Guatemalan Civil War

For 36 years, from November 1960 to December 1996, Guatemala was torn by an internal armed conflict between a succession of military-dominated governments and leftist guerrilla movements. Most of the killing, however, was not combat but state violence against civilians, above all the indigenous Maya of the western highlands. A UN-sponsored truth commission later attributed the overwhelming majority of abuses to state forces, and the killings of the early 1980s are widely regarded as genocide.

The roots of the conflict lay in a deeply unequal distribution of land. A small, mostly European-descended elite and foreign firms such as the United Fruit Company held much of the country's farmland, worked by poor, largely indigenous peasants. Elected governments after 1944 attempted labour and land reform, but in 1954 a coup organised and funded by the United States overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz and brought Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to power. A line of right-wing military rulers followed, against the background of the Cold War.

The war is dated from 13 November 1960, when junior officers staged a failed revolt against General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. Survivors formed the MR-13 movement, which in 1962 joined communists and students in the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR). A US-assisted counter-insurgency campaign in the eastern departments of Izabal and Zacapa in 1966–68 broke the guerrillas there at a heavy civilian cost. Political murders and "disappearances" became routine, and in 1968 FAR gunmen killed the US ambassador, John Gordon Mein.

From 1970 army officers allied with the Institutional Democratic Party held the presidency through disputed elections. In the 1970s new guerrilla groups, among them the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), took root among Maya communities in the northern highlands, while unions, students and peasant leagues pressed for reform. Under General Romeo Lucas García from 1978, repression intensified in both city and countryside. Among the most notorious episodes was the Spanish embassy massacre of 31 January 1980, in which peasant leaders were among those killed.

In 1981 the army began a scorched-earth sweep of the highlands intended to separate the guerrillas from the civilian population. On 23 March 1982 General Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a coup, and his "Victoria 82" plan combined massacres with aid programmes and forced recruitment of villagers into civil self-defence patrols, which grew from about 25,000 to some 700,000 members in eighteen months. Many villages were razed and their inhabitants killed or driven out. The violence peaked in 1982.

Civilian rule returned from 1986, and peace talks between the government and the guerrilla coalition URNG gained momentum under United Nations mediation in 1994. Agreements on human rights, the return of displaced people, a truth commission and indigenous rights followed. Under President Álvaro Arzú, the final accords were signed on 29 December 1996, and the URNG became a legal party.

Estimates of those killed or disappeared range from about 140,000 to 200,000, including tens of thousands of forced disappearances. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification reported in 1999 that the state was responsible for 93 per cent of the human rights violations it documented and the guerrillas for 3 per cent, and that 83 per cent of the victims were Maya. In 2013 a Guatemalan court convicted Ríos Montt of genocide against the Ixil Maya and sentenced him to 80 years, the first time a former head of state had been tried for genocide in his own country's courts, but the verdict was annulled days later; he died in 2018 before a retrial ended. The activist Rigoberta Menchú, whose father died in the embassy massacre, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Neighbouring countries saw parallel conflicts in the Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Our 1960, 1985 and 1994 maps show Guatemala at the start, the height and the closing stage of the conflict.