the men one by one into the church and gave the orders to set the
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church on re to incinerate the bodies inside. “Everything was sheer death. People were dying, dying.” In the
chaos of the slaughter, one or two men escaped death by lying among the corpses. One man, his clothes
stained by the blood of his neighbors, lay so numb and still among the bodies that the soldiers thought he
was already dead. He wondered himself if he were dead. “They grabbed me alive and threw me on top of the
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bodies.”
He waited in the carnage for nearly an hour, debating whether he should risk being burned alive when they
set the church on re or be shot trying to ee. But when he heard the sounds of the soldiers, singing and
listening to music on cassette recorders and boasting about their victory, he decided to take the opportunity

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to escape. Before leaving, he asked permission of his dead companions to abandon them. “‘Friends,
companions, let me go free to the elds. Give me luck. You are already free. Let me go. I am going to the eld.’ I
56
talked that way with the dead.” About that time, the soldiers decided it was time to torch the church. The
survivor escaped through a window when the re started, along with one other man, but the soldiers saw
the other man and shot him dead.
The man who escaped through the window lost thirty family members that day: his wife, his eight children
(including a one‐month‐old baby), his brothers, grandchildren, and the wives of his elder children. “That is
how I came, Father. I am hearing again, but through the pain in my heart for the dead ones. I was watching how
my brothers were killed, all of them—companions, relatives—everyone. We were all brothers. That is why my heart
57
is crying all the time.” Of the more than 300 original residents of Finca San Francisco Nentón, three men
survived to give testimony of these events from the relative safety of the refugee camp in Mexico. Two other
p. 96 survivors, who had been out in the elds at the time of the massacre, died along the way; one fell o a
steep mountain path on the trail to Mexico and another died in the hospital in Comitán, Mexico.
It takes a long time to kill more than 300 people one by one. There were so many people to kill that the entire
massacre process took many hours, from early afternoon into the early evening. Between 302 and 350
people died at Finca San Francisco Nentón on July 17, 1982. In the days and weeks to follow, approximately
9,000 people from nearby villages, fearful that they would su er the same fate as their neighbors in Finca
San Francisco Nentón, ed to the mountains, some making it across the border to the refugee camp in
58
Mexico.
The savagery and inhumanity of that day is di cult to comprehend, in part due to what Falla calls “the
59
element of inexplicability which makes a massacre something hard to believe.” But one aspect of the
tragedy is di cult to overlook, which is that this massacre was explicitly not the playing out of ancient
tribal or ethnic hatreds that underlie so many savage con icts in other parts of the world. Many, if not most,
of the soldiers who took part in the massacre were from the neighboring villages, such as nearby San
Miguel, Jacaltenango; the survivors could tell by their manner of speaking. “They were all from San Miguel
[puro sanmigeleños]—they speak their dialect! All Indian [puro natural].” “Why did brothers come, the brothers
themselves, to kill us? They did not say, ‘This is the crime; here is the proof.’ They didn’t do anything. Who knows
why this happened. No one indicated, ‘this was one o ense; this was another.’ Nobody said. They just killed. We
60
don’t know. We are ignorant [nosotros somos ignorantes].” All the victims and most of the victimarios
(perpetrators) were indigenous; if this case was like many others, they may have known one another or even
been relatives.
At the time of the Finca San Francisco Nentón massacre, the Guatemalan military denied that any such
event had ever taken place. Three months later, under pressure from international human rights groups, the
U.S. Embassy sent out a team to view the site by air to observe the “sites of alleged large‐scale massacres
purportedly carried out by the Guatemalan Army,” but bad weather prevented their landing or seeing the
site. Instead, they visited the army base in Huehuetenango, which was home to the soldiers who had
committed the atrocities. Given free run of the base, the U.S. Ambassador concluded, “If these o cers have
something to hide, they do not seem overly concerned about us nding out,” a statement pregnant with
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ambiguity.
In trying to explain an inexplicable event, many questions arise. Was the Finca San Francisco Nentón
massacre and so many others like it the result of a top‐down order that ran down a clear chain of command
p. 97 from the president to his eld commanders, or was it, as those close to Ríos Montt claimed, the result of
rogue eld commanders and undisciplined troops run amok? How far up did the chain of command
62
authority ultimately extend? Harris Whitbeck, who served as a key civilian advisor to Ríos Montt, not
surprisingly takes the view that command authority extended only as far as local eld o cers. When asked
about the Ríos Montt administration’s knowledge of and culpability for the Finca San Francisco Nentón

massacre, he responded: “There was a renegade army unit there that went out of control—killed lots of
innocent people. I got there right after it happened—there was one other civilian and four army o cers
with me and they saw it too. As soon as I got back, I repeated to the General what had happened. He asked
me who was involved, and I told him and he was very upset. But nothing ever came of it. I think the o cer in
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charge got killed or something like that.”
Refugees and Internal Exiles
Early on, many villagers from the zones of con ict sought the protection of the EGP, but the guerrillas were
64
entirely unprepared to protect, feed, or otherwise take care of large numbers of people. In the aftermath of
massacres, or in anticipation of them, survivors were left with the choice of relocating to a military‐run
refugee camp or seeking exile. Some willingly sought out the army camps, both to avoid being swept up
further in the counterinsurgency campaign and to insulate themselves from further contact with the
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guerrillas. According to REMHI, however, nearly half (40 percent) made the choice to go into exile, leaving
their communities to ee to the mountains, where many perished, their bodies left behind to the mercy of
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wild animals and the elements; others escaped to international refugee camps in Belize and Mexico. When
the army found a village abandoned, the soldiers burned all the buildings and their contents to the ground,
thus leaving people who had left even temporarily without homes, crops, livestock, or possessions to return
to. This is what is meant by “scorched earth”: the obliteration not only of homes and possessions, but the
very landscape of place and belonging.
The bewilderment that Finca San Francisco’s survivors expressed as to why they had fallen victim to the
army’s wrath is not at all uncommon in survivor testimonials. While the guerrillas had enjoyed explicit
support in some villages, in many locations villagers knew little about them or expressly did not want any
association with them. “Ni conocemos la guerrilla ni conocemos el ejército,” explained one survivor. “We know
67
neither the guerrillas nor the army.”
p. 98 While many may well have made this claim falsely in order to save themselves, others—recalling Trouillot’s
admonition to listen to all voices—must surely have meant exactly what they said. This is not an
insigni cant point, as it casts a broader net of culpability for the death of many innocents. Obviously, it
involves culpability of the army in killing people who were entirely uninvolved with the armed popular
movement. But blame also falls on the guerrillas for continuing to put the rural Maya in harm’s way, even
when they were fully aware that such a position was virtually guaranteed to bring the ercest recrimination
against a subaltern population in a society that was as racially divided as Guatemala.
The CEH report con rms this observation. “The guerrillas applied a tactic of ‘armed propaganda’ and
temporary occupation of towns to gain supporters or demonstrate their strength; once they withdrew
however, they left the communities defenseless and vulnerable,” the report charges. “In many cases,
communities were then attacked by the Army, with a very high civilian death toll, especially among the
Mayan population. Faced with scorched earth operations and massacres…the guerrillas were unable to
protect the people who had sympathized with their objectives or had supported them. This inability created
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a broad sense of abandonment, deception and rejection in these sectors.”
The Communities of Population in Resistance
This last betrayal was not lost on indigenous people themselves, including those who were directly engaged
with the armed guerrilla movement. Seeing the carnage that the counterinsurgency had brought to their
own people and observing what appeared to them to be the popular resistance’s apparent willingness to
sacri ce them even in the face of overwhelming force, many indigenous combatants and sympathizers

began to abandon the guerrillas in mid‐1982, further diminishing the rebel forces. As anthropologist Charles
R. Hale phrases it, “Some persisted in a contradictory struggle from within, others bit their tongues, but
especially after the military tables turned, the vast majority of indigenous foot soldiers simply abandoned
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the Left.”
Some indigenous former guerrillas and massacre survivors went on to establish comunidades de población in
resistencia (CPR) in remote and inaccessible areas of the country. The CPR were small, ambulant
communities of internal refugees, often technically under the protection of a guerrilla force that was
nevertheless unable to provide for it. Left alone and sometimes entirely self‐su cient, refugees lived in
p. 99 such constant fear of detection that sometimes they could not make cooking res or allow their children
to cry: they even devised a way to tie o the voice boxes of their roosters so that crowing would not give
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away their locations to the military and civil patrols. Perhaps as many as 20,000 refugees ended up living
in CPR for a decade or more in clandestine isolation from the Guatemalan army, their home communities,
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and society at large.
The hardships in the CPRs were manifold: food was scarce, and people subsisted on inadequate diets of wild
plants and roots, sometimes for long periods of time—even years—without relief; they lived in temporary
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shelters of leaves and poles that were inadequate to keep out rain or the unexpected cold of the highlands.
Many CPR members, especially children, took sick and died of malnutrition and privation. Yet even the
di cult decision to stay in a CPR o ered no guarantee of safe haven, as survivors had come to distrust both
the army and the guerrillas. “Sometimes there is just no di erence between the two,” Doña Cristina, a CPR
member, explained to a human rights worker. “If we go over to one side, we are afraid, but we are afraid of
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the other side, too.”
Civil Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa)
A central aspect of the Fusiles y Frijoles campaign was the establishment of civilian militias known as civil
patrols (patrullas de autodefensa, PAC), manned by male villagers who served in the patrols on a mandatory
rotational basis. The civil patrols, which became feared paramilitary militias in their own right, played a
signi cant role in the army’s reassertion of control over remote rural areas. It was through the civil patrols
that counterinsurgency came to be woven intricately into the fabric of village life.
The idea of self‐policing in indigenous villages did not actually originate with Fusiles y Frijoles. Volunteer
civilian patrols had a fairly long history in the highlands; in fact, a few communities had established self‐
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defense patrols on their own even before Ríos Montt took power. In November 1981, the town of Nahualá,
for example, had formed its own patrol three weeks after the EGP had taken over its radio station and
75
kidnapped several residents. The system, however, did not become widespread until April 1982, when Ríos
Montt made the formation of civil patrols a centerpiece of his paci cation program.
The system, not altogether unlike the labor rotations of the Spanish colonial period, the repartimiento and
the mita, demanded that male villagers in rural areas between the ages of eighteen and sixty serve in patrols
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on a forced rotational basis to ensure the security of their villages and the surrounding areas. PACs were
p. 100 responsible for reporting guerrillas or guerrilla collaborators to the local military comisionado; they also
accompanied the army on rastreos, military sweeps of surrounding mountains and villages to look for
suspected guerrillas or refugees. The frequency with which men were obliged to serve in the patrols
depended on manpower available in a given cantón. In larger towns, a patroller might be scheduled to serve
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every two months for twelve hours, and a man could buy out his service with a mozo, a paid replacement.
In smaller towns, however, men took a turn in the patrol once every three days for twenty‐four or even
forty‐eight hours at a time; the use of mozos was rare because there were none available and people could

78
not a ord it. Civil patrol duty might take up to forty‐ ve to fty workdays per year, representing a
79
signi cant loss in productive labor for those involved.
The PACs were a rural system, designed to assert control over the indigenous population through internal
rather than external forces such as the military, which up until that time functioned in the villages very
much as a foreign occupation force. An army press release published in 1984 (printed bilingually in Spanish
and dubious English clearly meant for international consumption) described the PACs as a “new form of
social organization…without supervision or any kind of control, specially taking into consideration that the
indian [sic] population were not in capacity of managing by themselves those new forms of social, political,
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and economic organization.” O cial doublespeak notwithstanding, the PACs did indeed fall under the
supervision of the military. The army provided the PACs with a set series of objectives: (1) to provide a rst
line of defense for soldiers; (2) to police and provide counterinsurgency defense to their communities; and
(3) to generate intelligence and counterintelligence for the detention of suspects who might be
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sympathizers, collaborators, or insurgents.
Although the government described the civil patrols as “voluntary, spontaneous expressions of patriotism,”
in fact, participation was entirely compulsory, as the army openly considered those who refused to
participate to be subversives, with the lethal consequences that such a designation implied. Each patrol
reported directly to the local army destacamento (base) either every eight days or every two weeks to give
information on activities in their communities and to receive instructions and “orientation” from local
military commanders about current military objectives. Patrols or individual members who failed to comply
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could expect the harshest possible penalties. Despite the involuntary nature of the service, the PACs
quickly became adept at doing the army’s bidding, and many took the initiative to root out potential
subversion on their own, often zealously. As General Guillermo Echeveria Vielman stated in an open letter to
Ríos Montt on January 11, 1983, “the civilian defense patrols are led, controlled, protected, and work under
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the military’s vigilance; thus they are part of the Army.”
p. 101 The central objective of the civil patrols was to cut o the guerrillas from whatever base of support they
might have among the local population. Although the patrols’ o cial mandate was to provide military
defense of their towns, the army’s underlying motivation was to control the men who were collaborating
with the guerrillas or who had done so in the past. Equally important, the civil patrols, according to an
internal army document from July 1982, were designed to provide “back‐up support for the army in its
military and counterinsurgency operations, using locals’ knowledge of terrain, language and the
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inhabitants to boost the e ectiveness in the eld.” This the civil patrols certainly did, at least in terms of
numbers: by September 1982, there were approximately 25,000 civil patrollers in the highlands, a number
that had swelled to 700,000—about 10 percent of Guatemala’s entire population—by the time of the 1983
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coup. Although the U.S. Embassy privately cautioned that “arming the highland Indians…could boomerang
should they turn against the government in the future,” the Guatemalan government supplied the civil
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patrollers with new straw hats, Guatemalan ags, and weapons. Many of the weapons were antiquated or
useless (such as wooden planks carved into the shape of ri es) because the state, re ecting the primordial
colonial fear of a motín de indios (Indian rebellion), was eager to capitalize on their manpower but reluctant
to arm them properly.
As a strategy of counterinsurgency, the PAC system was extremely e ective; indeed, by most accounts on
both the political Left and the Right it was the single most successful element of the counterinsurgency
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campaign. It accomplished the goal of “draining the sea in which the sh swim” by isolating the guerrillas
from their base of indigenous support and thereby weakening them nearly to the point of capitulation. By
coercion or by choice, the civilian population, monitored by the PACs, gave themselves over to army control.
In this fashion, the government was able to successfully invert the guerrillas’ strategy of engaging the
indigenous population in the popular struggle, by integrating the indigenous, by persuasion or by force, into

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the heart of the counterinsurgency. Menegazzo and Us Alvarez have referred to this inversion of hearts
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and minds as a process by which revolutionaries were “converted into subversives and transgressors.”
Guatemala’s dictator of the 1930s, Jorge Ubico, had foreseen the day when the Maya might be persuaded by
clientage to advance the interests of the state as “citizen soldiers,” but he could not have anticipated how
the wholesale call‐up of the civil patrols would transform Mayan society.
By the military’s assessment, the success of the PACs lay in the popular perception that the PACs o ered
protection to communities in the zones of con ict, from the guerrillas but also from anticipated military
p. 102 recriminations. If villagers viewed the Guatemalan military as an army of occupation, they could hardly
do so when it was the sons of the village itself who provided the oversight. The bilingual army publication on
civil patrols presented the equation thusly, in an Orwellian English that curiously anticipates the scholarly
debates of the late 1990s on the same topic:
Since the marxist [sic] victory was never achieved and the civil population was well aware of the
respect the army showed toward all those individuals or groups that were not enrolled in guerrilla
activity (the civilian population) they concluded in the following manner: the guerrilla groups
failed; once again we were deceived, we became poorer and su ered unnecessary mourning, we
were forced to practice military exercises (self defense) but against an enemy that was no enemy;
therefore and as a logical consequence of following the initiative of a few, the great majority of the
rural population directly or indirectly involved with the guerrilla groups turned against them and
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became their principal critics and accusers.
Whitbeck, Ríos Montt’s personal del presidente, described the government’s position more succinctly: “With
the PACs to protect them, people no longer feared the guerrillas or the army, and that closed o the
guerrillas’ support, especially in the highlands. The PACs weren’t well‐armed at all, but with them there,
people lost that fear. By the end of 1982 [the guerrillas] had been virtually dismantled, really done in by the
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participation of the population, the PACs, which later distorted into something else.”
Without doubt, one of the most lasting e ects of the civil patrol system was its e ect on community
cohesion, a consequence—perhaps unintended but perhaps not—that in either case helped to advance the
government’s expressed goal of achieving unidad nacional at the expense of indigenous and community
identity. In the words of historian Marvin Estuardo Ramírez Cordón, “the distrust and hate were new
elements that appeared with the formation of the civil patrols. Resentment is permanent against the
patrollers, some of whom took undue advantage, tortured, persecuted, threatened, or in the majority of
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cases assassinated some [people] they knew or who were in their family [algun familiar].”
As violence played out locally, community coherence disintegrated, as long‐standing feuds, rivalries, land
disputes, religious di erences, and personal di erences assumed a political veneer. Anthropologist Linda
Green recorded disturbing stories of women knowing which life‐long neighbor had denounced their
p. 103 husbands, and of women and children who continued to live and work as neighbors with people who they
knew had been responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes crossing paths with them on a
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daily basis. In Ramírez’s words, “The sadness and anxiety brought about by [intercommunity] violence
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would become permanent problems.”
The civil patrol system contributed directly in other ways to the decay of community integrity. There was no
question that service in the civil patrols was burdensome, a “cargo” in the truest sense of the word that
sapped vital energy from individuals and from communities that were struggling to get back on their
collective feet. Service time in the PACs often left insu cient time for farming, even for the growing of corn,
the food staple and symbolic sustenance of Mayan life, much less for the communal performance of
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whatever religious rituals, cofradia activities, or civic duties had survived the scorched‐earth campaign. By
accident or design—and, indeed, there is no outstanding evidence to suggest that the army anticipated the

PACs’ long‐term cultural consequences as such—the civil patrols became an insidious force in the
destruction of indigenous community culture.
The physical risks of participation were also onerous. Along with being forced to patrol in all types of
weather, including torrential tropical rains, PAC members regularly found themselves both literally and
guratively in the line of re, either from the guerrillas or from the military. Indeed, of the seventeen
massacres attributed to the EGP during this period, at least seven—Chez, Aguacatán, Xacataltej Chajul, and
in Comalapa, Chicamán El Quiché, Saquil, and Nebaj—were all attacks against patrulleros. These attacks, like
those on the other side, were as punitive as they were strategic, as the guerrillas targeted not only the only
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the patrollers themselves, but also their families, including infants and children.
While the civil patrols originated as an involuntary system of subordination, however, it took remarkably
little time for the civil patrollers to rise to what Nietzsche described as the “will to power”: the desire for
cruelty with the pleasure that comes with the exercise of power, and the fundamental human instinct to
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wish to expand that power at the expense of others. As civil patrols gained increasing power by earning the
army’s con dence, they quickly acquired power as the local arm of military authority and all too often
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became a law unto themselves. An early Americas Watch report on civil patrols commented that “the
army’s order to inform on fellow villagers has created a great temptation to seek revenge by
denunciations,” a charge later borne out by many accusations of family feuds, land disputes, and personal
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vendettas that found their “ nal solution” with the patrols. Even in the PACs’ rst year, 1982, people
p. 104 spoke of being afraid to talk with long‐time neighbors, to attend church services, or even to go work in
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their elds due to their fear of orejas (literally, ears, or spies) who might turn them in to the civil patrols.
Such fears were fully warranted: according to some sources, civil patrols were involved in more than 125
massacres committed between 1982 and 1983, as they either helped carry out military orders or acted on
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their own initiative. In the case of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, for example, a region once friendly to the FAR,
anthropologist Rolando Alecio estimated that political violence destroyed half of the thirty‐eight rural
communities of the municipality, and that some 5,000 people—close to 25 percent of Rabinal’s total
population—died in political violence in 1981–1982. While the military and guerrillas had killed some of the
people in this total, Alecio found that it was the local civil patrols that had committed the vast majority of
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the killings. In their mid‐1980s study of San Pedro la Laguna, Benjamin Paul and William Demarest
observed how the context of a “culture of fear” exacerbated intercommunity factionalism and rivalries,
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leading to a breakdown in the social system that the civil patrol system eroded further. By giving the
corrosive forces of distrust, revenge, and terror a local face, the PACs arguably did more to undermine
indigenous community coherence and identity than did any other single factor in Guatemala’s thirty‐six‐
year civil war.
The ultimate e ect of the civil patrol system, then, might be seen less in the achievement of the
government’s stated goal of isolating the guerrillas from their civilian base of support than in the PAC
members’ willingness, whether under coercion or not, to advance the o cial discourse to the extent that
civilians would be willing to engage in the kind of “autogenocide” that Alexander Hinton describes in
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Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge. As Hinton notes, autogenocide is somewhat unusual in the human
experience because killing does not result from ancient hatreds, as is usually the case in “simple” genocide.
Rather, it stems from the ability of the state or an entity such as the military to, in Hinton’s phrase
(borrowing from Chomsky), “manufacture di erence.” That is, to construct and stigmatize a subaltern
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group to the extent that they are perceived, politically and culturally, to be completely di erent beings, in
this case, not di erent ethnic groups, but within what was otherwise a relatively homogenous community
with few ethnic di erences. It is, simply put, the willingness to kill your own. The Ríos Montt government’s
ability to successfully manufacture di erence between guerrilla and “patriot,” rural and urban,
“subversive” and “sanctioned Maya,” civil patrol and community, may ultimately have had a greater
impact on the outcome of the struggle than did the straightforward military campaign against the armed

resistance.
p. 105
The Gendered E ects of the Scorched‐Earth Campaign
One of the most striking e ects of the scorched‐earth campaign is that it left much of the countryside
largely devoid of men. Because the state, not incorrectly, presumed that men were most likely to engage in
political activity, including outright support for the guerrillas, it directed a preponderance of repression
against the male population. The CEH report estimates that approximately 75 percent of the people killed
over the course of Guatemala’s long con ict were men, a cold statistic that, in isolation, fails to convey the
loss of wage earners, family providers, and beloved husbands, sons, and fathers—the heads of households
and communities.
Not all men were permanently lost to violence; when villagers began to grasp the logic of the scorched‐earth
campaign, adult men, as a vulnerable population, would often ee the village or sleep in their elds or the
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forest to avoid confrontation with the military or, less commonly, with the guerrillas. As a survival
strategy, however, this tactic was highly awed, as the military took to attacking women, children, and the
elderly instead, a practice that led to a marked increase in casualties among women and children between
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1981 and 1983. While the killing of both men and women peaked in 1982, women and children, not
surprisingly, were much more likely to die in massacres than in selective killings or assassinations. Men,
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however, were highly vulnerable in either scenario. Such factors have profound implications for the
number of women and children who are left behind in a highly patriarchal society that was suddenly bereft
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of its patriarchs. During (and after) the Ríos Montt period, some villages, having lost their men to
violence, ight, migration to the south coast, conscription by the army (or the guerrillas), or obligations
with the civil patrols became virtual “cities of women”—villages in which adult males were, for all intents
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and purposes, almost entirely absent. The absence of men, in turn, helped to contribute to an overall
collapse of traditional community and family hierarchies.
In the areas where families still had homes to return to, the loss of their men had serious economic and
cultural implications. Mayan society, like Guatemalan society in general, tends to be extremely male‐driven,
with religious brotherhoods, councils of (male) elders, and kinship networks forming the loci of local power
and identity. In making the transition from wife to widow, women lost their status vis‐à‐vis that of their
husbands. They often also lost their places within the local hierarchies of kinship, which complicated issues
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of patrilineal land inheritance and exacerbated legal di culties tied to women’s ownership of land titles.
p. 106 Compounding the situation was the fact that in traditional Mayan society, widows normally have a
sanctioned status within the community, where they enjoy respect and support from their children,
especially their sons, now absent from the scene. Moreover, the complex and seemingly arbitrary nature of
the violence stigmatized many widows, who often did not receive the economic and emotional help they
needed from their villages and extended families even when they remained relatively intact. The implied
supposition that a widow might have been an esposa de guerrillero—a guerrilla wife—and thus indirectly
responsible for bringing harm to the community further isolated such women, even in the eyes of friends
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and family. The Guatemalan government, as well, took a contradictory view of such women, regarding
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them simultaneously as war widows entitled to relief, but also as possible enemies of the state. This kind
of double marginalization forced widows into a new, narrowly bounded social space within their own
communities, ostracized in fear and silence from their traditional networks of kinship and other forms of
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social organization.
The women left behind faced signi cant obstacles in reestablishing lives for themselves and their surviving
families without their husbands, grown sons, and other male family members. Their economic plight was

paramount, since the scorched‐earth policy destroyed principal crops, particularly corn, as well as the
beans, small livestock, and other agricultural staples that sustained rural families. All these losses had long‐
term implications that reached far beyond the immediate parameters of the war itself.
In September 1983, an ad hoc private aid organization known as PAVVA (Programa de Ayuda para Víctimas
de la Violencia en el Altiplano), armed with government‐authorized safe conduct passes, conducted a survey
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of a ected areas. PAVVA’s ndings o er a disturbing snapshot of the kinds of challenges that survivors,
mostly women and young children, faced in the immediate aftermath of the scorched‐earth campaign.
Although PAVVA was generally not unfriendly to the government’s overall objectives, its 1983 report,
alarmingly titled “A Proposal to Avert Imminent Calamity in the Highlands of Guatemala,” laid out Fusiles y
Frijoles’ collateral e ects in the starkest possible language. “Civil violence in the Highlands of Guatemala
has disrupted the traditional self‐su cient agricultural cycles, created food shortages, hunger, cut o
medical attention and broken up families and communities,” the report began.
Agricultural production has broken o in all a ected areas, re ecting the cut-o of fertilizers as
well as the interruption of eld work. Many villages have not harvested crops for as many as three
p. 107 years, denying their only sources of food and leaving them today without the funds to purchase
supplies needed to get back into production. Moreover, with the disintegration of local market
systems, supplies are scarce or unavailable. The ability of a self‐su cient society to meet its basic
human needs depends upon its agricultural cycles.…Continuing long‐term caloric insu ciency will
exacerbate excessively high rates of kwashiorkor, maramus and vitamin de ciencies, reducing any
possibility of help.
The report concluded, “A large segment of the Indian population of Guatemala is facing starvation and
social disintegration. Three years of political violence have resulted in disruption of planting cycles, loss or
abandonment of farms, homes and tools, and the inability to resume productions of subsistence crops. Food
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shortages and illness threaten an ever‐mounting human tragedy.”
Even in areas of the highlands where the need was less acute, economic and social disruption was severe.
Because the division of labor in Mayan society is such that men are responsible for the cultivation of corn
and other subsistence crops and for the perennial migration to the southern coast as seasonal labor, the
severity of the circumstances eventually pressed women to hire men outside the family to help them tend
their elds, or assume the job themselves. Young boys, who would in the normal course of events have
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learned to farm at their fathers’ sides, worked without role models. In such cases, women and children
took on “men’s labor” in addition to their traditional tasks of tending small livestock, infant care,
housework, and weaving, the last being both a source of income as well as a highly valued cultural
118
commodity. As a secondary e ect of counterinsurgency, in short, the gendered costs to Mayan family life
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and culture were extraordinarily high.
“Why Did the Brothers Come to Kill Us?”: Mayan Soldiers in the
Guatemalan Army
A single unifying character in this chapter is the soldier, whom we have e ectively, if not altogether fairly,
vili ed as the murderous Other. Yet a close reading reveals that the majority of low‐ranking soldiers in the
Guatemalan army were themselves Mayan conscripts, as indigenous as the husbands, farmers, and
catequistas described above. The conscription of young Mayan men to the military was a long‐standing
practice in Guatemala, the result of a desire to both assimilate and “tame” indigenous youth. British
novelist Aldous Huxley, who visited the country during the 1930s and wrote about the trip in Beyond the

p. 108 Mexique Bay, commented on this regarding the Ubico‐era army: “ They were all pure Indians from some
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village in the highlands.…They can be relied upon to obey orders.” For many years, the Guatemalan army
had engaged in a practice informally known as el cupo, or the grab, where military commissioners
coordinated the “grab” of youths aged eighteen and over. Of this long‐standing custom of forced
conscription of indigenous men, Richard N. Adams observes that as far back as the late 1960s, “It ha[d]
always been the practice, and continues to today, to recruit, or conscript, enlisted men from the ranks of the
Indian and rural Ladino population. To be liable for conscription is a good index to one’s lack of power to
avoid it.…One o cer distinguished Indian from oriente Ladino conscripts by indicating a preference for the
former. Once you broke his customs, he explained, the Indian was much easier to discipline than the
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Ladino.”
By the early 1980s, the need for soldiers was so acute that younger boys and those attending school were no
longer exempt from service. Army “recruiters” regularly scoured villages for eligible men, taking care not to
overlook drunks passed out in front of cantinas in the wee hours of the morning, unless they wore a belt
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buckle forged from welded‐together bullets to show they had already served. The “recruitment” of
indigenous youth was such a widely hated practice that in at least one case, in Santa Eulalia,
Huehuetenango, in 1980, an angry mob (many of them parents) killed the local military commissioner for
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his role in forcing their young men into the army.
Once recruited, however, it was the “breaking customs” that transformed many Mayan conscripts. For
young men who, in addition to acquiring military indoctrination, might also be eating three square meals a
day and receiving deference (rather than having to o er it) for the rst time in their lives—the military
experience created an intoxicating brew of inverted power, coercion, fear, rage, and adrenaline that
transformed young Mayan men into the very soldiers who committed massacres against their own people.
This, working within the crucible that John Keegan has described as the psychology of battle—the high‐
voltage energy and shared fear, especially of an unseen enemy (acute in a guerrilla war) that helps forge
powerful intragroup loyalties and rationales of self‐defense and preservation—helps to explain, at least in
124
part, how it was that young Mayan men so readily abandoned one identity for the other. Arguing
speci cally against the CEH’s charge that the army burned corn elds to make a symbolic holocaust of
Mayan culture, military historian Mario Alfredo Mérida González noted that “one has to remember that
125
90% of the soldiers were of Mayan origin, and for that reason this grain was part of their natural diet.”
Although the tone of this quote should give us pause, the role of Mayan soldiers in the massacres is
p. 109 nonetheless troubling, especially given the fact that they were often called upon to translate and take
action against their own or neighboring villages. So complete was their indoctrination, their fear, their
grasp of power, their repudiation of their former identities, their military esprit de corps, that they became
capable of taking actions against victims who were often known to them, in some cases even neighbors or
family.
The matter of civil patrol participation is equally disturbing. Although membership in civil patrols was
theoretically voluntary, in reality it was anything but that—men and teenage boys served in the patrols on a
forced rotational basis, and those who did not the army considered to be subversives and dealt with as
126
such. The military expected civil patrollers to report in on a regular basis; those who did not produce
results could expect to su er very serious consequences. As one patroller testi ed, “That o cer told us that
127
if we didn’t kill them, they would kill all of us.” Stories of coercion and fear‐induced collaboration among
civil patrol members abound, including haunting testimonies of people being forced to kill family members
128
and neighbors. Yet, as we have seen, there is also ample testimony that demonstrates that some civil
patrollers took to their task with alacrity, using their power not only to apprehend real and suspected
guerrillas, but to torture, humiliate, intimidate, and kill—suggesting that forced collaboration encouraged
129
not only complicity but even, sometimes, enthusiasm. Within their communities, civil patrollers ceased
to be seen as forced collaborators, but as powerful agents of fear and terror at work within the heart of the
community itself.

Conclusion
All of the foregoing leads to the conclusion that there is a false dichotomy between the soldier and villager,
who might both share a common ethnicity, language, and, up to a point, personal history. Yet it does not
discount the argument of political genocide: history, and especially the twentieth century, is rife with
examples of what historian Greg Grandin has called the “industrial” or large‐scale killing of a people by
their own kind, who are able to self‐identify as having been raised up by power or ideology and who
therefore feel justi ed in killing those who have not.
Explanations for perpetrator motivations reach at least as far back as the 1945 Nuremberg trials when Nazi
130
defendants o ered the now‐infamous defense that they were “just following orders.” During the 1960s,
Stanley Milgram conducted his well‐known obedience experiments, in which volunteers willingly
administered what they believed to be potentially fatal dosages of electrical shocks to other volunteers,
p. 110 explaining later that they simply had “done as they had been told.” Milgram suggested such behavior
was a psychosocial response through which people see themselves as conduits of the demands of authority
131
gures—automatons—lacking the free will to withstand the consequences of not following orders. Both
explanations, however, tend to negate or even exonerate the actions of individual killers. In making
victimarios themselves victims of coercive powers beyond their control, the lack‐of‐free‐will model fails to
take into account people’s acute desire to accumulate power and authority for themselves, regardless of the
high moral cost.
An explanation of perpetrator motivation that demands more accountability comes from Kenneth Quinn,
who, in discussing the Khmer Rouge, describes perpetrators as simple peasants who, after training in
“harsh and brutal methods,” use their newfound power and expertise to willingly commit genocide. In
Quinn’s words, such training empowered Cambodians to cease to identify with their own culture to the
extent that they were willing to “destroy physically the cultural underpinnings of the Khmer civilization and
132
to impose a new society through purges, executions and violence.” In the Guatemalan case, there is no
question that coercion played a factor in Mayan soldiers killing Mayan villagers (the penalty for disobeying
an o cer was harsh, including time in the brig on a tortilla‐and‐water diet, where the prisoner might well be
“executed while trying to ee”). Even with such strict penalties there were a few reports of military patrols
“hiding in the monte” until they could return to base, where they submitted fabricated reports of “rebel
kills.” Evidence also shows that a few soldiers, after witnessing or even taking part in a massacre, deserted
the army to join the guerrillas. Such de ance, however, was rare.
If Mayan‐on‐Mayan violence constitutes that kind of autogenocide of which Hinton writes, then it is,
historically speaking, a fairly unusual phenomenon that requires further explanation. Rafael Lemkin, the
scholar who rst coined the neologism “genocide” in response to the Nazi actions, de ned it as a “crime of
barbarity”—a primitive and primordial clash resulting from “ancient tribal hatreds,” a de nition that does
133
not entirely explicate the case of Guatemala in the early 1980s. In the matter of autogenocide, however,
killing does not result precisely from ancient hatreds (although, as we have seen, long‐standing tensions
between ladinos and indigenous very much underscored the political discourse). Instead, it stems from the
134
ability of the state or an entity such as the military to, using Hinton’s expression, “manufacture
di erence.” This refers to a power broker’s ability to construct and stigmatize a subaltern group to the
135
extent that they are perceived, politically and culturally, to be completely di erent beings. This is not to
say that the Guatemalan government or even the civil patrols created these di erences entirely from scratch
p. 111 —we must remember that just as some villages, or sectors in them, supported the guerrillas, others
staunchly supported the government, while still others would have preferred to stay out of the fray
altogether. Yet the ability of the Guatemalan government during the Ríos Montt years to manufacture and

emphasize these di erences—through the creation of civil patrols that divided communities into
“sanctioned Maya” who supported the military program against those who did not—and the multiple
physical and metaphysical divisions that it encouraged in villages (between military and guerrillas, refugees
and those who stayed behind, Catholic and Protestant, soldier and victim, between one family and another)
were all underscored by a messianic anticommunist discourse expressed by the president in weekly Sunday
“sermons” that may, ultimately, lie at the very heart of what Argentina’s military regime in its day
approvingly referred to as the “Guatemalan solution.” While the scorched‐earth campaign of 1982 enforced
compliance with the regime through terror, it was the government’s adept manipulation of perceived
di erences at the inter‐ and intracommunity level that accounted for the success of its long‐term
counterinsurgency strategy.
As we speak of manipulation and manufacturing alterity, it is important to note that the results of these
actions are anything but abstract. As members of civil patrols or indigenous conscripts—even ordinary
Guatemalans who were not directly involved in the war—came to imbibe the doctrines of counterinsurgency
through whatever methods, they also came to understand that they were engaged in a “mission”—a word
that has religious as well as military signi cance. If not everyone accepted Ríos Montt’s assertions that the
counterinsurgency was an outright crusade from God, many nonetheless came to believe they were on some
kind of higher mission: to save the nation, to root out the “bad seed,” which morally justi ed even the most
extreme actions. In combination with the army’s powerful sense of esprit d’corps, it was the regime’s ability
to give meaning to these actions that helped make them not only plausible but actually possible.
Finally, the matter of violence against women and children again commands our attention. While many
would argue that such attacks were an unfortunate side e ect of the fog of war or simply the fault of rogue
and undisciplined soldiers, the scope and scale of such events between 1981 and 1983 can only point to the
conclusion that massacres were, per se, a central strategy of the counterinsurgency campaigns. As such, the
motive was not so much to eliminate guerrilla supporters or even to regain control through terror, but
rather to destroy the culture and society that had sustained the insurgency down to its very roots. Once this
p. 112 was complete, it was time to plant the “good seed” of La Nueva Guatemala and raise it from the ground up.
Notes
1. Robert Carmack introduces the phrase “culture of fear” in the introduction to Harvest of Violence, p. 27.
2. According to one general, the Fusiles y Frijoles plan was actually conceptualized by the army high command during the
Lucas era, but it never advanced beyond Fusiles. Conversation with Brigadier General Carlos Villagrán de Leon, November
6, 2006.
3. REMHI, Nunca más, vol. 1, pp. 157–158.
4. Tom Barry, Guatemala: The Politics of Counterinsurgency (Albuquerque, NM: Inter-Hemispheric Educational Resource
Center, 1986), pp. 19–20.
5. “La conciencia de la historia,” MPR, [September 15] September 19, 1982.
6. Efraín Ríos Montt, Ese gobierno tiene el compromiso de cambiar: no robo, no miento, no abuso, press packet, July 1982, pp.
11–14.
7. Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, p. 119.
8. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, p. 62.
9. See CEH, “Conclusions,” in Guatemala: Memory of Silence, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/conc1.html.
10. “Los frentes guerrilleros del EGP,” map, Compañero, inner cover no. 5, January 1982 (INFOSTELLE).
11. “Counterinsurgency Operations in El Quiché,” secret cable, CIA, February 1982, National Security Archives,
http://gwu.edu/ñsarchiv/NSAEBB32/20–01.htm.
12. Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG), Breve descripciones y reseñas de investigaciones realizados
(FAFG, internal document, 2004), Centro Ak'Kutan.
13. REMHI, Nunca más, vol. 2, p. 22.

14. “Counterinsurgency Operations in El Quiché,” CIA, February 1982, NSA Electronic Archives, Electronic Briefing Book #11,
document #14.
15. See Ball et al., State Violence in Guatemala, p. 40.
16. See Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, Los que siempre estarán en ninguna parte: la desparación en Guatemala (Mexico: GAM, CIIDH,
1999).
17. Ball et al., State Violence in Guatemala, chapter 6, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala /ciidh/qr/english/chap6.html.
18. The two editorials appeared in El Gráfico on May 17 and May 20, 1982. Jorge Carpio Nicolle went on to found a center-right
political party, the Union de Centro Nacional (UCN), and ran as its presidential candidate in 1993. He was assassinated in
July 1993, killed by a gunman on the road outside of Chichicastenango. Although Carpio's murder was o icially attributed
to robbery, the killers did not take any of the expensive electronic equipment that Carpio's crew carried with them. The
military was widely assumed to be responsible for his death, but the link was never fully established.
19. Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, p. 110.
20. These figures come from the CEH report and are the basis of charges brought by the Audiencia Nacional de España by
judge Santiago Pedraz in which he ordered the capture of eight Guatemalan military o icers, including Ríos Montt. See
Prensa Libre, July 13, 2006, p. 3.
21. Ambassador's confidential cable, summary of analysis of reports made in the United States by Amnesty International,
WOLA/NISGUA, October 1982, http://www.gwo.edu/ñsarchives/NSAEBB/SNABESS11/docs/16.01.htm.
22. “Ríos rechaza acusaciones: se declara inocente de genocidio y dice que se enteró de desmanes ocurridos en su gobierno,”
Prensa Libre, July 13, 2006, pp. 1–2. His actual words were, “Durante me gobierno el Ejército complió órdenes, pero
cuando no se dieron órdenes se cometió desmanes, pero y nunca estuve enterado.” Ríos Montt's careful use of the
uncommon word desmanes in place of the much more widely used abusos shows a special concern for the semantics of
this case.
23. Quoted by Robert M. Carmack, “The Story of Santa Cruz del Quiché,” in Harvest of Violence, p. 57.
24. Quoted in Roger Plant, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster (London: Latin American Bureau, 1987), p. 12.
25. “Additional Information on Operation Plan Victoria 82,” confidential intelligence report to U.S. Department of Defense,
Joint Chiefs of Sta , July 1982, NSA #00833.
26. REMHI, Nunca más, vol. 2, pp. 21–22.
27. Gabriel Aguilera Peralta, “Contrainsurgencia rural,” mimeo, 1985, cited in ibid., p. 22.
28. Ricardo Falla, “Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco, Nentón Huehuetenango, July 17, 1982,” unpublished paper,
Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin, p. 2. Ricardo Falla is a Jesuit priest who had worked in
Guatemala since the 1940s. He was active in promoting Catholic Action in the 1960s and 1970s until he was forced to flee
the country in the early 1980s. During his exile he worked among Guatemalan refugees in Mexico and earned a PhD in
anthropology at the University of Texas. A long-time political activist, Falla's political sympathies lay largely with the Le .
29. Regarding Guatemalan place names, which can be confusing: the basic unit of measure is the municipio, or township,
located in a department, which is the equivalent of a state. Each municipio is surrounded by a series of smaller villages,
known as aldeas. From the aldeas, in turn, radiate out smaller settlements known as cantones, and beyond these even
smaller settlements known as carcerías. All of these small settlements are legally bound to the municipio. Beyond the
carcerías there may be a finca, which can be either a large commercial farm or, as in this case, a settlement of small-scale
farmers. A place name may or may not include all of these spatial references; thus, Finca San Francisco is part of the
municipio of Nentón, in the department of Huehuetenango. However, it is not unusual for a small settlement to be referred
to simply by the name of the nearest municipio, a practice that has led to some discrepancies in the identification of
massacre sites in REMHI and the CEH and CIIDH reports.
30. See Grahame Russell, Sarah Kee, and Ann Butwell, Unearthing the Truth: Exhuming a Decade of Terror in Guatemala
(Washington, DC: Epica/CHRLA, 1996), p. 2; for Rabinal, see Gonzales Sichar Moreno, Masacres en Guatemala: los gritos de
un pueblo entero (Guatemala: GAM, 2000).
31. Sichar Moreno, Masacres en Guatemala, pp. 56–60.
32. Falla, “Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco, Nentón Huehuetenango, July 17, 1982.” This work is available
through the special collections at the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin. I have also used a
longer Spanish version of this paper that was eventually published by a solidarity group in Denmark. This published
version includes appendices that did not appear in the English paper, p. 2. See Ricardo Falla, “Masacre de la Fina San
Francisco Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 17 julio de 1982” (Copenhagen: Group Internacional de Trabajo Sobre Asuntos
Indígenas [IWGIA], September 1983). In the subsequent notes, I refer to the English text as “Massacre at the Rural Estate of
San Francisco” and the Spanish paper as “FSFN.” There is also a published source written by Falla called Massacres in the
Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975–1982 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) that I use through this section; this is noted as
such.
33. Paul Kobrak, Huehuetenango, historia de una guerra (Huehuetenango: CEDFOG, 2003). Kobrak's work, which is also based

on interviews with survivors of the massacre and with other residents of Nentón, concurs closely with Falla's, but Kobrak's
study o ers a good example of how, by the time he did his interviews, a more “standard” narrative of the massacre had
begun to emerge.
34. Falla, “Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco.”
35. Hayden White writes that “survivors' testimonies are constituted by various rhetorical mediations such as figurality,
tropes, and emplotments, despite the author's/ narrator's desire to render factually accurate historical re-presentations of
the event. In the course of testimonial practices, such textural and transtextural negotiations produce di erent types of
knowledge—didactic, moral, and aesthetic as well as cognitive.” Cited in Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space,
and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California Press, 1999), p. 212.
36. Kobrak, Huehuetenango, p. 80.
37. Ibid.
38. Falla, “Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco,” p. 9.
41. Despite the army code of conduct's strict prohibition against rape, it was a widely used form of terror. As Brinton Lykes
notes, “Under conditions of…state-sponsored violence, violence against women takes on additional dimensions of
horror,” a quality the Guatemalan army apparently understood all too well. M. Brinton Lykes, Mary M. Brabeck, Theresa
Ferns, and Angela Radan, “Human Rights and Mental Health among Latin American Women in Situations of State-
Sponsored Violence,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 17 (1993): 527. In his study of the violence in the Ixcán, Jesuit priest
Ricardo Falla noted that when women were captured and raped by soldiers, they were o en forced to cook and clean for
them a erward. In at least one case, soldiers, fresh from the bloodlust of a massacre, forced the surviving young women
of the village to strip and dance for them; they then raped them (REMHI, Nunca más, vol. 2, pp. 213–214). This kind of
sexually enforced servitude humiliated and broke women down both emotionally and physically. By invading their homes,
their bodies, and their work, the military was able to demonstrate that it fully dominated even the most intimate spheres
of the women's worlds. Falla, Massacres in the Jungle, p. 132, in Paula Emilia Winch, “Maya Women's Organizing in Post-
Violencia Guatemala: ʻTenemos el derecho de decir lo que pasó,ʼ” master's thesis in Latin American Studies, University of
Texas, 1999, p. 52.
43. Ibid., p. 13.
44. Ibid.
46. Falla, “Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco,” p. 13. Cabrones: literally, a mean goat, but here more like “bastards.”
49. Ibid.
50. Kobrak, Huetenango, pp. 85–87.
52. Falla, FSFN, p. 15.
53. Ibid., p. 19.
54. Ibid., p. 19.
55. Ibid., p. 19.
57. Ibid., p. 3. This flight took place between late July and August 1982.
58. Ibid., p. 2.
59. Ibid., p. 16.
60. Falla, FSFN, p. 88.
61. “Embassy Attempt to Verify Alleged Massacres in Huehuetenango,” Ambassador's report, October 1982,
http://www.gwu.edu/ñsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/15–01.htm.
62. “Command authority” is a legal and military term that refers to the ultimate lawful source of military orders.
63. Whitbeck interview, July 14, 2005.
64. Secret cable, CIA, February 1982, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/ñsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/30–
01.htm.
65. See Terri McComb and Tomás Guzaro Gallero, Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led His People Out of a Holocaust
in the Guatemalan Civil War (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2010).
66. REMHI, Nunca más, vol. 2, p. 20.
67. Testimony of Juana Tzoc, in Jonathan Moller, ed., Nuestra cultura es nuestra resistencia: represión, refugio y recuperación

en Guatemala: testimonios de sobrevivientes de al guerra civil guatemalteca (Mexico: Editorial Océano de México, Turner
Books, 2005), p. 34.
68. CEH, “Conclusions,” in Guatemala: Memory of Silence, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/conc1.html.
69. Hale, Más que un indio, p. 32.
70. Some of these details are found in Guy M. Lawson, “Flowers from the Ash: The Communities of Population in Resistance
and the Process of Reintegration in the Ixcán Jungle of Guatemala,” master's thesis in Community and Regional Planning,
University of Texas, Austin, 1995. There are stories of mothers being told by the guerrillas to cover their babies' mouths
with cloths to prevent their crying so that the group would not be found by the army, a move that sometimes resulted in
the babies' death by su ocation. Other women reported being told by the guerrillas to throw their babies away or to leave
them behind to prevent apprehension by the army. See Sanford, Buried Secrets, pp. 102–104.
71. Lawson, “Flowers from the Ash”; see also Ricardo Falla, “Las CPR,” in Moller, Nuestra cultura es nuestra resistencia, pp. 57–
59.
72. See Ball et al., State Violence in Guatemala, pp. 107–109.
73. Sanford, Buried Secrets, p. 105.
74. In the mid-1960s, anthropologist Benjamin Colby noted a “long tradition of patrolling in Nebaj. You were asked to do it as
a service to your community.” Quoted in Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: Americas Watch
Committee, 1986), p. 15.
75. Ibid., p. 25.
76. Although the o icial ages for participation were 18–60, at least one report claimed that “many boys as young as 12 and
men as old as 70 were forced to serve.” Alice Jay, Persecution by Proxy: The Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: Robert F.
Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, 1993), p. 17.
77. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, p. 56.
78. Ibid., p. 5.
79. See Marvin Estuardo Ramírez Cordón, “Las patrullas de autodefensa civil como estratégia de la doctrina de seguridad
nacional, Guatemala 1982–1996,” tesis de licenciatura, Universidad de San Carlos, June 1998, p. 52.
80. Guatemalan Public Relations O ice, “Las patrullas de autodefensa civil: la respuesta popular al proceso de integración
socio-económico-político en la Guatemala actual,” Guatemalan Army Public Relations O ice, 1984, p. 2 (photocopy).
81. Consejo de Comunidades étnicas Runujel Junam (CERJ), “Inconstitucionalidad de Los Comités ʻVoluntariosʼ de Defensa
Civil o Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil e Institucionalización de la Violación des los Derechos Humanos en Guatemala,
Guatemala, 1992,” cited in Ramírez Cordón, “Las patrullas de autodefensa civil,” pp. 43–44.
82. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, p. 18.
83. Jay, Persecution by Proxy, pp. 20–21.
84. “Annex H, Standing Orders for the Development of Counterinsurgency Operations, National Plan for Security and
Development, July 16, 1982,” cited in Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, p. 19.
85. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, pp. 26, 28–30.
86. “Guatemala: Reports of Atrocities Mark Army Gains,” secret U.S. Embassy to State Department, http://www.gwu.edu/
ñarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/17–01.htm.
87. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, p. 16; Harris Whitbeck interview, July 14, 2005; Edelberto Torres-Rivas and Gabriel Aguilera
Peralta, Del autoritarismo a la paz (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1998), p. 68.
88. See Torres-Rivas and Aguilera Peralta, Del autoritarismo a la paz, pp. 68–69.
89. Menegazzo Amado and Us Alvarez, “Violencia institucional y concepciones políticas,” p. 81.
90. Guatemalan Public Relations O ice, “Las patrullas de autodefense civil: l,” p. 2.
91. Whitbeck interview, July 14, 2005.
92. Ramírez Cordón, “Las patrullas de autodefensa civil,” p. 54.
93. Green, Fear as a Way of Life, p. 168.
94. Ramírez Cordón, “Las patrullas de autodefensa civil,” p. 55.
95. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, pp. 68, 70–71.
96. REMHI, Victimas del conflicto, vol. 4, “Masacres: distribución por departamento y año,” p. 530; Sichar Gonzáles, Masacres
en Guatemala, pp. 47–71.
97. Of this “will to power,” Nietzsche wrote, “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation
as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to
power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.” Frederick Nietzsche, translated by Helen
Zimmern, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Modern Library, 1917). For more on the will to power, see Frederick Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994 [1891]).
98. See Chris Krueger and Kjell Enge, Security and Development Conditions in the Guatemalan Highlands (Washington, DC:
Washington O ice on Latin America, 1985), p. 20.

99. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols, p. 73. For a vivid sense of how the creation of the civil patrols changed village equilibrium,
see Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), chapter 5.
100. See Davis and Hodson, Witness to Political Violence in Guatemala.
101. Sichar Moreno, Masacres en Guatemala, pp. 47–71. This work combines the findings of REMHI and the CEH and includes
some additional reports of massacres taken from the Noticias de Guatemala and other sources that the author of the book
feels that REMHI and CEH missed.
102. Russell et al., Unearthing the Truth, p. 7.
103. Benjamin Paul and William Demarest, “The Operation of a Death Squad in San Pedro La Laguna,” in Carmack, ed., Harvest
of Violence.
104. Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), pp. 211–251.
105. Ibid.
106. Ball et al., State Violence in Guatemala, pp. 80–81.
107. See ibid., “Figure 15.2: Percent female victim of killing and disappearances by year, 1966–1995,” pp. 80–81.
108. Ibid., p. 80. According to the CIIDH, adult females made up 26–29 percent of people killed in massacres, but only 14
percent of individual assassinations or disappearances.
109. CEH, Memoria del Silencio, 1999, p. 1.
110. Organización para las Migraciones (OIM), Aid, “Programa de Asisténcia a Victimas de Violaciones de los Derechos
Humanos,” Informe: Diagnóstico comunitario en cuatro municipalidaes del Departmento de El Quiché, Guatemala, Cuadro
No. 3-B (Guatemala: OIM, 1999).
111. Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (EAFG), “Las Masacres en Rabinal: Estudio Histórico-Antropológico de la
Masacres de Plan de Sánchez, Chichupac y Río Negro” (Guatemala City: EAFG, 1995), pp. 287–288.
112. Dupuis Nieves Gómez, Informe sobre el daño a la salud mental derivado por la masacre de Plan de Sánchez, para la Corte
Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (Guatemala: Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Social Psicosocial, 2005), p.
32.
113. Green, Fear as a Way of Life, p. 104.
114. Winch, “Maya Women's Organizing in Post-Violencia Guatemala,” pp. 60–61.
115. PAVVA was a small private nonsectarian organization that included among its membership some former Peace Corps
members, graduate students associated with Tulane University School of Public Health, and some British and American
foreigners who had resided in Guatemala for many years.
116. Programa de Ayuda para las víctimas de la violencia en el Altiplano (PAVVA) (A Proposal to Avert Imminent Calamity in the
Highlands of Guatemala), September 1983, p. 1 (CIRMA).
117. Judith N. Zur, Violent Memories: Mayan War Widows in Guatemala (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 127–137.
118. Organización par alas Migraciones (OIM), Aid. Informe: Diagnostico comunitario en cuatro municipalidaes del Departmento
de El Quiché, “Programa de Asistencia a victimas de Violaciones de los Derechos Humanos” (Guatemala, for internal
distribution of participating organizations, 1 August 1999), p. 38.
119. For an excellent study, see Green, Fear as a Way of Life.
120. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), pp. 63–64.
121. Adams, Crucifixion by Power, p. 248.
122. Sheldon H. Davis and Julie Hodson, “Conscription of Indian Youth,” in Witness to Political Violence in Guatemala, p. 30.
124. See John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976).
125. Mario Alfredo Mérida González, Venganza ó juicio histórico: una lectura retrospectiva del informe de la CEH (Guatemala:
self-published, 2003), p. 38.
126. Kobrak, Huehuetenango, p. 102. Kobrak's careful study of Huehuetenango provides a microhistory of the e ects of the
early 1980s in Huehuetenango, including the work of the civil patrols. For more on civil patrols, see also Paul Kobrak,
“Village Troubles: The Civil Patrols in Agucatán, Guatemala,” doctoral dissertation in sociology, University of Michigan,
1997.
127. REMHI, Never Again, p. 8.
128. See Case 2811, Chinique, El Quiché, for example (REMHI, Never Again, p. 23).
129. Kobrak describes cases in Huehuetenango where even fellow patrollers who arrived late or drunk to duty received harsh
treatment at the hands of the PACs: “ʻthey beat the [slacker] or put him in a well of cold water over night.… They made
him carry rocks on his back,ʼ according to one ex-patroller from San Rafael La Independencia” (Kobrak, Huehuetenango, p.
106).
130. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).

131. Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, p. 278; see Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Anthority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper
and Row, 1974).
132. Ibid., 287. See Kenneth Quinn, “Pattern and Scope of Violence,” in Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia, 1975–1978, Rendezvous
with Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 240.
133. See Rafael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
134. Chomsky speaks of “manufacturing consent” to describe the media's ability to form and sway public opinion at a
subconscious level, by manipulation, and not only in what appears in new coverage of events, but in what is excluded
from coverage as well. This issue looms large in the Guatemalan case, a point I shall return to in chapter 6. See Noam
Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1988).
135. See Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, pp. 211–251.

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Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982-1983

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https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379648.003.0004 Pages 85–112

Keywords: massacre, scorched‐earth campaign, gender, violence, Maya

Si tuvieran que pintar la guerra,

¿de que color la pintarían?

Una dijo, de verde

—Humberto Ak’abal, Raqonchi’aj: Grito

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Refugees and Internal Exiles

The Communities of Population in Resistance

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Civil Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa)

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