operation sofía - Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras

OPERATION
analysis of these military plans from different points of view—
historical, anthropological, psycho-social—out of our belief in
Guatemala’s infinite capacity to transform its current situation..
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
The military operations “Victoria 82” and “Sofía” demonstrate the aims and strategies of Guatemala’s Army during the
darkest period of the country’s recent history. We offer a brief
SOFÍA
SumMarY
Short notes on a long
armed conflict 2
From racism to genocide
4
The tyranny of Ríos Montt
and Operation Victoria 7
Operation Sofía
12
Targeting women: feminicide
20
The risks of union struggle
23
The truth underground
26
The pain of impunity
29
A new dawn
32
Seeds against forgetting
35
Graphic Design: Studio BOTERO
Translation: Neil Mann
Rural people moved against their will by the Army. Nebaj, 1982.
Taking the fish’s water away
I
mpunity is a sea in which the criminals of armed conflict swim. During the armed conflict,
the Army was inspired by the well-known
Maoist dictum that “the guerrilla, supported by
the people, exists within their community as the
fish does in water.” It put into practice a strategy
of “taking the fish’s water away,” in other words,
destroying the communities that might support
the guerrillas, so that they could not use popular
support to sustain themselves. In this way, the racist government planned, executed and justified
one of the cruelest and least punished genocides
in Latin America.
Today, those responsible for these hateful crimes swim in a sea of impunity and occupy important positions of power in the democracy. This situation not only makes a mockery of the victims,
survivors and the people as a whole, but also means
that the state is committing a serious breach of the
rules of international law, as well as jeopardizing
the credibility of its institutions at both national
and international level. As the United Nations has
repeated: the prosecution and conviction of those
responsible for crimes, along with the compensation of victims, are obligations on all States and
must not be substituted in any way or delayed.
Only the determination and tireless efforts of
organizations for human rights and victim advocacy have managed, with a few but important sentences, to crack the wall of impunity that stands
between the victims and their struggle for justice.
Within the framework of open trials for genocide in the country, the Justice and Reconciliation
Association (AJR: Asociación Justicia y Reconciliación) demanded that the Guatemalan Army
hand over the campaign plans dubbed “Victoria
82” (“Victory 82”) and “Firmeza 83” (“Firmness
83”) and the plans for an operation labeled “Sofía.” The Army gave the Courts of Justice the first
two plans in a more complete form than they had
given to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH: Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico), but said that Operation Plan Sofía (POS
– Plan Operaciones “Sofía”) had been lost. At the
end of 2009, the analyst Kate Doyle received one
of the twenty original copies of POS.
This plan of operations shows that in 1982, during Ríos Montt’s government, there was a strategy, formulated down to the last detail, to destroy
every sign of life in the Ixil area and to leave it in
ashes, including the municipalities of Santa María
Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul.
These military documents give: the names of those
responsible for the crimes committed as part of this
extermination mission; the movements and reports of the patrols operating there; the faxes sent in
an unbroken chain of command; the “successes”
achieved in obliterating indigenous communities
and razing their property to the ground.
We humbly dedicate this short publication
to all the victims, survivors and their families. To
borrow the words of Eduardo Galeano, we wish to
say that, “it was worth it, that so many men and women did not die in vain. That there are lives that are
wonderfully long, because they continue in others,
in those who come after. Lives that remind us that
we are not condemned to choose the same.”
We thank all of them for continuing to help us
“not to lose our way, not to accept the unacceptable, never to give in, and never to get down
from the beautiful horse of dignity.”
Comisiones Obreras Trade Union.
Guatemala, Tierra de Árboles, 2011
To see the complete original Operation Plan Sofía, go to: www.madridpazysolidaridad.org • www.ccoo.es
Photo/photo text: C Jean-Marie Simon/2010. Guatemala, Eternal Spring–Eternal Tyranny
“They make you sing the
national anthem and the
Army anthem, and then
they tell you that the Army
guarantees and protects
the Guatemalan economy
and the rich people, and
the reason why they protect
the rich is that they’re the
ones who give work to the
Guatemalan people and
someone has to protect the
people who give work. They
tell you that a guerrilla is
someone who steals. They
never tell you what it means
to be a guerrilla or a communist. They tell you that Cuba
and Nicaragua have communists but you never know who
is really the enemy.” Former
soldier, Guatemala City.
Short notes on a long armed conflict
Antonio García *
I
n order to give a clearer sense of the context
in which Operation Plan Sofía was formulated
and carried out, here are a few quick brushstrokes to sketch the internal armed conflict that
devastated Guatemala for 36 years..
Ten years of democratic reforms under Arévalo and Arbenz ended in 1954 with the triumph
of a coup supported by the United States. The
United States disseminated the idea throughout
Latin America that any government that took direct responsibility for the welfare of its people,
showed intellectual curiosity or desire for economic independence was considered “communist.”
The U.S. systematically intervened from then on
to maintain the regime installed by the CIA and,
when Congress imposed some limitations, delegated responsibility for supplying the means, weapons, military advisers and training necessary to
commit the brutal crimes to various client states
(Israel and Argentinean neo-Nazis).
The inability of the Guatemalan State to
address legitimate social demands and claims
led to a repressive system, whose main objective was controlling the population that wanted
to rebel against their miserable living conditions. The rural population undertook community
programs to pull themselves out of their silent
suffering, which were immediately destroyed by
those who wanted to reimpose the traditional
order.1
* Lawyer, in charge of the legal committee of the Comisiones Obreras Trade
Union.
factors that determined at
a profound level the origin
and subsequent outbreak of
the armed conflict, which
dragged out from 1960 to
1996.3
The conditions of semislavery and misery, called
“traditional life” by the élites,
came under threat when “the
peasant population, Indians
primarily, began to lend
support to guerrillas after
the government crushed their nonviolent efforts
to overcome” them. “The dynamics were the familiar ones. Local self-help organizations, many
established by the Church, had developed during
the 1970s and ‘functioned effectively with wide
participation by the rural population,’ achieving
‘impressive results’—and calling forth the usual
response [in Central America]: murder of priests
and community leaders, and generalized massacre
and repression.”4
Reports by Amnesty International, Survival
International and Americas Watch were aware
of the exponential increase of violence in the early 80s, when entire villages were reduced to ashes and there was systematic torture. A network
C Lorena Pajares Sánchez
Referendum= Trap BEHIND Fear lies FREEDOM
“You gringos are always worried about the
violence done with machine guns and machetes. But there is another kind of violence that
you must be aware of, too. I used to work on
the hacienda. My job was to take care of the
dueño’s dogs. I gave them meat and bowls of
milk, food that I couldn’t give my own family.
When the dogs were sick, I took them to the
veterinarian.… When my children were sick,
the dueño gave me his sympathy, but no medicine as they died. To watch your children
die of sickness and hunger while you can do
nothing is a violence to the spirit. We have
suffered that silently for too many years. Why
aren’t you gringos concerned about that kind
of violence?”2
Structural injustice, which persists to this
day; the closing of political spaces; racism; discrimination; the consolidation of exclusive and antidemocratic institutions that refuse to promote any
substantial reforms that might have reduced the
structural conflicts—these, according to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), are the
1
2
3
4
Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (2nd edition; Boston: South End Press,
1987), 28.
Chomsky, Turning the Tide, 6–7.
United Nations Commission for Historical Clarificaion on Guatemala
(CEH), 12 vols. Guatemala: Memory of Silence (Guatemala: UN Office
for Project Services, 1999), Ch. 4, p. 24, § 12.
Chomsky, Turning the Tide, 28, citing ed. Cynthia Brown, With Friends
Like These, Americas Watch Report on Human Rights and U.S. Policy in
Latin America (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 194, 185ff.
Short notes on a long armed conflict
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
A woman detained with her children at the military
base at Nebaj. 1982.
of parallel apparatuses of repression was created,
replacing the judicial activity of the courts and
establishing an illegal punitive system run by military intelligence structures (G-2). We wonder if
this network is still functioning and why successive
governments since the signing of the peace have
not dismantled it.
The direct or indirect collaboration of key economic and political sectors is more than demonstrated in both the successive military governments
and also the civilian ones “overseen” by the army.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a leader in the Reagan Administration said: “Traditional autocrats [the ones we
do and should support, Kirkpatrick explains] leave
in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional
societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses
in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and
observe traditional taboos.… Because the miseries
of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable
to ordinary people who, growing up in the society,
learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in
India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for
survival in the miserable roles they are destined to
fill.”5
Anti-communist policy received strong support from right-wing political parties and
powerful sectors of society in Guatemala. The
U.S. did not hesitate to support the successive
military regimes in its “strategic backyard.” The
National Security Doctrine was taken up without
problems in Guatemala, expressed first in terms
of anti-reform, then anti-democracy, and finally,
as counter-insurgency with criminal intent. The
anti-communist thinking took root in the country and was joined by a vigorous defense of religion, traditions and conservative values that supposedly saw themselves threatened by the world
expansion of atheist communism.6 In the case of
5
6
7
8
9
Turning the
Guatemala:
Turning the
Turning the
Guatemala:
Tide, 8.
Memory of Silence, Ch IV, p. 24, § 14.
Tide, 30.
Tide, 31.
Memory of Silence, Ch. IV, p. 24, § 15.
Soldier’s Song
Soldier, do not shoot me,
soldier.
I know your hand is shaking
soldier, do not shoot me.
Who put those medals on you?
How many lives did they cost you?
Tell me if it’s right soldier
with so much blood. Who wins?
If it’s so wrong to kill,
why kill your brother?
Víctor Jara
(Chilean singer-songwriter
and musician)
Guatemala, United States support was most evident at the military level in terms of strengthening the national intelligence apparatus, the sale
of equipment and weapons, training officers for
counter-insurgency warfare, all key areas involved in the commission of the serious human-rights
violations that the army committed during the
conflict.
The bloodiest governments of the 36-yearlong armed conflict were those of Lucas García,
Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores, between 1980 and
1984. During these years, “As the London Economist noted in 1983, ‘with the help of Israeli advisers, [Guatemala] has succeeded where a similar
campaign in neighbouring El Salvador, pushed by
American advisers, has failed,’ though ‘the price of
success has been very high,’ including ‘sadistic butchery’ and one million homeless Indians.”7 Elliott Abrams, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for
Human Rights, argued that the violence and the
refugees were “the price of stability.” In 1984 in
an appearance before the United States Congress,
he said that Mejía Víctores (Ríos Montt’s Depu-
ty Defense Minister and later Head of State) “was
continuing the great number of improvements on
human rights that Rios Montt had begun.” The
Reagan Administration had also praised the policy of Lucas García, for his “positive” advances,
although it claimed that it had not provided direct military aid to Guatemala until later, in 1982,
when Ríos Montt staged his coup and began his
“dramatic improvements [in human rights].”8
In Guatemala, for several decades the National
Security Doctrine promoted by the U.S. became
the Army’s raison d’être and State policy. At the
same time, the concept of the “internal enemy,”
inherent in this doctrine, became ever more widespread for the State. The CEH has recorded one of
the most devastating effects of this policy: State
forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of the violations documented
by the CEH, including 92% of the arbitrary executions and 91% of forced disappearances. The
victims included men, women and children from
all levels of society: workers, professionals, priests
and nuns, politicians, farmers, students and academics—in ethnic terms, the vast majority belonged
to the Maya population.9
As we shall see in discussing the plan for Operation Sofía, the State’s repressive response was
completely out of proportion to the military
strength of the guerrilla groups and can only be
understood within the framework of the country’s
profound social, economic and political conflicts.
In the period 1978–1982 there was, among large
sections of the population, growing social activism and political opposition to the continuation of the established order, whose organized
expressions, in some cases, maintained links of various kinds with the insurgency. However, at no
point in the internal armed conflict did the guerrilla
groups have the military capabilities necessary to
pose a threat to the State. The State and the Army
were aware, at all times, that the insurgency’s military capacity did not represent a real threat to
the political order in Guatemala. In 1982 they devised plans for a military campaign—Operation
Victoria 82—knowing full well that they were
not fighting against the guerrillas but rather
wiping out whole villages, inhabited only by an
unarmed population of indigenous peasants, all
under the guise of regarding them as the guerrillas’ social support.
One of the most common crimes of this armed conflict, and one that has left so many consequences, is that of “forced disappearance.” More
than 45,000 innocent people are still missing and
only one soldier and a few paramilitary personnel
have been convicted for the crime. This year marks
30 years of the “disappearance” of the writer and
fighter Alaíde Foppa. Taking responsibility as a
writer, she used her pen and every means of
expression to challenge enslaving stereotypes,
unfair restrictions and any violation of dignity.
She had a son with Juan José Arévalo and married
Alfonso Solórzano, an official in the governments
of Arévalo and Árbenz and founder of the Guatemalan Labor Party. She lost two of the children
she brought up to work for justice. She disappeared
on December 19, 1980. Her voice is that of all men
and women who fought for a fairer Guatemala
and paid a very high price for it. Their names are
in our memories.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
The Army directing the
annual Indian festival in
Nebaj, Quiché, 1982.
Racism justifies control
through fear of violence and
assures the system of domination. At the same time it is
a key element in explaining
why military operations were
carried out such viciousness
and brutality. This racism has
recently been exacerbated by
the elites who consider themselves “white.”
Marta Casaus Arzú *
Introduction, premises and starting point
T
he war that Guatemala underwent resulted
in more than 200,000 casualties, according
to the report of the Historical Clarification
Commission. For the first time in the country’s
history, an official commission has confirmed that
racism is a fundamental factor in explaining the
cruelty and discrimination with which military
operations were carried out against the indigenous communities in the West. It has further been
confirmed that, according to the rules of international law, acts of genocide were committed by
the Army who branded groups of Mayan people
as the “enemy within.”
The first thing we ask ourselves is how this could
happen. What could have provoked it? Why so much
cruelty and horror? What relationship exists between
racism and genocide, both social practices that are
articulated as technologies of power? What does
Operation Sofía add to the confirmation of racism
and its link with the Guatemalan genocide?
The genocides of the twentieth century have been
part of modern bureaucracy and the culture of rationalism, and they could appear again at any time.
That is the reason for my interest in investigating the
phenomenon in the light of Operation Sofía, which
proves collusion between the Army, the oligarchy
and the CIA in planning the Guatemalan genocide.
In the opinion of experts such as Bauman,
Uvin and Kuper, Goldhagen, and Bruneteau,
for genocide to be defined and categorized as
* Professor of History of the Americas, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Author of numerous publications, including: Genocidio: ¿La ma_xima expresio_n
del racismo en Guatemala? (Genocide: The Ultimate Expression of Racism in
Guatemala?) and Guatemala: linaje y racismo (Guatemala: Race and Racism).
Racism and Genocide
The Guatemalan genocide in the light
of Operation Sofía: an interpretation
and a reflection
such, it must have a series of elements: One is
the objective of exterminating an ethnic, religious or cultural group. The essential thing is
to declare this group an absolute enemy and
“therefore previously barbarized or animalized
and separated from their humanity.”1
The other element is the degree of intentionality, which means finding out whether it was planned
from the very top with the decided intention of exterminating the ethnic group. Secondly if the executors were involved in designing, planning and implementing it. Thirdly, analyzing the rules and practical
methods by which of acts of genocide, deportations,
starvation, torture, terror, massacres were put into
practice. Fourthly, examining what Feierstein
terms as genocidal social practices that accompany
it—training methods, refinements, legitimation and
consensus—which imply prior planning.2
I want to start from the basis of the relationship
between racism and genocide, a matter that is hotly
debated in Guatemala and throughout Latin America.
In those multiethnic and multicultural states with ethnic minorities or minoritized majorities, such as Guatemala, where racism also plays a fundamental role in
the social structure, in the science and the structure
of power, these practices, attitudes and expressions
contribute to the execution of genocidal acts and
social practices.3
We consider this connecting thread of racism
crucial in analyzing the case of Guatemala, to seeing
how it goes on mutating and metamorphosing over
a succession of historical stages, the spaces in which
recreates and reproduces, and as power elites and the
church construct and recreate it, via the State, to become normalized so that even the subordinate classes
use it as part of how they formulate their own identity.
For Foucault, racism is inserted as a new mechanism of state power, which exercises the right
to kill or eliminate the Other in the name of sovereignty. He claims that the most murderous states
are also the most racist.
These starting premises allow us to situate the
racism that comes from the State and to analyze it, not
only as an ideology of difference and inequality, not
only as a form of discrimination and oppression between classes or ethnic groups, but also as a logic of extermination and exclusion, as a technology of power.
1
Foucault, Michel J. (1992). “The State Must be Defended” in Bernard
Bruneteau (2006), The Century of Genocide, Violence, Massacres and
Genocidal Processes from Armenia to Rwanda.
2 Feierstein, Daniel (2007). Genocide as a social practice, between
Nazism and the experience of Argentina. (Buenos Aires: Fondo de
Cultura Economica)
3 There is a great deal written on this subject: see the work of Peter
Uvin, Aiding Violence, The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West
Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998). D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler´s Willing
Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1998) and Bernard Brunettau, The
Century of Genocides, op. cit.
Racism and Genocide
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
The historical-political foundations of genocide
are rooted here in the way that the homogeneous
states in Latin America were constructed.4 In the
State and its repressive apparatus, genocide
operates as the ultimate expression of racism,
because it constitutes an intrinsic element of the
state itself and forms part of a central axis that is
used and manipulated by elites in power who
consider themselves white. Studies on genocide
have shown how responsibility for the enormity of genocide rested not only with the fascist state, but with the civilian population, and they give
warning of the enormous dangers that we run
if we do not deactivate these racist practices that
lead to genocide.5 In the case of Guatemala, it is
necessary to investigate those sociological, political
and psychological variables, and especially the historical background that gave rise to the survival and
normalization of racism and genocidal acts.6
In that context, in view of documents recently
brought to light about Operation Plan Sofía, along
with many other Army and CIA documents, I consider that the state has played an essential role in the
reproduction of racism and the planning of genocide.
In fact one of the main contributions of Operation
Sofía is to confirm the seamless operation of a chain
of command that begins with the orders of Chief
of Genral Staff, López Fuentes, coordinator of the
plan Victoria 82, and reaches down to the leaders
of each one of the patrols that made up the three
paratroop companies.
The 20 copies of Operation Plan Sofía distributed to the various battalions confirm the explicit
mission to exterminate the civilian population
and how that order came directly from high command in order to develop “counter-subversion
operations, population control and psychological
operations with to exterminate all ENO” encounters with the enemy and the FIL, local Irregular
Forces, namely indigenous civilians in the Ixil area
with no links to the armed struggle.7
The following are some of the basic premises about the State’s involvement in the genocide in Guatemala which reinforce the narrative in
Operation Sofía:
•The Guatemalan racist state perpetrated a
genocide against the indigenous population and
this was because, historically and structurally, it
possessed, in its intrinsic nature, the repressive,
ideological and legal apparatus to carry it out.
• The Guatemalan State is a racist state that
uses state racism as a technology of power,
when it loses “control of the indigenous population” and fears that they might rise up and
take revenge. In this sense, everyday racism and
the normalization of racism play a crucial role in
the imagination of the ladinos, the military and
political elite, who have revived the fear of re-
“Everyday racism and the normalization of racism play a crucial role
in the imagination of the ladinos,
the military and political elite.”
verse racism, in the form of a backlash against
their own historical and social domination.
• The racist state is by nature exclusionary, authoritarian and discriminatory, and uses all means of
coercion at its disposal to exercise power and
consolidate a system of exploitation and domination, so that race becomes the linchpin of the
differences and inequalities.
• It is a state that, faced with a crisis in domination
or an inter-oligarchic struggle, resorts to genocide as a final solution to maintain control, and
supports itself substantially through repression
as its main route.
• It is a state whose strategy has been to assimilate
or integrate the Other according to the homogenizing model of nationhood and has historically
resorted to eugenics as a strategy for improving
the breed and to genocide to maintain its dominant status.
• The features identified here formed a substantial part of the Guatemalan State and therefore we
arrive at categorizing it as a racist state, which
favors state racism, or massive and indiscriminate use of brute force, as the most common
mechanism to justify control by means of violence
and ensure a global system of domination.
4
It is in this context that social Darwinism, with all the theories about the
hierarchy of races and the extermination of the same, takes on an unusual
historical value and as part of a hegemonic current contributes to genocide. It is what a certain writer referred to as “the murderous imaginarium of
social Darwinism.”
5 The same phenomenon occurred in Nazi Germany, where the civilian population took a good part of the responsibility for the Holocaust by their
silence, if not by their complicity. Bauman believes that it is impossible to
try to explain the Holocaust as a monstrosity of the past or as something
incomprehensible that is alien to our civilization, because the system and
ideology that led to Auschwitz remain intact. This means that the nation
state itself is out of control and that at any moment acts of this nature
can be unleashed and happen again. The uniqueness and normality of the
genocide is what ensures its repetition. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and
the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
The Indian as a public threat: Racism as technology of extermination
Guatemala has been one of the clearest cases, only
comparable with the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia
and Kosovo and possibly in Rwanda. The extermination of the indigenous population was undoubtedly the work of the Army and the power
elite at the height of the war that, according to the
Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH),
In the 80s, a 17-year-old coffee-picker with her child on her
back. Jocotenango, Sacatepequez. In the last fifteen years,
maternal mortality has been reduced from 248 to 133 cases
per 100,000 live births and is three times higher in indigenous women than in the non-indigenous population. However, this rate is the fifth highest in Latin America.
cost the lives of more than 200,000 people, more
than 83% of them Mayan, and resulted in acts of
genocide against the indigenous population. This
violence had a background in racism insofar as
they sought to exterminate the Maya people, declaring them the “enemy within.”8 Out of the total
number of human rights violations that affected
life and physical integrity, 70% were committed
against Mayans and only 10% against ladinos; in
terms of casualties recorded by the CEH, 89%
were Mayan speakers and proceeded predominantly indigenous municipalities: Quiché, Kekchi and
Kakchiquel.
Reading Operation Plan Sofía, it is immediately obvious in how many paragraphs the word
“extermination” occurs. In Operation Sofía, the
central mission of these companies was “to carry
out offensive and counter-subversive operations
and psychological operations in the Operation’s
Gumarcaj area, in coordination with the Task
Force, to give greater impetus to these operations and to exterminate subversive elements in
the area.”
6
A book from the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), on the
first meeting about racism and genocide in Guatemala, brings an underdiscussed topic like this for analysis and further reflection. CALDH, Genocidio la máxima expresión del racismo (Genocide: The Ultimate Expression of
Racism) (Guatemala City: Maga, 2004).
7 See Operation Sofía, 13 report from patrol 1. In the Periodic Reports on
Operations (IPOs), especially the report “IPO no. 1” from Colonel Castellanos, correspondent to the first battalion of paratroopers, it is reported how
they yoked the civilian population together with the guerrillas, making
them out to be responsible for supporting the guerrillas, when they were
simple peasants who were fleeing in terror from the massacres.
8 This fact is well documented in Operation Plan Sofía and the CEHís Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio (Guatemala: Memory of Silence) (Guatemala
City: UNOPS, 1999), vol. 5, “Conclusions and Recommendations.” In sections 108, 109, and 110ñ122 the report concludes that the Guatemalan state,
between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against the Mayan
population.
operaTion SofIa
Some of the massacres committed in Guatemala during this period allow us to see how, in
the form of the violence, torture and elimination
directed against women, children and indigenous
people, there was planning and premeditated strategy from the high command, a deliberate intentionality coming from military leaders targeted
at physically exterminating a people and their
offspring and triggering genocide against the
civilian population of Mayan origin.9
The Army’s brutality was merciless in areas of
Mayan population and most of them were accompanied by insults such as “raza de coches,” “indias
de mierda.”10 There were also practices such as
extracting the fetus alive from a pregnant woman
or even amputating her breasts, as well as leaving
signs of rape on dead bodies, such as objects in
their vaginas or stakes in their bellies.11
One of the most striking elements in all
these testimonies—and of course fully reflected in
Operation Sofía—is the objectification of the Other
or their animalization. Regarding these Others as
things or objects was one of the most effective tactics for Nazi executioners and the killers of other
genocides in carrying out their mission “to save”
humanity, where cleansing of the population, in
many cases, or improvement of the race played
a crucial role. The fact that in none of the documents related to Operation Sofía are the victims
considered as people or indigenous people or individuals, and certainly never as victims, is one of
the ways the military objectified them away took
away their humanity.12
The documents of Operation Sofía list the
dead or murdered in the same way as animals,
houses, traps or other objects; at no time does it
speak of either the indigenous population or Mayans, a term that is absent from the entire plan:
they are enemies, “ENO,” local irregular forces,
“FIL,” or subversives.13
Children are referred to as “chocolates,” a
clear reference to their copper-colored skin. What
appears in the reports is that two chocolates were
eliminated, or five FIL dead, or they are referred
to as a “17-year-old undocumented element,” or
“an item in plain clothes was eliminated,” “25 horses, 70 sheep, 35 cows and 15 FIL were eliminated”....
Only when they are evacuated, or made prisoners, do they become subjects again, “three orphaned children were evacuated,” “female and male
children, and old people were evacuated,” “captured: children, women and old people.” Only then
do they regain their humanity, become “people”
again, human beings with identifiable gender or
age. During Operation Sofía which lasted for only
one month three days (from July 16 to August 19,
1982), the area was devastated with an indescribable level of violence, villages were destroyed, there
9
What is striking in the case of the Guatemalan genocide is the huge
number of rapes and murders perpetrated against children (18%), most
of them arbitrary executions. In the documentation for Operation Sofía,
the soldier Mario Roberto Grajeda Toledo reports that over three days
alone, “during 25, 26 and 28 July 1982, the Army captured 91 children,
73 girls, three newborns, 69 women and 52 men.” All were categorized
as local irregular forces (FIL).
10According to the CEH, rape, including gang rape, was inflicted on indigenous women (89%), of whom 35% were under 18. The insults are not
easily translated, being far stronger than the literal meaning “spawn of
pigs” or “shit Indian women.”
11CEH, Memoria del Silencio, vol. 5, p. 32.
12On the subject of animalization the other and its effects in cases of
genocide, see Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence. Roger Paul Droit, Genealogía
de los bárbaros: Historia de la inhumanidad (Barcelona: Paidos, 2009).
Two tears
When I was born
they put two tears
in my eyes
so that I could see
the size of my people’s pain.
Hope
Yesterday I passed by the cemetery.
I questioned many who sleep without a grave.
And though they died, they wore no hope.
And though they died, they wore no hope.
Hope.
The birds heard the voice of my heart
And happy, they sang their songs of justice and/
freedom.
And happy, they sang their songs of justice and/
freedom.
Hope.
Humberto ak´abal
(Guatemalan Maya poet)
were massacres, sieges of the civilian population,
indiscriminate bombing, destruction of animals
and goods, and the Army instilled a level of psychological terror, as it forced more than 100,000
Indians into internal displacement, many dying of
starvation and cold in the mountains or trying to
cross the border.
All these data in the plan for Operation Sofía
mean that we are in complete agreement with the
assessments given by Victoria Sanford,14 the Fundación Rigoberta Menchú, CALDH (Center for
Human Rights Legal Action), Chirix,15 Montejo,
Payeras, Brett,16 Prudencio García,17 Castellanos
and many others, concerning the responsibility of
the Guatemalan State, the Army and the power
elites who designed and implemented a strategy of
genocide against the Mayan population. Tracing
the orders set out in Operation Sofía confirms that
the High Command and the people involved in
the governments of Kxel Laugerud, Lucas García, Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores, had the clear
intention of committing genocide against the
indigenous population and that it was designed,
planned and executed from the military leadership, with the collusion of the power elites and the
CIA.
Operation Sofía gives concrete proof of the
two elements that enable us to classify the strategy
as genocide. There was both the intent to exterminate the Ixil population, and also the motivation to gain control of the population “in order
to make them more ladino and erase the Ixil in
them.” The means used were the massacres within
broader psychological warfare and displacing the
population to development stimulus zones, or
using a “strategic hamlet program” copied from
Vietnam, all in order to achieve dissociation from
their culture. Operation Plan Sofía, once again,
gives clear evidence not only that they aimed
destroy the internal enemy, but to debase and animalize it, meaning that the Mayan people, the indigenous population, were objectified and dehumanized, referred to impersonally as FIL, ENO,
the children termed derogatorily as “chocolates,”
and the women called by the names of animals,
as well as stripped of their physical and moral
integrity.
Other considerations that arise from this:
1)The foundations on which the genocide is
built—both in its institutional aspect, the racist
state, and in its repressive and ideological apparatus—remain intact.
2)The perpetrators of genocide are fully identified but have not been punished, not even
named individually as in other Truth Commissions, and they are responsible for much of
the current violence. Despite being mentioned
in the documentation of Operation Sofía, no
cases have been filed against them or brought
to trial.
3)The power elites, who govern and lead the
country, and the economic elites continue
expressing their racist and discriminatory attitudes, practices and displays all the
time. Within the “white” elite, racism has
worsened, reactivated in behavior and practices
that are even more intolerant without, any need
for cause, but particularly when they fear the
arrival of “an Indian in power.”
In the face of these situations of helplessness
and impunity
Why should we not seriously consider the possibility of a revival of racist and genocidal prejudices that can raise their heads at any time, giving
rise to further acts of genocide, such as those that
happened less than a decade ago and that are occurring elsewhere in the world, with the silence and
complicity of the entire international community? Why not be aware that we continue to have a
ticking time-bomb in our hands? I think all men
and women have in our hands the duty and
moral responsibility to think about it and to try to
prevent it.
I will conclude with the words of one witness,
who carried the bones of a member of his family
wrapped in his backpack, and told the tribunal the
following: “I will not bury him yet, I want a paper
saying they killed him (...) that he was guilty of no
crime, was innocent .... then we will rest” (testimony to the CEH). This terrible lesson cannot be
forgotten, nor is it healthy for a society that aims
to live in peace and democracy to try to erase the
past, to forget it and not to demand justice for these crimes against humanity.
13Roddy
Brett (2007). Una guerra sin batallas: del odio, la violencia y el
miedo en el Ixcan y el Ixil (1972-1983) (Guatemala City: F. & G. Editores). This book gives tangible proof of Army involvement and the close
links between racism and genocide.
14Victoria Sanfordís excellent book proves how the Guatemalan Army
planned and reported about this strategy to the U.S. State Department,
in recently declassified reports (January 1998). She states that these
declassified CIA and State Department documents contain evidence of
genocide. Victoria Sanford, Violence and Genocide in Guatemala, pp.
32 and 33.
15Emma Chirix (2004). “Subjetividad y racismo: la mirada de los otros
y sus efectos” (Subjectivity and Racism: The Gaze of Others and Its
Effects), in Los desafios de la diversidad, Instituto de Estudios Interetnicos (IDEI), No. 18, November Year 11.
16Roddy Brett, Una guerra sin batallas, pp. 228-29.
17Prudencio García (2005). El genocidio de Guatemala, a la luz de la
sociología militar (Sepha, Madrid).
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
Ríos Montt in the center,
with General Horacio Egberto Maldonado Schaad
(left) and Colonel Francisco Luís Gordillo Martínez
(right).
While the U.S. State Department claimed that the
new government “publicly
declared that it was committed to ending the violations
perpetrated under the
government of Lucas García,”
on May 27, 1982, the bishop
of Guatemala, stated:
“Never in our country’s
history have we been in such
a dire situation. These killings
are … genocide.”
Sofía Duyos *
T
he bloodiest years of armed conflict began in
1980 with the government of Lucas García and
were abating in 1983 with the departure of his successor, Ríos Montt. Both governments were the most
repressive of the conflict and wreaked unprecedented
havoc on the non-combatant civilian population. According to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), 81% of the human rights violations
recorded by the Commission took place between
1981 and 1983.
In those early years of the 80s, the alliance
between the oligarchy and the military was eroded by
a succession of electoral frauds and bloody repression,
aimed at holding on to power through the systematic
murder of the country’s intelligentsia, community
leaders, university teachers and students, people of
culture, labor leaders, even civilian candidates for the
presidency. Meanwhile, revolutionary movements
were strengthening and, for the first time, the indigenous population was joining the guerrillas en masse,
particularly the Organización del Pueblo en Armas
(ORPA; Organization of People in Arms) and the
Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP; Guerrilla
Army of the Poor).1
The Army perceived the fact that a high percentage
of the country’s population was made up of indigenous peoples as a threat. Their wretched living conditions meant that they appeared dangerously liable to
influence from the examples Castro’s followers and
the Sandinistas, and particularly a natural ally of the
guerrillas. But this fear would not have turned into
killing and torture if there had not been a pre-existent profound contempt on the part of the military toward the indigenous people, the product of a
*Coordinator of the program Human Rights in Guatemala for Fundación Madrid Paz y Solidaridad/Comisiones Obreras.
Ríos Montt’s Tyranny:
Government’s Three Branches
in the Service of Genocide
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
the Local Irregular Forces (FIL) organized to act as
armed self-defense units, the Army responded with
Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC; Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil); to oppose the Clandestine Local Committees (CCL; Comités Clandestinos Locales) that
acted on behalf of local government in areas under
insurgent control, the Army created the Inter-Institutional Coordinators; and against the Communities of
Population in Resistance (CPR; Comunidades de Población en Resistencia) they set up the Model Villages
(concentration camps).3
Ríos Montt: “I declared a state of siege so that we
could kill legally.”4
Women members of the EGP guerrilla force.
historical and structural racism. We cannot ignore
that those who came to power between 1980 and 1983
belonged to a social group that considered itself white
and of European descent, who not only advocated improvement of the race but were supporters of eugenics and the extermination of the indigenous population as way to integrate them into the nation.2
As the Army believed that it had control of the
towns and had dismantled the guerrillas on the South
Coast, it focused its efforts on the offensive against
the guerrilla fronts on the Altiplano, starting with
Chimaltenango. Troops began to fight the insurgency copying the insurgents’ own strategies: to combat
After the coup d’état of March 23, 1982, the Military
Governing Junta was installed headed by GENERAL JOSE EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT and also
including HORACIO EGBERTO MALDONADO SCHAAD and FRANCISCO LUÍS GORDILLO MARTÍNEZ. This Junta was appointed
the highest authority in the Republic of Guatemala; it set aside the Constitution and exercised
executive and legislative functions until June 8 of
1
2
3
4
M. Casaús, Genocidio: ¿La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala?
(Guatemala City: F & G, 2008), p. 55.
Ibid.
H. Rosada Granados, Soldados en el poder: proyecto militar en Guatemala
(Guatemala: Funpadem, 1999), p. 159.
Statement by Ríos Montt on Guatemalan television in 1982, cited Noam
Chomsky, Turning the Tide (2nd ed; Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 55.
operaTion SofIa
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
the same year, when Ríos Montt concentrated all
the Junta’s powers in his own hands and held them
until August 8, 1983. General Ríos made a series
of changes in all institutions “for the military …
to remain in full control of the reorganization of
government, the armed forces, and the police, as
well as the political life of civil society.”5 The civil
authorities were under military authority and,
consequently, had to obey the Military High
Command faithfully.
Laws were passed that concentrated power,
violated International Norms and Behavior, and
facilitated the regime’s crimes. The government
of General Ríos Montt put out a series of decrees
to make it easier to violate the human rights of a
population whose individual guarantees,
freedom of movement and of trade, were suspended.
On May 24, 1982, he promulgated the Decree of
Amnesty and, as we shall see shortly, in June
began on the Plan of Campaign called “Victoria 82,”
which, in its Annex F, established: “Creating a
legal framework and justification for fighting
Subversion openly” (p. 35).
The Army argued: “That to carry out vigorous
and firm action to annihilate subversion, not provided for in the Government’s excellent proposals to
grant amnesty that expired on June 30 this year, it is
necessary to increase the strength of the Armed Forces (...)” (Decree 44–82); on July 1 a State of Siege was
declared (Decree 45–82). With this it was possible,
according to the Manual of Counter-Subversive
Warfare (p. 4), to smooth out many obstacles,
especially in the moral and psychological sense,
because the feeling of danger makes repressive
measures more acceptable (to the general population)
and actions (by the Army) more intense.
The judiciary collaborated in this criminal policy through the Courts of Special Jurisdiction (Tribunales de Fuero Especial), which judged political
opponents secretly and without due process,
although the vast majority of such opponents were
“disappeared.” Ríos Montt told representatives
of the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR): “I am the one who makes the
laws. I guarantee the public a fair use of force.
Instead of bodies in the streets, I’m going to shoot
those who commit crimes.”6 Access to justice
during this period was virtually non-existent for
the population in general and for the indigenous
Mayan population in particular. Reporting crimes
was not only extremely dangerous but it was formally impossible to do, thereby guaranteeing impunity for the Army and other State forces who
participated in the genocide (MDS II. 2.375.1933).
In conclusion, the military plans of extermination were executed with great efficiency because Ríos
Montt controlled all three branches of government: He managed Executive power through the
Military Junta and directly controlled the army
because he was also Minister of Defense.
5
6
6
Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 26. Hereafter
cited as GMP in textCEH (Comisión de Esclarecemiento Histórico / Historical Clarification Commission), Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio (Guatemala: Memory of Silence),
(Guatemala City: UNOPS, 1999), Ch. II, vol. 2, p. 375, §1932. Chapter II,
divided into four volumes, deals with “Violations of Human Rights and Acts
of Violence.” Hereafter cited in the text as MDS with references in the order:
chapter, volume, page, section. Available online at: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/mds/spanish/toc.html. Abbreviated English version: shr.aaas.
org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html.
Campaign Plan Victoria 82, Guatemala 1982, Annex H, Permanent Orders, p.
46.
“Rafael Yos Muxtay, kidnapped in
1985, said: ‘If you lift your head,
they break it. If you open your
mouth, they close it. If you take a
step forward, you’re dead’.”
Jean-Marie Simon
Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny
He arrogated to himself Legislative power by
overriding Congress and dictated regulations that
facilitated repression. And he took control of Judicial power through the Courts of Special Jurisdiction,
which acted in the service of the military government,
as did all the civil authorities. This takeover of all
state institutions by Ríos Montt facilitated the crime of
genocide, which is unthinkable as an individual fact,
without the state apparatus, without the structure
of hierarchy and obedience of the Guatemalan Army,
which proceeded to act without moral limits outside
international law.
“Victoria 82”:
Ríos Montt’s Scorched Earth Plan
“The war is fought in all fields: in the military, the
political, and especially in the socio-economic.
The mind of the population is the main goal.” 7
The Army defined the Guatemalan nation’s way
of life and aspiration, and was supported by the oligarchy, as long as their economic, social and political
interests were not affected. In April 1982, the Military Government Junta issued the National Security
and Development Plan (PNSD), which established
national objectives in military, administrative, legal,
social, economic and political terms. This National
Plan identified the main areas of conflict, including
the departments of El Quiché, Huehuetenango and
Chimaltenango. Therefore, it is no coincidence that
between 1978 and 1984, 76% of the massacres committed took place in these three departments, espe-
This photograph was taken by Jean-Marie Simon during the
armed conflict. The situation today is very similar: at most of
the large mines where more than 600,000 rural inhabitants
work, wages are between 22 and 25 quetzals, far below the
minimum wage established by law, and this for a working
day of more than 10 or even 12 hours.
cially in El Quiché, where 52% of them were recorded (MDS II.3.257.3080).
The Army also defined who the nation’s enemy
was, declaring the enemy communist, criminal, subversive, insurgent.... Its main objective was to separate
and isolate the guerrillas from the civilian population.
According to the Manual of Counter-Insurgency
Warfare, the entire population becomes a target in the
war, so as to prevent the subversive movement from
developing and ultimately to destroy it. This Manual
defines the war against subversion as total (in all fields
of human activity), permanent (as long as international communism exists), universal (it must involve all
the nations of the free world) and national (it must be
rolled out across the entire national territory).
A section of the Armed Forces criticized the way
in which President Lucas was running the war. The
absence of a long-term plan prompted the Army to
set out the need for a carefully designed counter-insurgency strategy. Lucas’s line officers were called the
“tacticians” because they supported razing the villages 100%. On the other side were the “strategists”
who supported Ríos Montt and favored a formula of
destroying 30% and re-educating the surviving 70%.
By applying “recovery clean-ups,” the strategists—intelligence officers and those trained in the special forces—coldly planned “first to exterminate thousands
upon thousands of indigenous noncombatants in
waves of terror and then recoup any refugee-prisoners
left over in order to ensure the permanent destruction
of the combatants’ infrastructure.” (GMP 45).
Journalist Allan Nairn quotes the words of
Sergeant José Ángel, who participated in operations
in the Ixil area in which over 500 people died: “We tell
the people to change the road they are on, because the
road they are on is bad.… If they don’t change, there
Ríos Montt’s Tyranny
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
is nothing else to do but kill them.” When the journalist asks: “So you kill them on the spot?” the sergeant
replies: “Yes, sure. If they don’t want the good, there
is nothing more to do but bomb their houses.”8
General RÍOS MONTT, as Head of State and
Minister of Defense, entrusted design of military
counter-insurgency plan to three officers of the “strategist” group, who had experience in military strategy: RODOLFO LOBOS ZAMORA, CÉSAR
AUGUSTO CÁCERES ROJAS and HÉCTOR
ALEJANDRO GRAMAJO MORALES. These
three colonels, from the Ministry of Defense, Army
General Staff and the Center for Military Studies respectively, along with some civilian professionals and
administrators, reformulated Lucas’s military strategy and prepared a long-term NATIONAL PLAN
FOR SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT (GMP
22–23). General GRAMAJO in an interview with anthropologist Jennifer Schirmer stated: “One of the first
things we did was to draw up a document for the campaign with annexes and appendices. It was a complete job,
with planning down to the last detail” (GMP 44).
The Military High Command designed a strategy aimed at wiping out the enemy, divided into three
stages: During the first stage, the Army would apply
selective repression and obtain the information necessary to select those populations to be labeled “red
zones.” As the Manual of Counter-Insurgency
Warfare itself says, in the red areas the wreaking of
havoc was inevitable (p. 5). The Army selected these
to reduce to ashes.
In the second stage, in selected areas, called
“killing zones” (matazonas) by GRAMAJO, no sign
of life would be left: they would raze entire villages,
burn the land, kill everybody without distinction and
hunt down the survivors. The campaign plans Victoria 82 and Firmeza 83 correspond to this phase. The
department of El Quiché was in a red zone, as were
all the Ixil villages where, from July, the Army would
implement its plan of annihilation, Operation Sofía.
In the last stage, from 1984 on, repression went
hand in hand with forms of reorganization and control directed at the surviving population and at preventing old ways of life reemerging, if these endangered the exclusive system that suited the oligarchy.
Indigenous communities were dismantled by means
of military control to get rid of the “indigenous” element—perpetuating racism—and thereby reintegrating these survivors into what the Army called “normal life.” The plans labeled “Institutional Reunion
84,” “National Stability 85” and “Advance 86” would
implement this strategy.
Officers of the Army General Staff, seated at
their office desks, designed “scorched earth” operations, perfectly aware that, more than the land, it
was the people that was being razed.9 In June the
plan of widespread repression called Victoria 82 was
already completed, systematizing in black and white
all the operations that were already underway in the
field (MDS II.3.301.3165).
The Victoria 82 plan, coordinated by General HÉCTOR MARIO LÓPEZ FUENTES and
overseen by General HÉCTOR ALEJANDRO
GRAMAJO as inspector general and Vice Chief of
8
9
Allan Nairn, “The Guns of Guatemala: The merciless mission of Ríos Montt’s
army,” New Republic, April 11, 1983, pp. 17–22, at p. 20. A journalist specializing in Central American affairs, Nairn spent April to September 1982
accompanying the Guatemalan Army.
Prudencio García, El Genecidio de Guatemala a la luz de la Sociología Militar
(Madrid: Sepha, 2005), p. 377.
Military occupation of Finca La Perla, Ixcán, Quiché.
The Meeting
The street narrows on me
with the joy I have,
without having imagined it,
my darling, I meet you.
Coming and going, struggling
for the things most dear
even if it wore out our hands
it leaves our life open.
Why keep rolling
Like the stone to the void,
I learned that walking
I can conquer what’s mine.
Now, my darling,
with this huge joy
I am not separating from you
although the street is narrow.
Víctor Jara
(Chilean musician and singer-songwriter)
General Staff, was made a priority for the State and all
its resources were put at the service of the war: every
government agency and institution was involved in
its implementation, including all Ministries, services
and education centers, as well as all international or
government aid bodies. The budget of the Ministry
of Defense was increased and all civil authorities were
placed under military authority.
Every unit of the security forces was given a specific mission and the obligation to coordinate constantly in order to increase efficiency. Every command had
to obtain maximum collaboration from and control
of the National Police and Treasury Police. The command structure was strengthened, not only because
communication between each Area of Operations and
the Army General Staff had to be continuous, but also
because all the details not covered by the plan needed
to be checked in advance with the General Staff (Vic-
toria 82 Plan, Instruction AA p. 16). Objectives were
achieved through strict military discipline and hierarchy of ranks: “Gramajo and the General Staff were
given reports every hour and every day concerning the
progress of the offensives” (GMP 46).
The body of soldiers grew from 27,000 to about
36,000—including the mobilization of 2,000 reservists
(GMP 47)—and the most heavily contested areas were
filled with Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PACs). Out
of the total number of the violations reported to the
CEH, PAC patrolmen took part in 18%, of which
85% were carried out by PACs in conjunction with
the Army or other government forces, and in 15% of
cases the PACs acted alone (MDS II.3.227.3179).
For the better part of 36 years, the Army kept
itself supplied with soldiers through forced
recruitment. 20% of young men from rural areas
were forced to take part in two years of military service: “Back then they grabbed people to serve. Anyone
who didn’t serve was a guerrilla, ‘We’ll kill you,’ they
said. We said then it’s better for us to go.”10
The Directorate of Intelligence (D-2, under Chief
RODRÍGUEZ SÁNCHEZ) and the Directorate of
Civil Affairs (D-5, directed by CONTRERAS BEJARANO) played a central role in the Victoria 82 plan,
with responsibility for controlling the population left
alive. The order was to destroy the communities and
then use the “recoverable” survivors as slave labor for
reconstruction according to military ideology.
The scientific application of anti-communist strategy in the Victoria 82 plan meant that in 1982, when
it started to be implemented, there was such an
explosion of violence that 48% of all the cases of the
Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) are
referred to this year (MDS II.2.320.1739). In 18
months, more than 75,000 people died, concentrated
between April and November 1982 (GMP 44). The
State Security Forces committed 93% of all human
rights violations and acts of violence at this stage and
also of the conflict’s total (MDS II.2.324.1754).11
10
ODHAG (Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala): Report of
the Inter-Diocesan Project Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI), (Guatemala
Nunca Más, Guatemala City, 1998), Case 9524: Barillas, Sololá, Quiché, Volume II, pg. 160.
11 These forces include the national army, the PACs, military commissioners,
other state security forces and death squads. In 3% of the violations the CEH
has confirmed the responsibility of the guerrillas and in 4% of other and/or
unidentified groups.
10
operaTion SofIa
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
In 1982 Civil Self-Defense Patrols
(PACs) were organized in the area,
which caused conflict within the
local population: “… since the
patrolmen were all Mayan, it created
a division: the patrolmen and those
who didn’t want to be … They used
a slogan of the Army’s—whoever
doesn’t support us is the enemy
and should therefore die.”
execution of operations directly targeted against
communities of unarmed civilians, identified as siding with the guerrillas, with the objective of destroying them in whole or in part, without regard
to the victims’ age, sex or condition.”13
Civil patrolmen
burning the
guerrilla flag in
Nebaj, El Quiché.
THE ENEMY
MISSION: Extermination
Inspired by the well-known Maoist dictum that “the
guerrilla, supported by the people, lives within it like a
fish in water,” the State pursued a strategy of “taking
the fish’s water away,” in other words, depriving the
population of any the resources that might support
the guerrillas, thus stopping them from sustaining
themselves with popular support. The mission of the
plan, in the words of Ríos Montt, was “to surgically
excise evil from Guatemala” and “dry up the human
sea in which the guerrilla fish swim” (GMP 45).
Furthermore, according to their own Counter-Insurgency Manual: “destroying these armed forces will
not then be an objective in itself but will be a means
to regain control of the population. This destruction
is difficult only because of the battle. It is necessary to
drown them and reduce them to their status as guerrillas, occupying by force the areas or places from which they can obtain their human and material resources” (Ed. 1983, p. 69).
On its second page, the Victoria 82 plan says:
“THE MISSION: The commands involved will
conduct SECURITY OPERATIONS, DEVELOPMENT, COUNTER-SUBVERSION AND
IDEOLOGICAL WARFARE in their respective
Areas of Responsibility from ‘H’ Hour of ‘D’ Day,
until further notice, with the object of locating, capturing or destroying groups of subversive elements,
to ensure the peace and security of the Nation.” As
for the captured, “after carrying out tactical interrogation on them,” torture, they should be transferred
to a detention center and immediately reported to Intelligence, the G-2 (p. 18).
To ensure that all personnel involved in the mission knew what their orders and tactics were, each
Unit Commander, before starting operations, had to
read to the men in the unit the standing orders in Annex H of the Plan and provide those who could read
with a document containing the key points. According to Annex H, the mission is to annihilate and the
tactics are to deceive, to find, to attack and to annihilate them. In more than half of the massacres commit12
13
54% of the massacres are accompanied by extreme cruelty and 97% of these
cases involved the Army of Guatemala
CEH, Memoria del Silencio, Annex I, vol. 1, Illustrative Case No. 60, p. 70.
ted during the conflict extreme cruelty was used, and
in 97% of these cases the Army was involved (MDS
II.3.258.3082),12 which, as part of its policy of devastation, also systematically attacked cultural, spiritual
and religious elements of deep significance to the Mayan people (MDS II.3.272.3104).
Everything was planned down to the last detail.
To coordinate the forces involved in the Plan, the
units were ordered to be in constant motion and, once
detected, the enemy was to be pursued until capture
or elimination; meanwhile, units were to report in
their movements so that they could be provided with
immediate logistic support if necessary and in order
not to lose contact (p. 14). This order in the Victoria 82 Plan meant that the Army, after the massacres,
not only wiped out the population and devastated the
community, but also tried to eliminate people who
had fled the area. The soldiers continued “cleansing”
the area, capturing and executing all those who fled,
making it clear that the operation was not limited
to dispersing the population, but sought to destroy
it totally (MDS II.3.293.3146). The CEH has even
recorded five cases of massacres perpetrated by the
Army of Guatemala inside Mexican territory (MDS
II.3.297.3150).
The plan to exterminate the civilian population is laid out in irrefutable fashion in Victoria
82, when it states that that the mission of psychological operations is to “reduce the subversive
threat to a nuisance and eventually eradicate it”
(p. 31) and the purpose of psychological operations for the troops is to convince them of the
necessity of the extermination of the enemy (p.
39). The mission was relentless: “So we have to
finish them, we have to end them, men, women,
children, until there is nothing any more, no one
here from this group, which is getting help from
Cuba” (Case 1640, Sechaj, Los Pinares, Alta Verapaz, 1982. Volume II, p. 4, REMHI).
The CEH believes that the case of the massacre of the community in CHEL, CHAJUL, is an
example of how the Army eradicated subversives as
its main goal: “It’s an illustrative case of the application of the Victoria 82 plan in the Ixil area, where
the Army used its task forces (Special Forces) in the
The enemy is within Guatemala, is “the internal
enemy” of the United States’ anti-communist National Security Doctrine. This is how the CEH’s
truth commission outlined it: “The broad concept
of internal enemy put forward by the government
was relaunched with particular violence and intensity in the eighties, and included not only those
who were actively trying to change the established order, but everyone who could potentially
come to support this struggle” (§1947). Page 17 of
the Victoria 82 plan mentions the groups targeted
by the Army’s operations, which include: Living
Revolutionary Organizations (Organizaciones
Revolucionarias Vivas: ORV), Mass Revolutionary Organizations (Organizaciones Revolucionarias de Masa: ORM)—such as the church, unions,
associations, cooperatives—local power, refugee
sympathizers, and subversive criminal gangs.
For the Army, according to its Manual, nobody
is indifferent in the fight against subversion:
“There will be a active favorable minority in the
fight against subversion, a neutral majority and an
opposing minority. The technique consists in relying on the favorable minority to draw the neutral
majority to itself and to neutralize or eliminate the
opposing minority” (p. 4). If the population is not
neutral and therefore is not recoverable, military
operations will be expanded and more havoc inflicted. In addition, for the Army, “everyone who
flees is an enemy, as if they were not, they wouldn’t
flee.” This principle succeeded in blurring any distinctions between guerrilla fighters and civilians.
One woman’s comments illustrate how the civilian
population was treated, even young children: “A
boy of six months, how is he going to have done
crime? Are they also going to say that he’s a guerrilla or will be when he grows up ... ?”
The Army was not prepared to deal with the
cause that some members of the Catholic Church had
managed to communicate from the perspective of liberation theology, denouncing the workers’ subhuman
conditions and army violence, and mobilizing sections
of society that increasingly identified with the revolutionary options and, therefore, with the “enemy.”
More than 40 priests were killed during the conflict.
11
Ríos Montt’s Tyranny
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
“The Army must treat civilians as
if they were combatants. Therefore
it concentrates the ‘recoverable’
population whose ‘life has been
spared’ by its devastation into
refugee camps.”
Monsignor Juan José Gerardi Conedera, bishop of
Guatemala and director of the Archdiocese’s Office
of Human Rights (ODHAG), was brutally assassinated by members of the Army on April 26, 1998, two
days after publicly presenting the Report on the Recovery of Historical Memory in Guatemala (REMHI).
Some of the murderers have been convicted, though
not those who masterminded the crime.
“The Command of the Secret Anti-Communist
Army [ESA] is presenting by means of this bulletin
an ‘ultimatum’ to the following trade unionists,
professionals, workers and students: ... [it] warns
them all that it has already located them and knows
perfectly well where to find these nefarious communist
leaders who are already condemned to DEATH, which
will therefore be carried out without mercy...”
Bulletin No. 6, January 3, 1979, ESA14
Many union leaders were eliminated as a result
of openly anti-union government policy. The State Security Forces systematically did away with the general secretaries and Executive Committee members of
the union at Coca Cola, one of the protagonists of the
union movement between 1970 and 1980. At the same
time, in 1983 all the sugar unions on the South Coast
were “decapitated,” for example with “disappearance”
of the union leaders and advisers at Ingenio Pantaleón.
Both cases illustrate the links that the employers had
Guatemalan soldier in the New Life refugee camp, near
Nebaj, Quiché.
with the security forces, especially the Mobile Military
Police, and its collaboration with the government policy of dismantling the union movement.15
Targeting Women
The Manual of Counter-Insurgency Warfare states:
“The soldier usually has a great dislike for policing
operations and for repressive measures against women,
children and the sick in the civilian population, unless
he is extremely well indoctrinated in the need for these
operations.”16 Only with training—which dehumanized the soldiers and convinced them that the enemy to
vanquish was a being without rights, less human—is
it possible to comprehend the brutal deeds and tortures which the Army inflicted on women, boys, girls,
helpless people, often in front of their families. They
were trained for terror and trained to justify it.
The testimonies collected make it clear that the
women who were used to accustom the soldiers to the
practice of rape were prostitutes: “The Army brought
whores to their soldiers: first went the lieutenant and
then all the soldiers over a week, some visiting up to
ten times. They changed them [the women] every
three months” (MDS II.2.27.2397). Appendix B of
Victoria 82, on psychological operations for the troops, designated recreation areas for the soldier to keep
his fighting spirit, with amenities including “contact
with the female sex.” The ultimate goal of the operations was “to convince the troops of the need to exterminate the enemy” (p. 39). This is how the Army
conducted training in the practice of rape as a weapon
of war against women, in general, and against their
people, the Mayans, in particular. 88.7% of rape victims
identified in the CEH’s records (with information on
ethnic group) were Mayan (MDS II.2.23.2390). One
third were under-age girls (MDS II.2.23.2391).
The Mayans as Enemy of State
14
CEH, Memoria del Silencio, Annex I, vol. 1, Illustrative Case No. 67, p. 111.
15 CEH, Memoria del Silencio, Annex I, vol. 1, Illustrative Case No. 109, p. 319.
16 Manual of Counter-Insurgency Warfare, Appendix A, p. 10.
17 CEH, Memoria del Silencio, ch. 4, p. 29, §31.
As described in Victoria 82’s Annex on psychological operations, “The great masses of the nation’s Indians from the Altiplano have found that the pro-
clamations of subversion resonate with them, with
the banners about the scarcity of land, immense
poverty, and because they have received long years
of awareness raising, and see the army as an invading enemy....” (p. 29).
The 1972 Manual of Military Intelligence G-2
puts it clearly: “The enemy has the same sociological
traits as the people from our Altiplano.” The Victoria 82 plan itself, in several sections, orders putting
“emphasis on controlling the transient workers who
move from the Altiplano to the South Coast to do
seasonal work” (p. 13). This order from the Victoria
82 plan would result in the extermination carried out
in the Ixil region in Operation Sofía.
The Victoria 82 plan explicitly labels the enemy as an ethnic group and considers it a special
focus of annihilation operations. Thus, when it
chooses the target for such operations the list is
exhaustive: “The population in general and different ethnic groups in particular: Kakchiquel, Kekchí, Quiché, Ixil, Mam 1, Mam 2, Tzutujil, Rabinal Achi, Pocomchí , Aguateco, Jaclateco, Chuj,
Kanjobal” (Victoria 82, p. 35).
According to the CEH, the identification of Mayan communities with the insurgency was intentionally exaggerated by the government, which, relying
on traditional racist prejudices, used this identification to eliminate possibilities that the population
would help the insurgents or join their ranks, either
at that stage or at a future time. The CEH concludes
that “the massacres, scorched-earth operations, kidnapping, and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual leaders, represented not only an attempt to destroy the guerrillas’ social bases, but also
and above all to de-structure the cultural values
that ensured communities’ cohesion and collective
action.”18
Moreover, the undeniable reality of racism as
a doctrine of superiority expressed permanently
by the State is a fundamental factor in explaining
why the Army put the plan of Victoria 82 into
action with such particular cruelty against hundreds of Mayan communities in the West and
Northwest of the country. Between 1981 and
1983, more than half of the massacres and scorched earth operations were concentrated against
indigenous communities (MDS §33). Racism is
also expressed by the very fact that 83.3% of victims of human rights violations and acts of violence recorded by the CEH were of Mayan ethnicity (MDS §1745),19 and in the fact that there
was an especial concentration of deaths in this
population group (MDS §3081). Only villages
where ladinos predominated escaped the Army’s
systematic slaughter.20
Nothing was left to chance. The razing of hundreds of indigenous communities was precisely calculated by the Army High Command and was executed faithfully, even with extreme zeal, through each
link in the chain and it still remains unpunished. The
orders to eradicate were clear and no one can deny
that they were carried out savagely, leaving all kinds
of scars in their aftermath. This is the legacy of the
death of General Efraín Ríos Montt and his Army:
genocide.
18
CCEH, Memoria del Silencio, ch. 4, p. 29, §32.
These ratios are calculated according the 97% of the victims where the CEH
was able to determine membership of an ethnic group (MDS II.2.32.1745).
20 D. Stoll, “Between two armies in the Ixil towns of Guatemala,” 1993, quoted in
Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, p. 56.
19
Photo/text by photo: C Jean-Marie Simon/2010. Guatemala, Eterna primavera-Eterna tiranía.
12
During 1982 and 1983, the
local Army stationed in
Chupol, Chichicastenango,
brought a hooded man
to point out the guerrillas’
collaborators. It is not known
how many of the men indicated had actually collaborated with the guerrillas, as the
Army had a quota to fill: once
pointed out the result was
elimination.
Operation Sofía:
Army special forces on a mission
of extermination
Collective work, coordinated
by Sofía Duyos *
A
fter RÍOS MONTT came to power in March
1982, the Army carried out massacres that were
even more serious and widespread than any
committed before.1 It was in such a context that Operation Sofía was put into action: a scorched earth operation
executed by more than 500 paratroopers and the “Kaibil” special operations forces.2 Between July 15 and August 19, 1982, it aimed savagely to exterminate the Mayan people living in the municipality of Nebaj, Quiché,
under the pretext that they might join the guerrillas.
As clear from the 1982 military appraisal
entitled “Operation Ixil,” which deals with the area
where Operation Sofia was implemented and where
the Ixil people lived, since 1977 this had been a zone
of special operations by order of the Army’s highest
level: “In view of the fact that the Ixil region came to
be an area of subversive conflict, high command
ordered the establishment of an area of operations
with jurisdiction in the municipalities of Chajul,
Cotzal and Nebaj ... The military action was carried
out successfully, but the problem still exists even four
years later, and, as is natural with this type of action,
resentment is spreading in the local population at an
alarming rate without any peaceful solution
* Coordinator of the Guatemala Program at Fundación Madrid Paz y Solidaridad.
apparent.”3 The policy of destruction of the Ixil area
would last until December 1987.
As a chronicle of destruction announced in
February 1982, the United States, through the CIA,
knew about the plan to devastate the entire Ixil Triangle and knew that the Guatemalan Army took the
view that “because most Indians in the area support
the guerrillas, it will probably be necessary to destroy a
number of villages.”4 On July 30, the leader of one of
the patrols in Operation Sofía reported that the local
people was convinced that the guerrillas’ struggle was
good and stated: “We are fighting a plague that we
should have started on long ago.” (OS 173).5
The Army not only thought that a large part of
the guerrilla forces was located in the region, but also
that the Ixil people were the enemy. This identification
resulted in a large number of massacres that swept the
Ixil area.6 A secret CIA cable of the time reported it
Prudencio García (2005). El genocidio de Guatemala a la luz de la Sociología Militar (Madrid, Sepha), p. 386.
2
Most of the documents quoted here are colleted in Operation Sofia:
Documenting Genocide in Guatemala, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 297 (December 2, 2009). Hereafter OS in the
text. Available online at: www.madridpazysolidaridad.org. Both “Operation Sofía” and “Operation Plan Sofía” are used to refer to this plan
of operations, its implementation and documentation.
3
“Operación IXIL,” article published in Revista Militar (September-December
1982) on Civilian Issues in the Ixil area, p. 28.
4
National Security Archive, The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files
Reveal, vol. 2, Document 19, top secret CIA report, 5 February 1982,
page 2. Available online at: http.//www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB32/vol2.html. Hereafter USF in the text.
1
as follows: “In mid-February 1982 the Guatemalan
army reinforced its existing force in the central El Quiche department and launched a sweep operation into
the Ixil triangle. The commanding officers of the units
involved have been instructed to destroy all towns
and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla
Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of
resistance” (USF doc. 20, p.1).
The scorched earth operations worsened after
March 1982 in the Ixil area (the Ilom and Chel massacres). In January, many villages had disappeared
and most of the region’s social infrastructure, so that
the mountaintops had become sites of resistance for
the communities. The people had fled the terror and
were surviving outside their villages, organizing their
resistance in large groups of more than 1,000 families. When Operation Sofía started in July, the Army
started to persecute a population made up of different
Mayan peoples to the point of destruction. And there
was an express order to “kill all the Indians”:
Patrol Report No. 007 of the 4th patrol, signed by Patrol Leader, Infantry
Lt. Abner Isaac Monterroso Mérida, Santa María Nebaj, July 30, 1982.
CEH (Historical Clarification Commission), Guatemala: Memoria del
Silencio (Guatemala: Memory of Silence), (Guatemala City: UNOPS,
1999), Ch. 2, vol. III, p. 310, §3186. Chapter 2, divided into four volumes, deals with “Violations of Human Rights and Acts of Violence.”
Available online at: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/mds/spanish/
toc.html, though the section numbers are not continuous as in the
printed version, most of which is also available on the web. Abbreviated
English version: shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html.
Hereafter MDS in text.
5
6
13
OPERATION SOFIA
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
“Ríos Montt: ‘The aim is to dry up
the human sea in which the guerrilla
fish swim.’”
“In 1981 and 1982 we heard from Army specialists, natives of Sacapulas and other Quiché municipalities, who had access to the command of the military
base No. 20 in Santa Cruz del Quiché (6th Military
Zone Marshal Gregorio Solares), about the order that
the first and second in command had given to kill all
the Indians. Some pilots and people responsible for the
commanders’ security, took their families out of Quiché for safekeeping, since the order was real” (MDS
2.III.314.3198).
The conclusions of the Patrol Report No. 001
of the First Battalion of the Paratroop Regiment on
Operation Sofia already mention that the guerrillas
had left the area and it conveys how for some patrols
the operation had been “a success because it eliminated support and supply bases.” In addition, these patrol reports showered congratulations on those who
carried out the orders to “destroy the enemy with zeal
and dedication” (OS 192)7 and who showed “excessive aggressiveness and determination in combat” (OS
160).8 Their combatants were the Mayan population.
The order to kill all the Indians meant that
throughout the conflict, fatalities were concentrated
in the Mayan population, with the K’iche’ affected
most, suffering 25% of the arbitrary executions in
massacres, followed by the Kaqchikel (14%), the Ixil
(13%), the Q’eqchi’e (11%), the Achi (8%), the Mam
(6%) and Chuj (5%) (MDS 2.III.258.3081 and graph
15). These figures are especially revealing with regard
to Ixil victims, as the percentage of victims relative to
the total is much higher than the percentage of the population of this group in relation to the national
population (2%) (MDS 2.III.186, graph 12).9
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the coordinator of the Victoria 82 Plan was the Chief of General Staff, General Hector Mario López
Fuentes, who gave the order for each Command
involved to deliver their planning documents within a
given period (deadline June 21) through its S-3 operations officer.
At the same time, for the Ixil area, there was secret planning at top level for Operation Sofía. López Fuentes gave the order to draft it directly to
Colonel Francisco Ángel Castellanos
Góngora as Commander of the Operation.
WHO WAS INVOLVED IN OPERATION SOFÍA?
The Army High Command and Elite Special Forces
The Chief of General Staff, Héctor Mario López Fuentes, had direct and complete control of
the operation, given the importance that it held for
Army High Command. The Operation Commander
kept him directly informed of the beginning and end
of each phase, as well as many other details.10 Castellanos Góngora also received communications from Deputy Defence Minister Mejía Víctores (OS 22).
On July 14, 1982, as Castellanos Góngora Colonel of Infantry and Commander of the
Military Base of the Paratroop Regiment “General
Felipe Cruz” (BMTPGFC), sent General López
Fuentes Copy No. 1 of the 20 copies of Operation Plan Sofía, prepared by his command section in
Soldier in the belltower at Nebaj, 1982.
“So many centuries against a single minute
So many knives to cut a flower
So much bullet to tatter a flag
So much shoe to crush a dewdrop
So much fire to burn a lily
So many hunters to hunt one deer
So much coward against one valiant
So much soldier to shoot a child”.
Luis
de
Lion
(Guatemalan Poet)
Report by Scotland 2 Patrol. Palomo recommends that congratulations
should be offered to Corporal Miguel Ángel Quevedo, Paratrooper 1st
class Cesar Augusto López y López and Paratrooper 2nd class Carlos
Armando Galicia Torres for their work and performance “in the destruction of the ENO, where their zeal and dedication has been noted”.
8
Patrol Report No. 001. It singles out as noteworthy the actions of Eliseo Chinique Vásquez who “showed excessive aggressiveness and determination in combat.”
9
7% of massacre victims were ladinos (Guatemalans of European ancestry).
10
López Fuentes indicated the weaponry that needed to be allocated to
the operation (communication 07/14/82), and also ordered the Commander of Air Force to place a helicopter at the disposal of the operation (07/16/82). Castellanos asked López to authorize the helicopterís
fuel (07/20/82), and also, after informing him of the arms allocation,
asks López directly for replacement (08/26/82).
11
General Order 19, p. 35, No. 173. (Ríos Montt’s General Orders have
not been released publicly but have been cited as evidence in trials.)
7
compliance with the order given by the Army’s Chief
of General Staff. Signed personally and with the official
seal of the Command of Puerto San José, it states: “I
have the honor to address you in order to send, enclosed
with this letter, Copy No. 1 of 20 copies of the PLAN
for OPERATION SOFÍA, prepared by this command
in accordance with the order of the Chief of General
Staff of the Army. I remain, Sir, your respectful servant.
Puerto de San José, July 14, 1982” (OS 76).
Paratroopers and Kaibiles, the special forces of
the Guatemalan Army, executed Operation Plan Sofía. Castellanos Góngora and at least two
of the company commanders were Kaibiles, so that
High Command was assured that the inhuman orders
directed against men, women and children would be
carried out from the top.
When detailing the Execution, the plan indicated
that the operation would be conducted in two phases.
The first would be carried out with two series of excursions from the Military Zone “Felipe Cruz,” one
to Military Zone “Marshal Gregorio Solares” in Huehuetenango and the other administrative to Nebaj.
The second phase would be by airlift to Palob and Parramos to begin offensive operations.
Copy No. 2 was sent to the Wing Commander
DEMA P.A. Fernando Alfonso Castillo Ramírez, Commander of the Local Force
(FAG).11 Its mission was to provide fire support.
14
OPERATION SOFIA
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
According to Victory 82, “The Air Force
provided air cover for the duration of the execution
of Mobilization with priority to affected areas.”12
The air base personnel, who received training and
equipment from the United States, performed support
duties for the troops in the field and bombing raids.13
Its mission in Operation Plan Sofia is given as: “It will
support the Operation as requested in coordination
with the C.O.C. of the Army General Staff” (OS 3).
Copy No. 3 was sent to the Commander of the
Military Brigade “General Manuel Lisandro Barillas,” Quetzaltenango, Infantry Colonel Jorge
Mario Morales Díaz.14 The Brigade’s mission according to the plan of Operation Sofía was: “It
will support the Operation as requested, in coordination with the First Battalion the Parachute Regiment
of the BMTPGFC” (OS 3).
Copy No. 4 was received by Infantry Colonel DEM. Héctor Leonidas Hernández Catalán, Commander of Military Zone
“Marshal Gregorio Solares,” Huehuetenango.15 His
command’s mission in Operation Sofia was the same
as that of the Brigade at Quetzaltenango: “It will
support the Operation as requested, in coordination
with the First Battalion the Parachute Regiment of the
BMTPGFC” (OS 3). Operation Sofía was implemented in the Huehuetenango Military Zone Area, which
also includes El Quiché.
Copy No. 5 was sent to Infantry Colonel
Byron Disrael Lima Estrada as Commander of the Task Force “Gumarkaj.” On August 1
he was replaced by the Commander of Infantry Roberto Enrique Mata Gálvez.16 Byron
Lima was also the Deputy Commander of the Huehuetenango Military Zone.17
The mission of the four companies of the Task
Force was: “It will continue counter-insurgency
operations, population control and psychological
operations in its jurisdiction and support the operation in coordination with and at the request of the
Commander of Operation Sofía.” Coordinating with
three companies of Operation Sofía, the Gumarcaj
Task Force had the role of giving further impetus to
the operations and destroying subversive elements
in the area (OS 3).
Task Forces are specialized forces, where different Army corps are brought together, and they are
characterized by their flexibility. They were tasked
with controlling a given territory and population,
but in addition to this shared mission, they might
have other more specific missions. The General Staff
made decisions and planned the operations involving
the Task Force and the various military zones (MDS
2.III.306.3176). The Commander of the Task Force
kept the Chief of the General Staff informed directly
and constantly during the course of operations.
Gumarcaj Operations Area—one of the 10 areas
that were created in order to carry out the military
plans—comprised the municipalities of Chajul, Ne-
Campaign Plan Victoria 82, p. 23.
Archdiocese of Guatemala, Interdiocesan Project Report on Recovery of
Historical Memory (REMHI), vol. II, ch. IV, p. 106. Hereafter REMHI in text.
14
Appointed March 24, 1982, by General Order 7, until June 25, 1982
(General Order 19, p. 36), when he was replaced by Infantry Colonel
Rodolfo Lobos Zamora (General Order 20, p. 6)
15
General Order 10, No. 211, April 16, 1982.
16
General Order 19, No. 89, p. 36.
17
General Order 10, No. 212, April 16, 1982.
18
R. Brett (2004). “Encuentro en Guatemala sobre Racismo y Genocidio”
in Genocidio, la máxima expresión del racismo (Conferencia magistral,
Guatemala, 2004), p. 22.
19
General Order 39, 1981.
12
13
Refugee camp, Ixil.
“Destroying these [guerrilla] forces will not, then, be an end in itself but a means to regain control
of the population.”
Army Manual.
baj, Cotzal Uspantán, Cunén, Sacapulas, San Andrés
Sajcabajá, St. Bartolomé Jocotenango, San Pedro Jocopilas, Canillá , San Antonio Ilotenango, Santa Cruz
del Quiché, Chiché and Chinique, the central region
of El Quiché. Between June 1981 and December 1982,
24.82% of the total number of cases for the country
were recorded here, and 98.84% of the victims were
Mayan (MDS §3198).
Most of the Task Force were ladinos from the East.
This has been interpreted as an attempt to ensure that
the troops would follow orders in a brutal manner, as
the High Command had no confidence that Indian
soldiers would have been able to carry out such acts of
genocide successfully against their own ethnic group.18
Copy No. 6 went to Infantry Colonel Carlos
Dorantes Marroquín as Deputy Commander of the Felipe Cruz Military Base.19 From 22
July, the Colonel had been Acting Commander of
Operation Sofía. (OS 56 & 86). Later on, Infantry
Colonel Alfredo García Gómez was
appointed new commander of the base (OS 73, 74
&91),20 taking over with a just few days of the operation left. None of these changes affected the execution
of High Command’s orders, because the commanders
were effectively interchangeable cogs. This copy of the
Operation Plan, comprising a total of 359 documents,
is the one that became available to civil society.
Copies No. 7, 8, 9 and 10 were sent to the
Officers of the S1 (responsible for all matters
relating to personnel under military control), the
S2 (which is responsible for intelligence activities
and counterintelligence),21 the S3 (in charge of
organization, training and operations) and the S4
(responsible for supply, evacuation, medical care,
transportation and services).
Copy No. 11 was sent to the Commander of the
First Paratroop Company, the “Quetzals,” Raúl
Arturo Illescas García,22 who knew his
orders as part of the shared Operation Plan, gave orders to his subordinates to carry them out and elicited
the information necessary to communicate that they
had been fulfilled to his superiors. The Company consisted of 4 patrols, Cameroon 1, Cameroon 2, Cameroon 3 and Cameroon 4. It had 5 junior officers, 125
paratroopers and 35 civilians: a total of 165 people.
Copy No. 12, went to the Commander of the Second Company, the “Pentagons,” Marco Tulio
Valdez Pineda.23 It consisted of 5 patrols: Scotland 1, Scotland 2, Scotland 3, Scotland 4 and Scotland
5. It had 5 junior officers, 145 paratroopers, 5 guides:
a total of 155 people.
On August 15, 1982, Cavalry Major José Esteban Arango Barrios (S-3) and Infantry
Major Otto Fernando Pérez Molina24
reported that Scotland 3 found in contact with the
enemy in the vicinity of Salquil and Xepiun, where
they repelled an ambush and went in pursuit, backing
up Scotland 2’s operation. They state that there were
4 Local Irregular Forces (FIL) dead, 18 adults and 12
children captured. The confrontation “with the enemy” was July 22, 1982, and the report details the names of the 32 paratroopers involved (OS 316).
After this massacre, the Operation Commander
communicated to the Gumarcaj Task Force Commander: “I inform you that today at 1100 hours there
were captured in the vicinity of SALQUIL (8712)
18 adult persons, 12 children, request command for
support effect control, supplies and reintegration into
their normal life.”25 The message hides the execution
of the 4 people labeled FIL. At other times, the patrols
reported the elimination of FIL who were women
and children. The Operation Plan itself labels them
Appointed Commander of BMTPGFC on August 16, 1982, by General
Order No. 20 (p. 6).
21
The role of military intelligence is described in REMHI, vol. 2, pp. 65-69
and 88-94.
22
His signature and command appear on OS 323.
23
His signature and command appear on OS 276.
24
For references to Arango, see OS 6, 210, 316, 320, 333; to Pérez, see
211, 316, 320, 341. Pérez is the “Tito Arías” referred to in Allan Nairnís
“The Guns of Guatemala” (New Republic, April 11, 1983), as the “commander of the Nebaj base” (p. 17).
25
Enciphered message S3-005, July 22, 1982 (OS 28).
20
15
OPERATION SOFIA
enemies by indicating that on the Border Front the
guerrillas “are accompanied by approximately 70 FIL
among which the presence of women and children has
been detected” (OS 9).
Copy No. 13 was sent to the Commander of the
Third Parachute Company, the “Arrows,” Mario
Roberto Grajeda Toledo.26 It consisted of 5
patrols: France 1, France 2, France 3, France 4 and France
5. It had a total of 149 personnel: 5 junior officers, 141
parachutists and 3 civilian guides. According to page 1
of the Operation Plan, the three companies divided into
four platoons each as their organization for combat.
MISSION: extermination
Operation Plan Sofía designated who, how and when
the indigenous communities living in the Nebaj
municipality were to be attacked and destroyed. The
military detachments at La Perla, Cotzal and Chajul
supported the operation in coordination with and
under the command of the Operation Commander.
The mission of Operation Sofía was the extermination of the population. The Plan itself uses the word
“exterminate” in the Operation’s core mission: “THE
MISSION: The First Battalion of the Parachute Troops ... on D-2 will initiate counterinsurgency offensive operations and psychological operations and in the
area of Gumarcaj Operations, in coordination with
the Task Force mentioned, to give greater momentum to said operations and exterminate the subversive elements in the area” (OS 3).
The CIA reported: “The well-documented belief
by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is
pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army
can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and
non-combatants alike” (USF doc 20, p. 3).
A witness (a senior officer in the Guatemalan
Army) told the CEH: “Once I received an order personally from the Chief of Defense General Staff to
wipe out an entire population and I told the major who
was in charge of the region at that time, look, they’ve
given me the order to disappear San Juan Cotzal”
(MDS §3243).
Operation Ixil had been formulated earlier (1981)
as a military study and describes the danger of the Ixil
population because of its historical and ethnic characteristics, and highlights the need for an “intense, deep
and well-studied psychological campaign to rescue
the Ixil mind-set so that they feel part of the Guatemalan nation.”27 The Army’s idenfication of the indigenous people as the internal enemy had a strong
impact on the communities’ cultural practices, since,
as refugees and displaced people, many decided not to
wear their costume or speak their language for fear of
being identified by the Army and attacked for being
Indians. Operation Plan Sofía reiterated the objective
of psychological operations as being to reintegrate the
survivors into “normal life.”
The 3rd Company Commander sent the recommendation: “... the indigenous people who have fled
from the villages to the mountains should reintegrate
into normal life and not be afraid of the army. This
type of patrolling wears out personnel and equipment
and because of the action carried out (elimination of
guerrilla support bases) it lends credibility to the ENO
to discredit us with the people” (OS 163).
Another element in the whole is how the communities of the Ixil area had begun to take up
new forms of self-sufficiency and form cooperatives to manage resources in order to climb out of
poverty; this meant that they stopped going to the
South-Coast farms to work as semi-slave labor.
It is no coincidence that the peasants who were
“concentrated” and “reeducated” as “new Ixil” in
the Acul Model Village (December 1983) in Nebaj, were forced to perform hard labor on these
farms on the South Coast, as the interests of the
oligarchy demanded. Military and economic interests came together to thwart new ways of life
and organization that tried to change the unjust
established order.
The Army called the area the Ixil Triangle,
using the name of the Ixil ethnic group for a combat zone, which underlines the identification of
the devastated area with the Mayan ethnic group
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
inhabiting it. The Army used Indian names for
military operations in El Quiché, such as “Operation
Xibalbá” which means “hell” in the K’iche’ language. It also used indigenous symbols to name its
most brutal fighting forces: the Kaibil (and remember that “the Kaibil is a killing machine”28) is
a name derived from the Indian leader Kaibil Balam. The intention was to use indigenous symbols
so as to replace the cultural significance that they
held for the communities.
The patrols were under no illusions that the
population was the objective: “The population
of these areas has always lived in appalling conditions and this has therefore made them easy soil for
communist doctrine, I recommend punishing them
and fighting them militarily...” (patrol report, OS 163).
The plan specified that there were two guerrilla fronts accompanied by Local Irregular Forces
(FIL), who were rarely armed. The patrols
themselves reported that they did not fight with
the guerrillas: “The guerrilla force had already
left the area before the operation and the little
harassment came from small groups (FIL)”
(patrol report, OS 215). That means that there was
only one plan for Operation Sofía, with its preand post-operations, directed exclusively against
the non-combatant Mayan population. This was
also what the CIA reported: “The army has yet to
encounter any major guerrilla force in the area. It
successes to date appear to be limited to the destruction
of several ‘EGP-controlled-towns’ and the killing of
Indian collaborators and sympathizers” (USF doc. 20,
p. 3). This fierce assault against them meant that the
indigenous population were the group most affected
by violence during the armed conflict (MDS §1746).
The Army implemented three offensive operations
In its 1st Operation, July 16 to 31, 1982, on the one
hand, it left inside its zone of operation most of the
territory where the areas and population in resistance were located. On the other, the movements of all
patrols in the three companies involved marked out
a diamond figure in order to isolate the population
within its boundaries from any kind of external support.
In its 2nd operation, August 3 to 7, patrols also
described a diamond shape, with different lines and
angles, centered around Xesibacvitz hill. The companies and patrols were directed toward Xesibacvitz
beside the hamlet of La Pista and village of Nebaj. As
in the 1st operation, the Army bombed it, attacked
by land, tracked and ambushed two central nuclei of
resistance in the village and its surroundings, as well as
the Xejalvinte resistance.
In its 3rd Operation, August 9 to 19, the 2nd and
3rd Companies directly attacked the population who
had been displaced from the mountaintops to the valleys as a result of the 1st Operation’s offensive. The
three companies went in to finish off the people who
had fled the terror.
Later on, a 4th Operation was set in motion, which
had begun as part of the Operation Sofía as “the final
destruction.” This operation, also known as the great
siege of Sumal Grande hill, began after Operation Sofía had officially ended in mid-August 1982 and bore
His signature and command appear on OS 301.
“Operación IXIL,” Revista Militar (September-December 1982), p. 44.
MDS p. 56, §885: “The Kaibil is a killing machine when foreign forces or
doctrines assail the country or the Army,” ninth of the Kaibilís Ten Commandments.
26 27
28
Women concentrated in Nebaj, 1982.
16
OPERATION SOFIA
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
down inexorably on the population until January
1983—when the siege was reinforced as part of the
Campaign Plan Firmeza 83—and ended in 1987.
This operation involved Gumarcaj Task Force,
troops from Cunene, Sacapulas Aguacatán, Chiantla, La Perla, Chajul, Zona Reina and Uspantán,
as well as members of Civil Self-Defense Patrols
from all these locations. From mid-August 1982,
the Army surrounded between 18,000 to 25,000
people at Sumal Grande. Countless people died in
the siege as a result of massacres, hunger and cold,
and sickness. The bombardment of the besieged
population on Sumal Grande was continuous,
and the Army even shot fire bombs with white
phosphorus that set the forest alight.
Some people managed to break through the
siege toward the end of 1982 or early 1983, and
were massacred crossing the Xacbal river, as they
tried to reach the sites of resistance in Santa Clara, Amajchel and Caba, north of Chajul. Inside
the operation’s ring remained all the displaced
population from the town of Nebaj, Xesibacvitz
hill, Puerta del Cielo, Acul, Vicalitza, Vipana, the
village of Tzalbal with its homesteads and townships, Vixocon-Cosonip, Vixocon-Virr, the
population of the cantons of Palop, of Salquil
Grande, of Vicalamá and from the banks of the
Chel river, particularly Vega Sichel and Xecuxtun,
as well as, people from the cantons of Sumal
Grande and between them, Tizumal.
Wounded girl at the Nebaj base.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
Standing Orders: Destroy all signs of life
“The living conditions of the civilian population
under guerrilla control are fairly difficult, lack of
medicines and food mean that everybody’s life is
focused entirely on survival. Every time they flee,
they leave behind what little they have. The idea
is that the camps should always be on high ground,
but now Cameroon 1 found a camp in a ravine,
and a second, they found plenty of huts, as well
as boxes of corn and salt, pigs, chickens, which were
destroyed by Cameroon 1” (patrol report, OS 145).
To carry out Operation Plan Sofía the commanders of the three companies gave a series of
explicit orders to the respective patrol leaders as
pieces within an obedient and disciplined hierarchical machine, trained for the cruelest operations against the civilian population. The mission
of destruction was constant. When communities had managed to recover, the Army struck
again, destroying homes and their food-supply,
to prevent them surviving. In some places, like
the village Xoloché, where Operation Sofía
patrols operated, the Army returned three times
to destroy everything (MDS §3312).
The way in which the Army identified and
destroyed the enemy was also reflected in the
CIA secret cable: “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground,
and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed. ([word redacted] comment:
When an army patrol meets resistance and takes
fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the
entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.) The army has found that most of the vi “Operación IXIL,” Revista Militar (September-December 1982), p. 44.
MDS p. 56, §885: “The Kaibil is a killing machine when foreign forces or
doctrines assail the country or the Army,” ninth of the Kaibilís Ten Commandments.
29
Allan Nairn, “The Guns of Guatemala: The merciless mission of Ríos
Montt’s army,” New Republic, April 11, 1983, p. 19.
27
28
“When they run and go into to the
mountains that obligates one to
kill them.... Because they might
be guerrillas. If they don’t run,
the army is not going to kill them.
It will protect them.”
under complete Army control). And surrender
would not guarantee that the Army would not
kill them.
The commands to reduce the Ixil area to
ashes were:
Farmers killed in September 1982 at the Nebaj military base.
llages have been abandoned before the military
forces arrive. An empty village is assumed to have
been supporting the EGP and it is destroyed. There
are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in
the hills with no homes to return to. The EGP
apparently can not protect and feed such large
numbers and the refugees, mainly Ixil Indian
peasants, are making contact with the Army and
offering to collaborate in exchange for food and
shelter” (USF doc. 20, pp. 2–3).
In interview, Sergeant José Ángel said: “When
they run and go into to the mountains that obligates one to kill them (...) because they might be
guerrillas. If they don’t run, the army is not going to kill them. It will protect them.”29 He acknowledged that the army had killed men and
women, about twenty in each of the villages and he
mentioned villages passed through by Operation
Sofía patrols, such as Acul, Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande. Sergeant Raimundo also
stated that the people fleeing to the mountains out
of fear of the Army were considered “subversive,”
even the children. Some fled out of fear, justified
by what they had seen or known the Army do,
others because they refused to join the Civil SelfDefense Patrols or were unwilling to “concentrate”
(stay in the villages as directed by the Army and
1. Wipe out the population
During 1982, the Army brutally struck at the Ixil
area and indiscriminately attacked the civilian
population, including a very high number of women,
children and the elderly. In the Ixil Area 97.80% of
the Mayan people was affected (MDS §3581). The
Army used highly destructive weapons.
Annihilating the population was the main objective. According to the Report of the Archdiocese (the Informe REMHI – Recuperación de Memoria Histórica), the total number
of fatalities in 1982 committed directly by the
Army or under its supervision was 8,857: the
Army killed 5,252 people alone, and 2,270
people with the Civil Self-Defense Patrols
(PAC), and PAC patrolmen executed a further
1,335 people (MDS vol. 4, p. 524).
The massacres, a terrifying crime
•The massacres: “exterminate the subversive
elements in the area”
Patrol Report No. 001 states that when people
in the village Acul saw the Army approaching
they sounded the alarm, bringing everyone together and that “the patrol took advantage of
the fact that they were together to fire on them.”
The officer responsible for the April massacre
had already warned what could happen in the
village: “... Look ... back in Acul, yesterday a
lot of people were killed, I mean, yesterday I
17
OPERATION SOFIA
killed them ... if need be I will finish off half the
village so that peace can come to Nebaj...”
(MDS vol. 7, p. 119).
The CEH recorded 18 illustrative cases of
massacres in 1982 carried out with great brutality
and attributable to Ríos Montt, totaling more
than 1,400 victims (the Chel and Ilom massacres
in the Ixil area), most in El Quiché.
REMHI recorded a total of 451 massacres
in 1982, in which 8,385 people died. Among
these massacres, 180 qualify as particularly
serious, with aggravating factors of torture,
rape or cruelty, committed by the army and/
or paramilitaries in 1982. 109 of these, the
vast majority, were committed in Quiché; in
the whole country, there were 26 massacres
in July and August 1982, the months (together
with June) with the highest number of
massacres, pro rata, especially cruel in their execution and attributable to Ríos Montt (REMHI
vol. 4, pp. 509, 513 & 530).
In 1982, in the hamlet of Xoloché, Tzalbal
village, in the Nebaj municipality of the Quiché
depart-ment, Guatemalan Army members
executed three hundred people, all women and
children, apart from ten men. There were 310
unidentified victims (Case 15231, CEH).
In the same year, in the village of Tzalbal
itself, Manuela Pastor and twenty unidentified
people voluntarily surrendered to the Guatemalan Army: the soldiers executed everyone
(Case 3473, CEH). Operation Sofía’s patrols
passed repeatedly through the village Tzalbal
and its hamlets to raze them (OS 152 & 182).
The soldiers were masters of life and death
over the entire population.
As examples of the massacres, we present the
following:
– On July 17, 1982, in the village of Las Majadas, Aguacatán municipality, Huehuetenango,
personnel from the Guatemalan Army assigned
to the Nebaj military detachment, Quiché
department, executed six men and one woman,
two boys and seven girls (Case No. 5618, CEH).
– In July 1982, in the hamlet Chortíz, Chuatuj village, municipality of Nebaj, members
of the Guatemalan Army and PAC from
the village of Chex, Aguacatán, indiscriminately executed the inhabitants of the communities of Chortíz and Chuatuj. Later, the
soldiers and civil patrolmen looted and destroyed the houses (Case 15666, CEH).
– On August 15, 1982, residents of San Francisco Javier were displaced to the mountains
surrounding Palob, Salquil village, municipality of Nebaj, Quiché. Guatemalan Army
personnel assigned to Salquil detachment
massacred 31 people.
The bodies were left where they lay and
were eaten by animals (CEH and direct
witnesses). This massacre is recorded in
REMHI as massacre No. 272 (REMHI vol.
2, p. 43).
– REMHI also records four massacres committed in August 1982, three in Nebaj and
one in Cotzal. In August 1982, the REMHI
Nairn, “The Guns of Guatemala,” 18.
Nairn, “The Guns of Guatemala,” 19-20.
30
31
We just want to be human
No one cried here.
Here we just want to be human,
give landscape to the blind,
sonatas to the deaf,
heart to the wicked,
skeleton to the wind,
clots to the hemophiliac
and a boss’s kick
and a reminder that our breast weeps.
When you’ve been under widows’ sheets.
When you’ve seen hunger pass you going
the other way.
When you have trembled in the mother’s /womb,
without yet knowing air, light, the cry of
/death.
When that happens to us, eyes do not cry
but rather our human and wounded blood.
No one cried here.
Here we just want to be human.
Remind the exile of his homeland
to see him wallow in nostalgia.
Carry a loaf into a street of famished people
so that they throw themselves to bite us to /the soul,
give misery a chicken’s face
so hunger can devour it,
give saliva alone the taste of wheat
and essence of milk to the storm.
When you are born amid torn diapers
and when you are born without diapers.
When they have neatly cleared our digestive
/system
for us.
When we are told, eat,
eat your misery, wretches.
When that happens, it’s not tears that wet
the pupils
it’s a simple habit of squeezing our fists in
/our eyes
and saying: no one cried here,
here we just want to be human
eat, laugh, love, live,
live life and not die it.
No one cried here!
Otto René Castillo
(Guatemalan poet)
report records: massacre No. 317 in the
village of Nebaj, committed by the Army
and PACs; massacre No. 300 committed by
the Army and PACs in the village of Sumal; massacre No. 304 by the Army in the
village of Chuatuj. Also, massacre No. 245
committed by the Army in San Juan Cotzal.
In almost all cases of massacres of indigenous communities by the military between
1981 and 1982, the soldiers raped the women
(MDS §2402).
•Persecution to the point of death
If the first procedure of razing the villages left
any survivors, the second one started: persecuting displaced people who had fled. Once they
had achieved the purpose of emptying the areas
where the guerrillas were allegedly supplied, the
population continued to be pursued into their
places of refuge, where there was more killing
and destruction of crops. This persecution to
death shows that the intention was more than
just “taking away the fish’s water” and reveals
the intention to exterminate the group identified as the enemy, wherever they were (MDS
§3307). Moreover, the persecution of the displaced led the Army to commit at least five
massacres in Mexico (MDS §3150).
Patrol reports denoted the systematic execution of men, women and children in completely
defenseless situations as “mission accomplished.”
Some patrols did not specify the people
killed but mentioned fighting, the success of the
mission and spent ammunition. Others reported the execution, in total, of three children,
three women, one youth, three men, twelve FIL
and two alleged combatants. These killings might
have been under orders, as the executions are
reported under “encounters with the enemy.”
The soldiers themselves confirmed that they
killed civilians: “Lots of unarmed people, women refugees, but we haven’t had actual combat
with guerrillas.”30
The CEH recorded in 1982, in Nebaj, 23
cases where more than 30 people were executed,
including children, with cruelty and torture;
another seven cases in Chajul and six in Cotzal.
So openly was it acknowledged that the
unarmed civilian population was the enemy, that
ruthless execution was routinely reported to
superiors. Patrol Report No. 001 of Operation
Sofía notes: “in a ravine a woman was hiding and
noticing an outside presence the point man fired
eliminating her and two chocolates [children]”;
“an element in civilian clothes without documentation was eliminated” trying to escape; another
was “eliminated, trying to flee.” It also reports
the elimination of an “undocumented element
about 17,” fleeing, as well as “an undocumented
man who came out of some rocks with his hands
up” (OS 155). Report No. 002 mentions a small
battle and notes that, tracking in the ravines
nearby, they found the bodies of two women
and a child, and two children aged 2 and 3 alive
(OS 144).
According to Sergeant José Ángel, interviewed
by Allan Nairn, each soldier also had a lasso to
tie people up and torture them with an interrogation technique learned at Cobra, an Army
counter-insurgency course for special troops.
The soldiers expected those interrogated to provide specific information such as the names of
people who spoke to or gave food to the guerrillas. Failure to do so implied guilt and resulted
in an immediate trial and summary execution.
Captain Raimundo concluded: “Almost everyone
in the villages is a collaborator (...) They don’t
say anything. They would rather die than talk
(...) then they say ‘if you kill me, kill me—because I don’t know anything,’ and we know they’re
guerrillas. They prefer to die rather than say
where the compañeros are.”31
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OPERATION SOFIA
Reports of the Truth Commission (CEH, including Memoria del Silencio) and the Archdiocese
(ODHAG’s Informe REMHI) reveal that the
army used the torture of rape and sexual violation systematically and with complete impunity
during the armed conflict. In the Ixil area, they
continued raping women during the implementation of Operation Sofía. In June, the Army
had fought with extreme savagery against 357
people in Chuatuj, Nebaj; the people were hacked
with machetes, hanged, burned and raped (Case
11313, CEH). The PACs also committed this
terrible crime during 1982, for example in Cotzal, where four women were raped and executed
with a firearm (Case 3220, CEH).
Overall analysis of the data from the CEH
shows that torture was directed primarily
toward the Mayan people (MDS §2340). The
places where most of the torture occurred
correspond to the places inhabited by the Mayan
groups hardest hit by political repression: the
K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, Mam, Cakchiquel, Ach’ and
Ixil. In addition, these departments had the
highest poverty levels nationwide (MDS §2198).
Women, elderly people, children were victims
of the most terrible tortures. During 1982, the
Army tortured people to death in the village
Sumal and the municipal center of Cotzal
(cases 3775 and 3215). Setting people alight,
burning them alive, was a method often used by
the Army (see Case 3781, a child burnt alive in
Nebaj, and Case 3122, an elderly woman burned
alive in Xoloché, CEH).
In some cases, the community was forced to
attend the execution and participate in it. This is
a collective testimony from the village Salquil,
Nebaj: “I gathered all the people very well and I
ran to the little village, rang the bell and everyone
came together ... the officer sat down with three
people and that’s when he said ... ‘What do you
want be doing with these men, because you are
collaborating with the guerrillas ... Look, guys, if
you want peace, you yourselves are going to hang
these people’ ... they were hanged and died”
(MDS §3336).
In the slaughter at Acul, Nebaj, the Army
ordered the leaders (spiritual guides) to take their
sons and nephews and bring them to the cemetery where they would be executed: “Men of
heaven have to lead men to hell” (MDS §3337).
Beyond individual torture, these “collective tortures” attempted to destroy a group’s identity,
morally weakening them through terror and undermining their organization.
•Bombings
The villages and hamlets where Army companies operated were bombed during the whole of
Operation Sofía. The aim was to terrorize the
population into abandoning their homes and
move away so that capture or killing would be
easier. The bombings show that the attack was
indiscriminate against unarmed civilians. About
200 families lived in Tzalbal; about 60 families
in Corralcay; about 20 families in Vipecbalam:
“Yes, they were villages and hamlets: not a place
of silence, not a mountain, nor a guerrilla camp,
but a settlement.” Persecuting those who fled
32
“Operación IXIL,” Revista Militar, p. 38.
2. Forced Transfer: making them into “new
Ixil”
Like the cicada
So many times they killed me
So many times I died,
But still I’m here
rising again.
I give thanks to misfortune
and the hand with the knife,
because it killed me so badly,
and I carried on singing.
Singing in the sun
like the cicada,
after a year
underground,
like a survivor
returning from the war.
So many times they erased me,
So often I disappeared,
I went to my own funeral,
alone and crying.
I made a knot in my
/handkerchief,
but then I forgot
that it was not the only time
and I carried on singing.
Singing in the sun
like the cicada,
after a year
underground,
Like a survivor
returning from the war.
So many times they killed you
so often will you rise again
How many nights will you
spend in desperation.
And when the ship wrecks
and when darkness falls
someone will rescue you,
to go on singing.
Singing in the sun
like the cicada,
after a year
underground,
Like a survivor
returning from the war.
María Elena Walsh
(Cantante argentina)
the bombing till they were wiped out was also
part of the mission of the three companies that
carried out Sofía, along with the Gumarcaj Task
Force.
On the other hand, the population was
persecuted and bombed during their displacement.
“In the Ixil area they bombed the people who
were moving. And those who were captured or
surrendered voluntarily continued to be subjected to human rights violations, despite being
under the Army’s complete control” (MDS §3594).
During 1982, the CEH specifies cases of bombings in this area of operations during Operation
Sofía, from April (the refugee population in the
mountains near the village Tzijulché, Nebaj municipality, Case 3265) to December (bombardment
of the village of Xoloché, Tzalbal, Case 3517).
•Capturing and concentrating the surviving
population. “Operation Ixil” described one of the alternatives for dealing with the rebellious Ixil people:
“intensifying ladinization of the Ixil population so that it disappears as a marginal subgroup of the national way of being.”32 The
Army subjected those whose lives it spared in
order to “integrate them into the nation.” The
plan was to concentrate them in their own
village or to force relocation to refugee camps. In
late 1983, they created the model villages (concentration camp copies of Vietnam’s “strategic
hamlets”), starting with Acul, Nebaj.
Victoria 82 ordered: “identify areas of population concentration, affected by subversion
(sympathizing refugees)” (p. 17). In compliance
with that order, all reports mention the control of refugee survivors. Mario Roberto Grajeda Toledo reported on August 20, 1982, that
over the period of July 25, 26 and 28, 1982, the
army had captured mainly children: 24 men,
29 women, 38 boys, 31 girls and a newborn. In
three days, they captured a total of 123 people
(OS 345). In total, the patrol reported that during Operation Sofía 350 men, women, elderly and children were taken against their will
to refugee camps for indoctrination, to “ladinize” them, to “erase the Ixil,” and re-educate
them into a way of life that suited the military
and the oligarchy.
As for psychological operations, “Nerón”
(Nero), signing the report of patrol Scotland 3,
indicates that in the second phase “the FIL captured and presented were not eliminated. They
were pardoned and evacuated as refugees” (OS
197). So the army killed indiscriminately following orders and spared lives arbitrarily. Without
any objective reason it killed or “pardoned,”
wielding power of life and death in the communities and causing terror with violence, cruelty
and irrationality.
The psychological warfare program was developed with nationalist fervor, the discourse of
“Guatemalan-ness” and the introduction of religious sects. In a letter of July 22 addressed to
the Chief of General Staff, Castellanos Góngora
requests a broadcasting radio for the Ixil Triangle or a Psychological Operations work team
to prepare flyers to counter communist propaganda. He indicates that the political and revolutionary ideas inculcated by the EGP must be
fought with “ideas and armed acts aimed at the
permanent military units of the EGP.”
In this way, they established rules that restricted freedom and mobility, for example, by
instituting mandatory registration, and channeled daily life toward war. According to the Manual of Counter-Insurgency Warfare, “captured
personnel are not to be considered prisoners of
war, so they should not be characterized as such
or regarded as such under the Rules of Land
Warfare. Said personnel are defined as a common criminals by the Military Code of the Republic of Guatemala and as outlined in the Penal
Code” (Annex A, p. 10). Delinquent children
without any rights.
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OPERATION SOFIA
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
• Destroy what little social infrastructure has
survived the devastation
Since 1980 and during the first five months of
1982 they had laid waste to the area, but with
Operation Sofía the Army came in to destroy
what remained, such as people’s champas (huts/
shelter) (in Acul, villages in the area of Tzalbal
and Salquil Grande) and secret markets such
as the Casa de la Sal in Xoloché or Cosonip, la
Vega de Sichel and Vicalama.
A girl hides from a soldier behind her mother, who watches
her land being scorched.
•Disappearance
The State Security Forces were responsible for
more than 40,000 disappearances over the whole
period of the armed conflict, and “disappearance”
is a crime that takes a heavy toll on loved ones.
The CEH recorded 17 cases of disappearance
in the Ixil area in 1982. Between July and August, seven men and one child (Cases 216, 3618,
3315, 3297, 16532). In 1982, according to
REMHI 1,474 disappearances occurred, more
than 40% of the total (REMHI vol. 4, p. 509).
El Quiché was again the department hardest hit,
by a long way, for this crime as well as direct
killing, rape, cruel treatment and torture—accounting 57% of the national total of victims (REMHI
vol. 4, p. 512).
3.Destruction of resources to prevent the
population’s survival •Burn the villages
The CEH could not establish exactly how many
communities existed in the Ixil area before the
violence, but believes that between 70% and
90% of communities there were razed (MDS
§3311). According to the report, in only three
cases of massacre was the town not burned, in all
other cases the villages where massacres had occurred were physically destroyed during or after
the slaughter. On the other hand, many other villages where there no massacre took place were
burned or destroyed because the population had
fled. The massacres were accompanied by physical destruction of the communities because
both were part of the scorched earth operations
(MDS §3305).
According to information from the CEH,
scorched earth operations executed by the Army
in 1980 and 1983 caused the total or partial
destruction of around 90 villages: 54 villages in Nebaj, 26 in Chajul and 10 in Cotzal (MDS §3310).
“Each soldier also had a lasso to
tie people up and torture them
with an interrogation technique
learned at Cobra...”
•Seize and destroy property
The order to destroy the boxes (where corn and
other foods are kept), kitchen utensils, grinding stones, clothing, medicines, was central to
the mission and so patrols rigorously reported their destruction. Hundreds were systematically destroyed: “those people their living
conditions are fairly difficult.... otherwise we
are always going to be running around in the
mountains after them and every time the poor
people. (OS 161)
• Cut all external and internal supply movements
The Army ring fenced the “subversion” by
cutting supplies of food, clothing, soap, farm
tools, salt, etc. In 1980 and 1981, all the formal markets in Nebaj and neighboring municipalities were destroyed; in 1982, the population subsisted on small crops of corn and
had opened secret corridors to Cunen, Sacapulas, Aguacatán, Chiantla and the northern
point of Nebaj, through which its supplies
passed.
To carry out the tasks of burning and destroying corn, the staple food and a key element
of their identity as a people, the Army relied
on the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), which
went round methodically with the Army, obliterating all the crops along every path taken
by the patrols of the three companies involved
in Operation Sofia. As the farmers of Chajul
(1982–84) said: “The job of the patrols was to
burn our crops, burn our houses, that was their
work” (REMHI vol. 2, p 137).
And on to death ... by starvation, disease, cold ...
As a consequence of fleeing in terror, hundreds of people, including the elderly and children, died of hunger, cold and disease before
and during Operation Sofía (Cases 3191, 3686
and 3658, CEH). According to REMHI, 1982
was the year when the highest number of people
died from starvation, disease, grief or sadness
(REMHI vol. 4, p. 509).
The Army planned to pursue all who fled and
were sheltering in the mountains, on the pretext
that everyone fleeing the Army was the enemy,
as otherwise they would not flee. The Army
counted on people coming out of shelter in search of food so that it could finish them off or expecting them to surrender in exchange for food.
Soldiers and patrolmen even eliminated the elderly and constantly harassed the refugees in the
mountains (Case 2607, CEH).
In an Operation Sofía report, Patrol No. 1
of First Battalion Paratroopers lists encounters
with the enemy and their outcomes, saying that
on one occasion it saw a man who upon seeing
the patrol tried to flee but was eliminated— “he
was carrying only food (juice, rice, salt)” (OS
168).33
Two weeks after the massacre perpetrated
by the Army in Acul, Nebaj, on April 22, 1982,
the Army itself burned the houses and crops.
The survivors, who went to live in the mountains, suffered extreme hardships, were under
constant attacks and bombardment from the
Army. Almost one third of the survivors of the
massacre died in the mountains (Case 107, CEH).
In the documents of Operation Plan Sofía it
is clear that between General Ríos Montt and
the leaders of the patrols that carried out the orders,
there were three intermediate commands: the Chief
of General Staff, the commander of Operation Sofía and the company commander. Everything was
planned and supervised regularly.
Operation Sofía’s mission was considered
a military success although the guerrillas had
already left the area. The indigenous population
continued to suffer devastation during General
Ríos Montt’s government. In 1986, a third of
the rural population of the Ixil area had been
wiped out.34 And the General was checking at
every step to see how killing all the Indians was
approaching its goal: “to surgically excise evil
from Guatemala.”35
Report by Head of 1st Patrol, Infantry Lt. Rodrigo Guzmán, July 29,
1982.
34
Carol A. Smith (1998). “The Militarization of Civil Society in Guatemala:
Economic Reorganization as a Continuation of War,” Latin American
Perspectives 17, 4, No. 67, pp. 8-41. Cit. in J. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 56.
35
J. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 45.
33
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
20
Those who carried out the
crimes against women were
trained in the rape that was
committed systematically on
women’s bodies. The School
of Military Studies and the
Victoria 82 campaign transformed women into objects
for the troops’ entertainment
and a battlefield on which to
attack the “enemy” and destroy them. The “feminicide”
that swept the country after
the conflict is the direct descendant of those brutal practices
that have been perpetuated by
going unpunished.
Targeting women
Victoria Sanford *
“Post-conflict” violence
I
n this article, I explore the human rights
crisis now taking place in a Guatemala “at
peace.” I provide an overview of the armed
conflict within the country toward the end of
the twentieth century and specifically consider
the genocide of the eighties in order to assess the
“post-conflict” violence of twenty-first-century
Guatemala.
Within the structures of daily, institutional
and organized terror, we will examine the contemporary phenomenon of feminicide: the institutionalized killing of women. An analysis
of the criminal investigation into the murder
of Claudina Isabel Velásquez Paiz reveals the
role of government with respect to feminicide
in Guatemala and their responsibility for failing
to guarantee equal protection under the law for
all citizens. Claudina Isabel was one of the 518
women murdered in 2005. Every year it becomes more and more dangerous to be a woman in
Guatemala. Between 2002 and 2005 the number
of murders of women increased by over 63%,
and almost 40% of these deaths took place in, or
very near, Guatemala City. Most of them were
between 16 and 30 years old. In 2005, 68% of female victims were under 17.1 In 2006 more than
600 women were killed. In 2007, an average of
two women were murdered every day.
Feminicide and post-conflict
violence in Guatemala
Currently, the number of homicides is alarmingly
high: 53 per 100,000 inhabitants (OSAC 2009). The
current rate of mortality in Guatemala is at about the
level of the rate of female mortality in the early eighties, when Guatemala was at the peak of a genocidal
war that took the lives of 200,000 people. The Guatemalan people are still waiting the justice, while the
genocides live free.
In this hostile environment of genocide and impunity—in which the generals and their genocidal accomplices benefit from impunity—the Guatemalans
are seeing the rate of homicides rise. During five years
of “peacetime,” the number of recorded murders was
20,943. If the rate continues to rise at the same speed,
there will be more victims of violent deaths in the first
25 years of peace than in the 36 years of armed conflict
and genocide. Alston points out that while the female
population increased by 8% between 2001 and 2006,
the rate of homicides against women rose by over
117%.2 Overall in the last three years 2,000 women
were killed, but there were only 43 convictions for
these murders; only 2% of women’s murders led to
a sentence, so that the measure of impunity for such
crimes stands at 98%.3
* Dr. Victoria Sanford is Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Internationally recognized as an expert
on genocide, feminicide, historical memory, human rights, peace processes and transitional justice, she is author of La Masacre de Panzós: Etnicidad, tierra y violencia
en Guatemala (2009), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (2008), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (2003), and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in
Guatemala (2003).
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Lehman College for the support that made possible my investigation of the
phenomenon of feminicide in Guatemala. My greatest debt is to Jorge Velásquez for asking me to accompany him and for entrusting me with his daughter’s story.
Handling and analysis of evidence
A. E. Maldonado Guevara has concluded that the
victims and survivors of feminicide are subject to
re-victimization by the Guatemalan government
because it invariably treats those who seek justice with indifference, cruelty, stigmatization and
there is a lack of political will to solve these cases.4
The Ministerio Público (MP; the public prosecutor) does its best to ignore the demands of families and dissuade them from seeking justice. For
example, in every meeting with Mr. Velásquez,
father of Claudina Isabel, that the prosecutor
attended, he got extremely and visibly annoyed
when Mr. Velásquez asked about progress in the
investigation of his daughter’s case. Invariably
the prosecutor would begin by saying: “If there
are problems in resolving this case, it is because
you made the evidence public via the BBC and
all you have achieved is to jeopardize the case.”
Then, inexplicably, he added impulsively: “The
coroner’s report indicates that your daughter was
not a virgin. There are also interviews with her
friends indicating that she drank beer and had
perhaps experimented with cocaine.”
Procudaría de Derechos Humanos (2006). Informe de las características de las muertes violentas en el país (Guatemala City: PDH).
2
Phillip Alston (2007). Civil and Political Rights, Including the Questions of Disappearances and Summary Executions. Mission to Guatemala. 19 February. (United Nations: Human Rights Council, 2007).
A/HRC/4/20/Add.2,11. Hereafter CPR in text.
3
Carlos Castresana (2009). Report of International Commission against
Corruption and Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
1
21
Las mujeres como objetivo
In a meeting with the prosecutor, Mr. Duran, and
the Ministerio Público team in charge of investigating
the murder of Claudina Isabel, the chief investigator
told Mr. Velásquez: “I lost my aunt. They killed her.
But the truth is that these cases are very complicated
and I have to accept that this case is not going to be
solved.” The MP was informing the victim’s father
that he and the BBC were to blame for the fact that the
murder had not been brought to justice; furthermore,
that his daughter was to blame for having been murdered and then that, if he were a more reasonable person,
he would resign himself—as the lead investigator of
the MP had—to the fact that his daughter’s case would
never be solved! Mr. Velásquez, always calm, replied:
“If this case is lost, it will be because the MP has not
done its job. I’m not saying my daughter was an angel, but young people should not pay with their life for
making a mistake or for experimenting.” These slanders about the behavior of the dead man or woman
mean that many families do not insist on the investigation of the murders of their loved ones. Others fear
reprisals from the perpetrators and do not trust the
MP to ensure their safety if they pursue justice.
As Mills has stated in her work on “intimate femicide” in South Africa, the criminal justice system
not only fails to protect women, it is also inextricably tied to the unfair treatment of women in violent
situations “through the gender bias and sexist attitudes that inform judges’ decisions and through the
content of the law itself.”5 Mills also notes that the
victims of “intimate femicide” are constantly being
blamed for their own murder and that the judge takes
the perpetrator’s side in the argument according to
which he was “provoked” and it is therefore his deceased wife’s fault that he killed her. Similarly, in
Guatemala Yakin Ertürk, the UN Rapporteur, has
stressed that there is a lack of respect for the dignity
of the survivors of violence and for their families
seeking justice, because the system, instead of bringing justice to victims and their families “merely revictimized the women”; she also adds that “blaming
the victims and the flippant response to acts of violence against women exacerbates the suffering of
victims and their families, besides legitimizing use
of violence and rewarding the aggressor.”7
A year later, in another report submitted to the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Ertürk concluded that the “major problem facing the State is its inability to provide women with legal, judicial
and institutional protection against violence.”8 What
is more, until 2006, the Penal Code exonerated rapists
if they married their victim, provided she was over
12. The Constitutional Court of Guatemala annulled
this antiquated law that sentenced the victim of sexual
abuse to a life of punishment with her assailant.
The Women’s Office at the MP and the special
service of the National Civil Police (PNC), both
responsible for combating violence against women,
openly admitted to the UN Rapporteur that “40%
A. E. Maldonado Guevara (2005). Feminicidio en Guatemala: Crimines Contra La Humanidad. Investigacion Preliminar. November. p. 97.
Available online at: http://www.congreso.gob.gt/uploadimg/documentos/n1652.pdf [30 June 2006].
5
Shereen Winifred Mills (2001). “Intimate Femicide and Abused Women
Who Kill: A Feminist Legal Perspective” in ed. Diana Russell and Roberta Harmes (2001), Femicide in Global Perspective (New York: Teachers
College Columbia University.
6
Ibid., pp. 76–77.
7
Yakin Ertürk (2005). Integration of the Human Rights of Women and
the Gender Perspective: Violence Against Women. Report of the Special Rapporteur on her Mission to Guatemala. February 9–14, 2004.
(United Nations: Commission on Human Rights, 10 February 2005),
E/CN.4/2005/72/Add.3. Hereafter RSR in text.
4
of cases are filed and never investigated” (DDS 16).
Indeed, the investigation, when it happens, usually
treats the murdered woman as a suspect, following
the old and discredited school of criminal investigation known as “cases provoked by the victim.”9
This approach seeks to find what about the victims
themselves might have caused their victimization,
rather than drawing up the perpetrator’s profile.
The MP has a miserable rate of convictions:
in late 2005, when a total of 5,338 murders of men
and women had been recorded, there were only 8
sentences. As the exasperated UN Rapporteur, Philip Alston, concluded in his report on Guatemala
in February 2007: “With a criminal justice system
incapable of achieving a conviction rate above a
single digit, the State is responsible under human
rights law for the many people who have been killed by other citizens” (CPR 2).
responsible not only the male perpetrators but
also the state and judicial structures that normalize misogyny. Impunity, silence and indifference
each play a role in feminicide.
Impunity increases citizens’ insecurity, fosters
fear and reduces trust in the state. The concept of feminicide helps to disarticulate the belief systems that
place violence based on gender inequality within the
private sphere,12 and reveals the societal nature of the
killing of women as a product of relations of power
between men and women. It also allows for an interrogation of legal, political and cultural analyses and
societal responses to the phenomena.
In Guatemala, feminicide exists because neither women’s rights nor their lives are protected.
In Guatemala impunity leads to more killings of
women. When an informant was asked if he was
worried about the safety of his adult sister in Guatemala City, he answered: “She doesn’t go out to the
store without permission. We will not let anything
happen to her.” While the brother was proud of the
way in which he was “protecting” his sister from an
attacker, this attitude is the product of patriarchy
and misogyny. The Special Rapporteur of the UN
on violence against women, Yakin Ertürk, noted
that it is paradoxical that a man’s honor is intrinsically associated with his ability to protect the sexuality of women associated with him; the violation of
women’s sexuality, as in the case of sexual abuse,
is a manifestation of the way in which male power
establishes domination over women (DDS 16).
The Guatemalan State has failed to create social
and legal conditions to ensure the safety of female
members of society. As Amnesty International has
noted: “The official classification of causes of death
in the homicide statistics hides the gender-based brutality and sexual nature of many of these crimes.”13
Ertürk also noted that the intersection of systems of
inequality with hierarchies of gender creates layers
of discrimination and exclusion for different groups
of women in Guatemala, and that women’s exposure to violence is related to their position within these
exclusionary systems that converge (RSR 8).
In this article, I use the concept of feminicide to
deal with the murder of women in Guatemala. Feminicide connotes not only the murder of females
by males because they are females, but indicates the
responsibility of the State, whether by the commission of the murders themselves, toleration of
the perpetrators’ violence, or by not fulfilling its
obligation to ensure its citizens’ safety.
Why Feminicide?
The historical role of the State and impunity
If more men than women are murdered every year
in Guatemala, then why categorize the killing of women as feminicide? If Claudina Isabel was murdered
by someone who knew her, why classify her murder as feminicide? What is feminicide and how does
it help to explain the phenomenon? The concept of
feminicide is based on the term “femicide,” which
refers to the murder of women in criminology literature and also refers to hate crimes against women
in the feminist literature about the murder of women.10 Insisting that the killing of women must be
problematized within larger structures of patriarchy
and misogyny, Russell defines femicide not simply
as the murder of females but rather as “the killing of
females by males because they are female.”11
Feminicide is a political term. Conceptually, it
encompasses more than femicide because it holds
During the eighties, thousands of women were victims of sexual violence and torture before being
killed by state agents. What is more, the report of
She sometimes feels...
She sometimes feels
like something forgotten
in a dark corner of the house
like fruit eaten inside
by birds of prey,
like a shadow, faceless and weightless.
Her presence is barely
slight vibration
in the still air.
She feels that looks pass through her
and that she becomes fog
between the clumsy arms
that try to clasp her.
She would like to be at least
a juicy orange
in the hand of a child
–not empty peel–
an image that shines in the mirror
–not a shadow that vanishes–
and a clear voice
–not heavy silence–
listened to for once.
Alaíde Foppa
(Guatemalan poet)
Ertürk (2006). Integration of the Human Rights of Women and the
Gender Perspective: Violence Against Women. The Due Diligence
Standard as a Tool for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
January 20, 2006. United Nations: Commission on Human Rights. E/
CN.4/2006/61. Hereafter DDS in text.
9
See Marvin E. Wolfgang, Patterns in Criminal Homicide (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1958)
10
Diana Russell and Roberta Harmes, eds. (2001). Femicide in Global
Perspective (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University Press).
11
Diana Russell, “The Politics of Femicide,” in Femicide in Global Perspective, p. 3.
12
See A. E. Maldonado Guevara, Feminicidio en Guatemala: Crimines
Contra La Humanidad.
13
Amnesty International (2005). Guatemala: No Protection, No Justice:
Killings of Women and Girls–Facts and Figures. Available online at:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGANR340252005.
14
Consorcio Actoras de Cambio, (2006). Rompiendo el silencio (Guatemala City: Consorcio Actoras de Cambio y El Instituto de Estudios
Comparados en Ciencias Penales), p. 32.
8
22
operaTION SofIa
C Archivo CAFCA
Vigil. San Miguel Acatán, Huehuetenango. Chimban Case.
Massacre. Army of Guatemala. August 1982. Victims: 11
people, buried by order of the soldiers initially in a mass
grave and exhumed the next day by family and placed in
individual graves.
“Violence against women is met
with impunity as authorities fail to
investigate cases, and prosecute
and punish perpetrators.”
the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH
– Comisión para el Esclarecemiento Histórico) confirmed that the State trained soldiers and other
armed officers to violate, mutilate, kill and terrorize women. During the war, soldiers and other
security agents were responsible for 99% of the acts
sexual violence against women. These crimes of the
state and its agents have never been brought to justice and have remained unpunished.
These murderers and rapists walk free. If the state
continues to shield these murderers and rapists with
impunity, then why hope that they would seek out
the murderers of Claudina Isabel or any other murdered woman? In writing about the effects of war in
the eighties on the women of El Salvador and Guatemala, the UN Rapporteur, Yakin Ertürk, observed
the need to “recognize the seriousness of sexual violence as a weapon of war during the conflicts and
the need for justice for victims and survivors” (DDS
2). By connecting the violence of the past with the
current feminicide, she considers it imperative to
bring to justice the perpetrators of violent crimes
against women “as an important step in the fight
against impunity, not only because the perpetrators
will be tried, but because of the effect of deterrence against future crimes” (DDS 2). It is paradoxical
that more than a decade after the signing of the Peace
Accords, the National Civil Police “is nowadays
considered the main source of human rights
violations” in Guatemala (DDS 16).
Rapporteur Ertürk concluded in her report
on Guatemala: “Violence against women is met
with impunity as authorities fail to investigate cases, and prosecute and punish perpetrators.
In this regard, the absence of a rule of law fosters a
continuum of violent acts against women, including
murder, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment
and commercial sexual exploitation. Security and
justice institutions have not responded adequately,
particularly by failing to solve a recent series of
brutal murders of women” (RSR 2).
Conclusión
Intimate violence, femicide and even feminicide are
predictable crimes with patterns that can be deciphered
through a basic forensic investigation. Feminicide is
not inevitable or inherent in Guatemala, or any other
country. The thousands of unsolved murders of
women in Guatemala make it impossible to determine whether the perpetrator is a woman’s partner or
a stranger, an individual or an institution; whatever
the case, the Guatemalan state and its agents carry
most of the responsibility.
We can establish connections between the
practices and discourses of violence in the past and
those of the present. Indeed, there is a particular lexicon
that we can trace from the eighties to the present. In
the eighties, the military regimes blamed the victims
by calling them subversives, threatened anyone who
opposed the repression, claimed amnesty for any
crimes committed by the Army, blamed the guerrillas
for the killings or disappearances, and pled ignorance
about the violence that was engulfing the country.
In the nineties, the Army blamed the massacre
victims for causing the massacres, claimed the victims
and survivors were subversives, threatened anyone
who sought exhumations, claimed amnesty for any
crimes committed, blamed the guerrillas for all violence, and pled ignorance for obvious Army violence.
After the Spanish Court issued its arrest warrant,
the generals claimed the Spanish judge was an ETA
terrorist, threatened witnesses, claimed amnesty for
any crimes committed, blamed the guerrillas for the
killings, and pled ignorance.
In the contemporary cases of feminicide and social cleansing, the judicial system in general and the
prosecutor’s office in particular have dismissed the
victims as less than worthy by labeling them gangmembers, blamed the gangs for all the violence,
claimed that social cleansing does not exist, claimed
witnesses will not come forward, and continued to
plead ignorance about all aspects of violence. It is
impunity that ties the genocide of the eighties, and
the Spanish Court’s international arrest warrant for
the genocides, together with the murder of women
and the murder of Claudina Isabel.
Impunity is the violation of the law by those
charged with upholding it. Philip Alston, the UN
Rapporteur, concluded in his special report on extrajudicial killings in Guatemala that the grisly murder
rate is the result of the lack of political will. Alston
stated: “There are 5,000 or more killings per year,
and the responsibility for this must rest with the
state. Guatemala is not a failed State, nor a particularly
poor State” (CPR 2). The Rapporteur also provides
legal guidelines by which he finds the state guilty.
Under International Human Rights Law: “The
failure to establish individual responsibility under
domestic criminal law does not absolve the State’s
responsibility ... Under the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the State has
legal obligations both to respect and to guarantee the
right to life” (CPR 6). While Alston notes that, as a
rule, the state is not responsible for ordinary murders
committed by citizens, he also calls attention that it
is the State’s duty: “to exercise due diligence in preventing such crimes. Once a pattern becomes clear
in which the response of the Government is clearly
inadequate, its responsibility under international human rights law becomes applicable” (CPR 6). This
responsibility means that, for the State to fulfill its
international obligations, it must investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators effectively; if this is
omitted the State fails in its obligations under international human rights law (CPR 6–7). Alston also
stated that the Guatemalan government’s responsibility under international human rights law is greater
than under its own internal legal system (CPR 7).
Solving the murder of Claudina would certainly be an important step in the restoration of justice.
The international community can play a positive
role in ending impunity in Guatemala by supporting
women’s human rights groups, the Human Rights
Ombudsman (PDH – Procuradería de los Derechos Humanos), and the International Commission
against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG – Comisión
Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala),
which is a formal commission established jointly by
the United Nations and the Guatemalan Government to investigate and dismantle clandestine organizations and parallel powers. Diplomatic missions,
citizens concerned about the problem and international aid groups can support the work of the CICIG
by making the ending of impunity a condition for
receiving international assistance.
The international community can put pressure
on prosecutors to take a step forward against feminicide, social cleansing and other cases of homicide;
put pressure on the National Civil Police to conduct
investigations without prejudice; put pressure on the
judiciary and new National Forensic Science Institute (INACIF) to apply a single forensic protocol
to all murder victims regardless of their appearance
and to include sexual assault as a standard protocol
in the investigation of murders; put pressure on the
Guatemalan government to cooperate with the Spanish courts and to cooperate in the extradition of the
generals to be tried in Spain and also move forward in
processing the hundreds of cases of human rights violations that are stalled in the courts; and support the
dismantling of impunity with full investigations and
disclosure of the role of the State’s parallel powers, accompanied by a legal trial of those responsible.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010.
23
5.5% of children between 7
and 12 years today are not
enrolled in primary education—that is more than
117,000 boys and girls. Most
rural, indigenous families live
on less than two dollars a day
and many of them on less than
one dollar.
Javier Lázaro *
F
reedom of association and repression have
been inextricably and invariably linked in the
recent history of Guatemala. In the period
between January 2007 and March 2010 alone,
47 trade unionists were killed and an undetermined number suffered bombings, kidnappings/
“disappearance,” threats, intimidation—including to their families—all of which recall the worst
episodes of repression during the armed conflict
that ravaged Guatemala between 1960 and 1996.
All these murders and attacks on union freedom
were committed in the context of labor disputes,
involving both the public and private sectors.
When he arrived in power in 1954, Carlos Castillo
Armas issued a series of decrees aimed at eradicating
the trade union movement in Guatemala, by means
of which he canceled the registration of trade union
leaders, curtailed the exercise of the right of workers
to free association and banned the union movement.
These decrees marked the beginning of a process
that has aimed to eliminate social protest and trade
unionism as a social partner within Guatemalan society.
In these moves, Castillo Armas could rely on
the invaluable cooperation of Washington, which
not only installed the new military government and
armed it, but also provided a list of people that had
to be eliminated immediately. The workers’ union
at United Fruit (a company that promoted the U.S.
intervention) and another 532 unions across the
whole country were banned by the new government,
which included the death sentence for strike organizers in the penal code. Thus began one of the darkest
periods in the history of Guatemala since colonial
times, a period which, unfortunately and along with
other schemes, continues to this day.
* Director of Fundación Paz y Solidaridad in Aragon.
Risks to union activism
in Guatemala
87% of the working population lives on a wage that is lower than the cost of the
basic basket of goods, as does 88.2% of the female population and 95% of the indigenous population. 81.8% of workers have no social security.
With the onset of the armed conflict in 1960,
repression intensified and began a new stage: stigmatizing the exercise of union freedom, physical
violence, and violation of the rights to life, to physical integrity and to personal freedom. These factors have become a constant in daily life and have
persisted to a greater or lesser extent up to the
present day. Although it might be assumed that
these violations would diminish with the signing
of the Peace Accords of 1996, lack of political will
to implement and enforce the Accords has meant
that this violence has not only increased but taken
on new patterns of expression. At the end of conflict, new, more elaborate means were added to
traditional forms of repression. These new kinds
of violence against human rights included the
weakening of protections for labor.
In effect, the violence carried out by the State
during previous years has given way to another
kind of violence, which in practice achieves the
same purpose: perpetuating conditions of poverty and dependence for more than 80% of the
Guatemalan population. This is done with the
connivance or complicity of the major economic,
social and political groups in Guatemala, whose
interests coincide with those of the local oligarchy
and the multinationals present in the country, who
have started a new process of wealth accumulation, plundering natural resources and destroying
the environment—the consequences of which are
only beginning to be evaluated—and threatening
the lives and livelihoods of millions of Guatemalans. This has come together with the consequences of a process of economic globalization of
a neoliberal cast that has ruined the Guatemalan
economy—in particular the aspects affecting the
most vulnerable classes—that has met with
hardly any opposition because, among other
reasons, opposition had already been virtually
eradicated from the political and social scene.
This social vacuum led to even higher rates of institutional corruption and created the ideal framework
for Guatemala to become one of the most violent,
backward and unequal countries in all of Latin America, with all the corollary injustice that this implies.
The government of Alvaro Arzú (1996–2000)
passed laws and created a judicial framework that
considerably weakened protection against dismissal and facilitated illegal hiring arrangements. The
practice of temporary hiring started to be applied
in a systematic way, creating the effect of tying
workers into a state of permanent job insecurity and consequently into conditions unfavorable
for the exercise of unionism. Simultaneously, the
institutions for the administration of justice faced
a process of politicization, weakening the rule of
law itself, so that the people came to distrust the
judicial system completely.
24
operaTION SofIa
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
During this period, the labor movement began to restrict its fights to battles that were clearly
union matters while instituting or increasing the
dues for representing workers in different areas,
meaning that their interests were separate from
the collective struggle. In 2004, the government
of Guatemala informed the Committee on Freedom of Association at the International Labour
Organization (ILO) that the membership of trade
unions stood at barely 0.49% of the economically
active population.
With the loss of socio-political vision from
the union movement in favor of an essentially
professional trade-union position, the movement shifted its focus from organized struggle in
favor of promoting important structural changes
to advance the elimination of the system of exclusion that has prevailed in Guatemalan society
since colonial times. The collectivism of the trade
union movement was viewed simply as an interim
or circumstantial strategy, responding to changes
that might negatively affect professional interests;
the social struggle, as such, was scattered and the
emphasis was on sectional interests.
Faced with increasing violence that aimed to
destroy trade unionism as a social agent, the main
measure taken by the Guatemalan government
has been to weaken the institutions responsible
for criminal prosecution. I refer to the removal
of the Fiscalía (public prosecution service) from
involvement in crimes against trade unionists and
journalists; this change took place on March 9,
2005, by general agreement of the Council of the
Ministerio Público (the public prosecutor’s Office). Parallel to the removal of the Fiscalía, the
government created a human rights section
within the Fiscalía General, charged with the role
of investigating and prosecuting those charged
with criminal acts committed against journalists,
trade unionists, those in the judiciary and human
rights activists, and all acts affecting collective
interests—especially those arising from action
carried out by the National Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)—crimes committed
by illegal bodies and clandestine structures, and
others. The elimination of the Fiscalía from
crimes against trade unionists and journalists,
and the creation of a section charged with investigating a range of crimes, including those committed against trade unionists, in practice reduces the
importance of such investigation, cuts the budget
targeted for the investigation of these crimes and
removes technical staff who would take care of
the investigation.
Currently, the unit for crimes against trade
unionists has only one reporter and one officer,
neither of them specialists, who must deal with
cases throughout the country, giving a clear indication of how sensitive and interested the government is in ending the current anti-union climate
of terror. However, in an act of hypocrisy to the
international community, before the supervisory
bodies of the ILO itself, the Government of Guatemala has presented the creation and operation
of this supposed “Fiscalía for crimes against trade
unionists and journalists” as a advance in curbing
acts of violence against unionists.
In this context, it should be noted that whenever
the Government of Guatemala has been singled
out by the supervisory bodies of the ILO for
The Army continues to intervene
to silence the
people’s voices
raised against
injustice, labor
exploitation,
plunder of natural resources and
environmental
destruction.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
“State repression during the years of
armed conflict has given way to another
kind of violence that also aims to perpetuate conditions of poverty and dependence
for more than 80% of the Guatemalan
population.”
tolerating or carrying out acts of violence against
trade unions, it has responded strategically, informing
them each time that it has created the Fiscalía for
crimes against unionists and journalists. This was
what happened in the Conference Committee
on the Application of Standards of International
Labour Organization in 2009, where the Government argued “that a specialized Fiscalía has been
created to investigate acts of violence against trade
unionists within the office of the Fiscalía General.”
The non-existence of the Fiscalía was personally
ascertained by the ILO High Level Mission that
visited the country in February 2009.
As noted by the ILO, the existence of an environment conducive to freedom of association and
collective bargaining requires the implementation
of legislation and best practice, as well as effective
institutions, including frameworks for the resolution of conflicts. Political will is essential to enact
adequate legislation and to achieve effective enforcement. The State of Guatemala ratified the ILO
Convention 87 in 1952, 58 years ago, and freedom
of association has been recognized in its law since
1947, 63 years ago. Between then and now, the
State of Guatemala has signed and ratified numberless instruments related to its willingness to
validate trade union rights before various international bodies, including the ILO, the Organiza-
tion of American States and United Nations. Treaties and trade agreements have been another instance
where the government has ratified its eternal
“good intentions” to comply with the rights related to freedom of association, such as, for example, the white paper titled The Labor Dimension
in Central America and the Dominican Republic:
Building on Progress: Strengthening implementation and enhancing capabilities; the Ministerial
Declaration adopted during the first ministerial
conference of the World Trade Organization (Singapore, 9–13 December 1996); the Fourth Ministerial Conference (Doha, 9–14 November 2001);
Chapter XVI of CAFTA; the GSP Plus between
Guatemala and the European Union; and many
others, no less significant.
To date, the situation has worsened primarily
with respect to the issue of violence, as is evidenced by observations from the supervisory bodies
of the ILO. The Committee of Experts on the
Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR)—the ILO’s regulatory control
body—has made representations to the State of
Guatemala over 17 years for serious violations
of Convention 87. These observations were continuous from 1999 to 2009. During all these years,
the government has also expressed the political
will to solve the serious violations of freedom of
association. However, concerned about the serious
impunity and increasing anti-union violence, the
main trade union organizations asked the Ministerio Público for a status report on investigations
into those cases involving crimes against trade
unionists, particularly the cases involving complaints filed by these organizations. The answer
given by the ministry was disconcerting: on
October 29, 2009, the Ministerio Público reported
that it did not keep a register of the cases of crimes
against trade unionists!
25
Risks to union activism in Guatemala
To the increasing incidents of violence, stigmatization processes, smear campaigns, impunity, and all the ways that express how Guatemalan
men and women are deprived of the conditions
necessary for the exercise of freedom of association, under the current administration, a new
and more dangerous form has been added, which
involves the use of exceptional mechanisms
designed to conserve public order as tools to
silence social protest.
Since 1986—the date when Guatemala formally
returned to democracy—until 2007, there has not
been a single government that has not made use of
the States of Alert or Emergency provided for by
the Public Order Act to break up struggles within
society.
During the Government of Colom alone, Public Order Act mechanisms for the exceptional
suspension of normal rule were used on 57 occasions to limit constitutional guarantees and going
as far as to legitimate the military’s involvement in
acts of repression against the organized people.
In the case of the strike by heavy vehicle
drivers, their struggle for basic labor claims was
thwarted by a State of Alert declared by the President of the Republic. In this case, the Army intervened against civil society.
The struggle of the people of San Juan Sacatepéquez against the installation of a cement quarry
without proper consultation with the community
in the municipality was also suppressed by a State
of Alert proclaimed by the President of the Republic of Guatemala. In this case also, the Army intervened against civil society. In the municipality
of Coatepeque in Quetzaltenango region, a State
of Alert was declared in order to suppress a protest by members of the Union of Independent
Traders of Coatepeque against the looting of
their goods, their being moved to a place that
did not meet the conditions necessary for them
to do their work and the murders of many of
the members of their Executive Committee
and even the organization’s advisor.
In the region of San Marcos, where there
was a fight against abuses by the electricity
distribution companies linked to the multinational Unión Fenosa, two States of Alert were
declared—one of which is still in force at the
time of writing—during which, eight community
leaders have been killed and numerous
search warrants issued against members of both
popular and trade union organizations.
This new pattern of repression is more
worrying inasmuch as it is expressed through
the abuse of rules provided under State Law,
justifying the silencing of social protest, legitimizing the use of excessive force within a legalformal framework, revealing the government’s
refusal to solve social problems by way of
dialogue. And more worrying still is the
request made by the Association of Binational
Chambers of Commerce of Guatemala, which
includes that of Spain, to declare a State of
Alert throughout the country based on the climate of widespread violence, in what appears
to be a suspicious agreement of opinion with
the Guatemalan Government. It should be noted that these mechanisms have been used in
four out of five cases to suppress actions headed by union-based organizations.
Weaving the Rainbow
Hear the embarrassing silence of its voice
the scream sigh of its dream
in the echo voice of its key
the marimba gathers in music
The notes of blood of the slaughtered people.
Maybe you are evil or unconscious
/barbarians
who kill your brothers
in cold blood?
Is it perhaps the core
That isn’t human
Oh marimba!
Keep playing the tunes that vibrate to
/infinity.
To the blue sky of spring
Oh Guatemala!
Never surrender ever
Or kneel to violence
so your cloths of a thousand colors
keep weaving in the rainbow of peace of
/your earth.
So never may the girl from Guatemala
Ever lose her green north
Oh Guatemala!
your dead leaders live in the roots of /your world tree*
its fruits have never have dried
Guatemala never again.
Copavic
*Ceiba: the Mayan world tree and the
national tree of Guatemala
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
Photographs of people “disappeared” during the armed conflict..
In conclusion, we can state:
• That acts of violence and other human rights
violations related to the exercise of freedom
of association have shown an alarming
increase since 2007, an increase that has
coincided with moves to form a Trade
Union Confederation of a socio-political
nature as the united effort of various union
and indigenous organizations in Guatemala.
• That violence and other human rights violations related to the exercise of freedom
of association in the period from 2007 to
January 2010 have impacted almost exclusively—over 90%—on organizations that
make up part of this emerging united front.
• That, at the date of this writing, in none
of the cases involving anti-union violence
have the actual perpetrators or the real
planners been convicted and sentenced,
which means that 100% of the cases can
be said to have gone unpunished.
• That this increase in the number of attacks
on trade unionists and the impunity that
surrounds them have been accompanied
by the exclusion of trade unions from
positions of representation of working men
and women in forums for social dialogue,
and also by the refusal of the Guatemalan
government to reply to questions about
these violations put before the regulatory
bodies of the International Labour Organization, a refusal that is based on arguments identical with those put forward
in the campaigns to smear and stigmatize
trade unions that do not support the
government.
• That the significant concentration of acts
of violence makes it highly unlikely that
these are the result of a random phenomenon, as would be the case in a climate of
generalized violence.
• That the acts of violence, discrimination,
stigmatization and other forms of trade
union repression at play in both the public
and the private sectors, are evidence of the
implementation of a strategy to prevent the
exercise of union rights, a situation that is
extremely dangerous in a country with a
weak democracy like Guatemala.
Finally, and as a corollary accompanying
the points above, we must draw attention to
the complicity of certain international actors.
Before signing the recent partnership agreement reached between Central America and
the European Union, the International Trade
Union Confederation (ITUC) proposed a series of recommendations to the negotiators,
in order to include issues relating to antiunion violence in countries like Guatemala, at the stage of deciding that agreement’s
terms. None of these recommendations was
taken into account, and priority was given
to economic issues over social and political
ones. The agreement managed to consolidate and improve access to many products,
such as bananas, sugar, meat, textiles, tuna
and rice. Within these products’ value chain,
however, what we do not know is what price has truly been placed on the lives of trade
unionists and trade union freedom.
C Rodrigo Abd, AP photographer.
26
“Exhumation in San Martin
Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango. Case Pachay Las Lomas.
Execution of sisters María
Elena and María Natalia
Álvarez Ajbal by the Guatemalan Army, August 20,
1981.”
Miguel Ángel Morales Reyes *
“Exhuming the remains of victims of armed
conflicts and locating secret and hidden burial
sites, wherever they are, is an act of justice
and reparation in itself and an important
step on the path of reconciliation.”1
B
etween 1960 and 1996, Guatemala experienced an internal armed conflict that affected the vast majority of its population. Large
numbers of civilians, counted in their thousands,
were killed, “disappeared” and displaced from
their birthplace, forced to live through one of
the country’s most repressive periods of living
memory.
In 1982 the Army implemented the plan
called “Victoria 82,” Annex H of which says:
“Subversion exists because a small group of people
support it and a large number of people tolerate
it, either through fear or because there are causes
that generate fear. The war must be fought in all
fields ... The people’s minds are the main objective.”2
Ríos Montt’s military plans filled Guatemala with secret cemeteries and made 1982 the
bloodiest year in the armed conflict.
As a result of the implementation of Victoria
82, all the communities that were within the scope
of operation of guerrilla groups were punished
by the Guatemalan Army by means of selective
murder or complete extermination, even though
in most instances they had no relation with the
guerrillas.
* Forensic anthropologist.
The truth underground
The exhumations in Guatemala, the
first step to acknowledging the truth
At the official start of Victoria 82, in June
1982, 5,000 Army troops “swept” the municipalities of Barillas, San Mateo Ixtatán, Nentón, San
Miguel Acatán and Jacaltenango in the department of Huehuetenango. In only eight days, between 12 and 19 July of that year, the Guatemalan Army executed more than 1,200 people
in accordance with its mission to destroy the
communities that it passed through completely and systematically, leaving Sebep, Xequel,
Yolcultac, Petanac, Bulej, Yalambojoch, San
Francisco and Yaltoya in ashes. The “scorched
earth” operation inflicted on these communities
in the Guatemalan highlands caused the maximum human damage possible and left behind a
string of unmarked graves, many of them now
exhumed.
The strategy was to spread terror and destroy
communities.
The fear continues
Paul Kobrak details the following: “on 13
July [1982] about 250 troops passed through the
hamlet of Xequel, San Mateo Ixtatán. They took
the inhabitants to a meeting in the nearby village of
Sebep ... [The captain] brought out a masked
guerrilla ... who passed through the crowd and
pointed: that one yes, that one no. Then the captain
selected another fifteen.” With these latter, the
captain created the Community Civil Self-Defense Patrol (PAC). Then he asked whether
they knew how to kill people? how to deal with
machetes? After that, he forced them to kill the
ones previously selected by the guerrilla, under
threat and with the aim of “ridding the community
of the taint of communism.”3 The victims, 17
men, were relatives, friends and/or neighbors
of those forced to commit these acts.
The testimonials collected from exhumed
victims’ relatives have shown that in at least
20% of these occurrences, the PACs were involved in killing people, either together with
elements from National Army or on their own.
Many of those patrolmen even continue living
alongside the families of the victims, meaning
that the families’ fear persists and the power of
the perpetrators is reinforced.
The Army’s strategy was to instill terror
among the communities, forcing the inhabitants to inform on probable collaborators with
or without foundation; they also prevented the
guerrilla forces from growing with the help of
those who survived these acts. This strategy
1
2
3
Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).
Cited Schirmer, Guatemala’s Military Project, 35-63.
Paul Kobrak, Huehuetenango: Historia de una Guerra (Guatemala
City: CEDFOG, 2003), 82.
27
THE TRUTH UNDERGROUND
C copy right CAFCA
X-X
— No, No, that’s not him.
—Yes, yes, it is.
—No, that’s not him. It isn’t possible
that this could be him.
—Look at the vaccination scar.
—No, that’s not him.
—Look at the crown on the tooth that
Miguel put in six months ago.
—No, that’s not him.
—I think that it is him. This time it is. —No, that’s not him.
Exhumation at San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango. Case
Sebep, 37 people dead, July 12, 1982.
generated a wave of unprecedented violence
and a large number of fatalities, turning the
land of Guatemalan into a field full of secret
graves.
The methods of killing used by the Army and
the PACs varied but are at the same time identifiable. Analyzing the bones recovered, the majority of
cases where the PAC patrolmen are identified as the
victimizers involved blunt trauma or blunt-force
incisions, people with features of asphyxia by
hanging or stoning. Cases where witnesses
identified the authors as personnel from the
National Army showed, in addition to the
above features, victims wounded by the impact
of projectiles from a firearm, usually associated
with skull and thorax, signs of cremation and/
or contusion wounds associated with the action
of explosive devices.
Forensic anthropology teams began working
at the request of victim organizations and the
families of the victims.
In the early 90s, groups that had arisen to
combat violence and impunity (CONAVIGUA, CERJ, GAM, among others) initiated
a series of calls for the investigation of the
secret cemeteries created during the internal
armed conflict, with the aim of finding their
missing relatives. Some of these cases were
dealt with by forensic doctors from the judiciary, but there was not the necessary follow
up. In 1992 they managed to contact Dr. Clyde
Snow, who, through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),
came to Guatemala with an international
team composed of members of the Argentine
Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) and Fo-
“With hundreds of graves still unopened, the exhumations performed
not only confirm the reports published by the Archdiocese Human
Rights Office (REMHI) and the United Nations (CEH), but go beyond
the information they contain.”
rensic Anthropology Group of Chile (GAF).
The first exhumations were carried out and a
group of Guatemalan archaeologists and anthropologists was trained and at that time organized into the Forensic Anthropology Team
of Guatemala (EAFG), going on to become the
Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) in 1997.
In the same year the Exhumation Team of
the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese
of Guatemala was founded —EAF/ODHAG—
which carried out numerous forensic-anthropological investigations up to 2000. In that year it
suspended its activities, resuming them in 2002
and closing again in 2008.
Between 1998 and 2001 in the area called Ixil,
in the north of El Quiché department, the Exhumation Team of the Diocese of El Quiché was at
work, focusing its activities in this area and performing over 100 exhumations. In 1999 the Center for Forensic Analysis and Applied Sciences,
CAFCA, was founded; the team has been working
steadily since then and has so far carried out a
total of 167 exhumations.
Together, all teams that have worked in
Guatemala up to the present day have managed
to recover, and return to their families, the
remains of more than 5,000 victims, who were
killed by a variety of causes during the political
How could it be him, if he has
/no eyes.
How could it be him, if he does not
/have his worker’s hands.
How could it be him, if they have cut
/off his seeds of manhood.
How could it be him, without his
/guitar and his song,
without that hard scowl in the face
/of danger,
without that smile while at work
without his voice expressing
/the thought,
without his foolish obsession
/about giving me flowers.
How could it be him.
It’s not him. I tell you, it isn’t him.
I do not want it to be him.
Manuel José Arce
(Guatemalan poet)
violence that afflicted the country, with more
than 80% of these deaths being referred to the
early years of the 80s, the most violent year
being 1982.
The data collected in forensic anthropological investigations not only corroborate the reports of the CEH and REMHI, but goes beyond the information contained in them. For
example, out of the cases exhumed in Guatemala, only about 45% were mentioned in any
of these reports, which significantly raises the
official figures for the number of acts and victims.
The agents of the Guatemalan State used
violence indiscriminately. This is reflected in
the results of these investigations, which show
that, for example, with regard to the sex of the
victims, at least 40% were female and, with
respect to age, 35% were in the age groups 0 to
15 and over 60. In summary, the victims of the
violence belonged to groups of the population
that were definitely civilian and non-combatant.
In this respect the CEH states that: “... arbitrary executions affected both men and women.
About a fifth of the victims were women. A significant percentage compared to the percentages
of women commonly victims in this type of conflict.”
28
operaTion SofIa
C copy right CAFCA
Over 90% of people whom the Army killed
in the Ixil area were non-combatant indigenous
people.
The data obtained from a forensic team working
in the area indicate that of the 291 victims
exhumed by them, 202 died from violent causes
and 74 by accident, disease or starvation. Responsibility for the violent deaths was attributed, from witnesses’ accounts, to the Army in
92.08% of cases.
In the four hardest years of conflict (19811984), according to the investigations of 34 cases
that took place in this period and according to
testimony, the Guatemalan Army killed 186
people in the Ixil area, only 15 of whom were
members of the guerrilla forces, which leaves
171 who were non-combatants, including women, the elderly, boys and girls, so that over
90% of the victims were non-combatant civilians.
On the other hand, 90% of those exhumed
came from places with high indigenous populations, making them one of the most affected
groups: El Quiché, Ixil, Canjobal, Chuj and also
Cakchiquel, Mam, and others, thus confirming
a similar trend reflected in the data presented
by the CEH and REMHI.
During the conflict the Ixil area was the
hardest hit by Army violence. The persecution
subjected communities to inhumane living
conditions that led to death.
From studies we know that nationally the
Ixil area had the highest proportion of violent
deaths in the armed conflict, with about 33%
of all victims having been killed in an identifiably violent context and in association with
evidence that supports this conclusion, such as
metal artifacts (firearm projectiles), remains of
sharp artifacts (knives and machetes) or devices
used as ligatures (ropes and cords).
Another important fact is that in this area,
for the total remainder of victims whose cause of
death cannot be established, ante mortem data
recovered show that at least 17% of them died
in conditions of persecution. This indicates not
only the intention to cause the physical extinction of the victims found at the scene, but also
that survivors were persecuted for the purpose
of extermination.
The context in which these victims died
is of particular importance, since, as reported
in various instances, these deaths were due to
displacement from their communities into
inhospitable areas where they had restricted
access to food and basic health services, owing
to the harassment that the State forces inflicted
on them.
By having escaped, many people died of
hunger. According to information obtained, the
leading cause of non-violent death during the
period 1981 to 1984 in the Ixil area was starvation, accounting for about 67% of cases. By
linking these data with those of the three areas
most affected by the conflict, we can conclude
that most of the people who died of starvation
in Guatemala between 1982 and 1984 were in
the Ixil area.
“If families want the exhumations
done, it will be necessary to follow
them closely, allowing for collective reflection on the part of the
people themselves, with the rituals
of their family or community.”
The exhumations have become a necessity
for a Guatemala that is seeking truth and
compensation to achieve reconciliation.
The exhumations carried out have given substance to the testimonies offered by
survivors, both in the official reports of the
CEH and REMHI, and also those compiled by
various institutions that have been working together with the communities since the signing
of the Peace Accords. The testimonies give the
location of secret gravesites, place and form of
burial, number of victims and their distribution with respect to sex and age, style and manner of death, thereby giving legal certainty to
the facts as told.
After more than 15 years of work, the exhumations in Guatemala are still going on and
continue to show that the nation needs this,
before there can be reconciliation and healing
for the families of those victims who, in most
cases, took no direct part in the conflict.
Currently, of the more than 1,500 cases investigated, only two have come to public trial and,
of these, only one has received sentence, leaving
the rest shelved and lost within the various offices
of the national Ministerio Público (public prosecutor). In none of the cases has the staff of the
Ministerio Público or of the Guatemalan courts
asked for any further information or confirmation
concerning any of the reports submitted by the
various experts working in Guatemala.
Burial, Chajul, El Quiché. Return of remains exhumed from
nine cases in the municipality; deaths took place in 1982, in
all cases by action of the Guatemalan Army. Total number of
victims: 23.
Indeed, as the CEH says, “The forensic anthropological investigation in the postwar context cannot be merely an administrative
formality, but must be a part of efforts to
solve a crime against life, be linked with very
deep human feelings and with cultural and
religious values.” For this reason the exhumations in Guatemala have been carried out along
with the offer of psycho-social care for the
victims’ families, so that the exhumation in
and of itself may become the beginning of a
healing process for families.
Finally, it is necessary to note that acknowledging the truth about the events that
occurred during the internal armed conflict has
gained more importance in recent years. The
exhumations carried out and the declassification of official documents, both nationally and
internationally, have revealed the truth lying
“underground” and the truth “on paper.”
In the wake of lawsuits filed in different
courts across the world with respect to human rights violations in Guatemala during that
period, and following social pressure on the
whereabouts of thousands of “disappeared”
people, the Government has been forced to
take certain steps to compensate for acts committed during the conflict. However, there is
still much to do.
Thousands of victims are still buried in mass
graves and their families are crying out to know
the truth of what happened. The recovery of their
remains and subsequent reburial in a dignified
and appropriate place are the first steps toward
being able to speak of peace in Guatemala.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010.
29
The prosecution of criminals
can restore the idea of justice
and open up a
collective hope that other
logics of power are possible.
Miryam Rivera Holgu’nI, Pau Pérez-SalesII,
Nieves GómezIII, Susana NavarroIV
S
ocieties that must confront political violence
cannot escape the political decision of whether or not to apply sanctions against the
perpetrators of crimes against humanity as indicated by international law.1 In 2005 the United
Nations system established that it was the inescapable duty of States to fight against impunity,2
rejecting the idea that political considerations of
a supposed good of greater order (social, political
or economic stability) could, under any circumstances, be accepted as justification for the absence
of justice in crimes against humanity.
In psycho-social terms, the issue of impunity
has been studied in depth and from multiple perspectives. We do not want to reiterate issues already treated extensively elsewhere, in contexts as diverse as Argentina, Chile, South Africa or Brazil.3
The search for truth and justice makes sense by
opening up the possibility of mending fractures
in countries with fragmented social bodies and
“allows victims to validate their pain and their
history. Justice favors processes for group cohesion, validation and sharing of history, for having a more critical view of the world and giving
the possibility of claims for reparation.4
Operation Sofia is a clear example of this, and
some aspects of it have been sifted elsewhere in these pages. For example, the issues of how it took the
approach of a dirty warówith training and consultancy from experts in psychological operations at
the School of the Americas5 and the intelligence
services of Israel and other countriesóand aimed to
* I Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru. Master’s in Community Psychology and
Community Action Group; IICommunity Action Group; III y IVCommunity Studies
and Psycho-social Action Team (ECAP).
The pain of impunity
A psycho-social look at impunity
Operation Sofia in Guatemala
break the social fabric of communities through the
militarization of everyday life, through the strategic
selection of individuals both as victims and victimizers, through techniques for creating co-responsibility and collective guilt through personal betrayal,
through forcing neighbors to destroy their neighbors’ crops and houses, etc. These are some examples of methods of fragmenting communities, used
as counter-insurgency strategy and social control,
that have left serious damage and consequences that
help to explain the high rates of violence in Guatemala today. They should also make us aware of the still
open wounds of the Mayan communities of the Ixil
area. The lack of healing comes from the impunity
with which the crimes were inflicted and the impunity that followed them how can principles of balance
and reciprocity within communities be maintained if
there is no kind of justice for past crimes and this lingers in people’s (trans-)generational memory?
Such a situation is exacerbated when impunity becomes the hallmark of post-conflict regimes,
where many of those responsible for human rights
atrocities have entered the political arena and been
elected to public office.6 Thus, a report presented to
the Inter-American Court on Human Rights on the
psycho-social effects of the non-application of justice in the case of the massacre at the village of Las
Dos Erres, La Libertad, Petén, showed that the survivors of the massacre have feelings of fury, rage,
anger, sadness, insecurity and depression related to the lack of investigation and of sanctions
against the guilty parties.7 These feelings, family
members say, derive from the perpetrators’ impunity and the lack of justice, as well as the presence
in positions of power of people accused of serious
human rights violations. They state that the absence
3
1
See R. I. Rotberg & D. Thompson (2000). Truth versus Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press); M.
S. Weissmark (2004). Justice Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
C. Hesse and R. Post (1999). Human Rights in Political Transitions:
Gettysburg to Bosnia (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books).
2 Defined as “the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the
perpetrators of violations to account whether in criminal, civil, administrative or disciplinary proceedings since they are not subject to
any inquiry that might lead to their being accused, arrested, tried and,
if found guilty, sentenced to appropriate penalties, and to making reparations to their victims,” in “Updated Set of principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through action to combat impunity,” United Nation, 2005: E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1, available online at
http://derechos.org/nizkor/impu/principles.html.
See D. Kordon, L. Edelman, D. Lagos, D. Kersner (2005): Efectos psicológicos y psicosociales de la represión política y la impunidad. De la dictadura a la actualidad (Buenos Aires: Ed. Madres de la Plaza de Mayo);
B. Loveman and E. Lira (2002): El espejismo de la reconciliación política. Chile 1990-2002 (Santiago de Chile: Ed. LOM); R. A. Wilson (2001):
The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Legitimizing the
post-apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); C. Rauter et al. (2002): Clinico e Politica: Subjetividade e violaçao dos direitos
humanos (Rio de Janeiro: Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais).
4 N. Gómez (2009). Peritaje psicosocial por violaciones a derechos humanos (Guatemala City: ECAP and F. & G. Editores).
5 See http://www.viejoblues.com/escuelamericas.htm; www.psicosocial.net (Centro Documentación: Control Social).
6 C. Menjívar and N. Rodríguez (2005). When States Kill: Latin America,
the U.S., and Technologies of Terror (Austin: University of Texas Press).
7 Gómez, Peritaje psicosocial por violaciones a derechos humanos.
30
operaTion Sofia
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010.
of justice has led to loss of opportunities for victims,
survivors and families, going beyond the impact of
the massacre, ruining all their life plans, and that impunity prevents these consequences from being dealt
with directly.
Elements such as fear, mistrust, stigmatization,
discrimination, lack of social and political participation, as well as exclusion, breakdown of forms of citizen participation, the collapse of community, social
and cultural support mechanisms, are all factors that
mark the life of these communities,8 and that is precisely what is currently seen in the entire Ixil population
who suffered violence. These multiple forms and sideeffects of violence still determine daily life in Guatemala and show systematic patterns that, furthermore,
differentially affect men and women in situations of
discrimination.9
The first way to come closer to the idea of justice
for the whole of society is openly to ask those who
constitute it: What should be done with the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights? In a review of
sociological studies in over 40 countries from different parts of the world, it was possible to see that the
answers in every country were based on four groups
of factors: (a) to what extent the population viewed it
as genuinely feasible for prosecutions to be brought
and conducted under the current government; (b) the
confidence they had in the impartiality of the judiciary
of the country at the time; (c) the perception of whether this process might involve risks of reawakening
the conflict; and (d) the perception of risks to personal
safety of a hypothetical complainant victim.10
International data show how, in spite of different
factors, between 48% and 75% of the population in
countries as different as Bosnia, Chile, South Africa,
Ghana or Uganda supported bringing the perpetrators to justice. In other words, in those societies
affected by political violence, the majority of society
aspires to justice. Guatemala is no exception: in 2009,
ECAP and GAC published a sociological study on
perceptions of truth, justice and reparation in Guatemala viewed through individual interviews with more
than 1,200 people in 20 regions around the country.
72.8% of Guatemalans felt that there had to be punitive justice against the perpetrators. Only 10.7% of
Guatemalans believe it is better to do nothing, resign
themselves, forgive and forget, and 7.7% proposed
imposing moral punishment or letting time or God
be their judge. There is a majority desire for justice,
but not without skepticism. Thus, for example, comments included: “But the law doesn’t work” (male, 18,
Huehuetenango); “Justice is only for the rich, I don’t
believe in the justice system” (female, 36, San Marcos);
“Punish them but nothing is done, the law is for those
with money” (male, 51, El Progreso, rural area); “It
would help those who suffered as well as those who
didn’t; we would end up with violence if we imposed
justice” (man, Maya speaker, 40, Alta Verapaz); “If we
imposed justice, those responsible won’t do the same
8
I. Martín Baró (1990). Psicología social de la guerra: Trauma y terapia
(El Salvador: UCA).
C. Menjívar (2008). Violence and women’s lives in eastern Guatemala: A conceptual framework. Women and International Development
(Michigan State University, Working Paper 290). Available online at:
http://www.wid.msu.edu/resources/papers/pdf/WP290.pdf
10P. Pérez-Sales (2009). “Estudios sociológicos sobre Verdad, Justicia y
Reparación en el contexto de violencia política. Circunstancias sociopolíticas, iniciativas y resultados,” in ECAP/GAC, Exhumaciones, verdad, justicia y reparación en Guatemala. Estudio de opinión (Guatemala City: F&G Editores).
11S. Navarro and P. Pérez-Sales (2007). “¿Por qué las exhumaciones no
conducen a procesos de justicia en Guatemala?” Cejil, magazine. No.
3, Argentina.
9
“72.8% of Guatemalans believe the
perpetrators of crimes during the
conflict should be brought to justice”.
again, but that doesn’t happen in Guatemala” (female, 30, Guatemala City); “There can be no peace if the
Accords are not honored. If justice is fulfilled, it will
help us to live better later on. It will happen if the past
is known” (man, Maya speaker, 38, El Quiché).
In this study data were broken down separately
for direct victims (those who had a “disappeared” family member, who had been suffered prison, torture
or displacement). These victims were more moderate when it came to considering the desire for justice
and expressed greater fear and distrust. The fact is that
fewer than one percent of the more than one thousand massacres unearthed so far in Guatemala have
led to trials in the pursuit of justice. While from outside there is a clear message that that justice should be
attained, the reality is that the Guatemalan State and
the Ministerio Público (public prosecutor) have so far
failed to fulfill the legal principle of performing their
office and have left the burden of investigation and
bringing cases to the victims’ own families, in contravention of international laws and obligations signed
by the country. However, there are countries such as
Argentina and Chile where the judicial route is open,
and others like Peru and Colombia where they are
starting to open, albeit with limitations. In Guatemala, justice is the major unresolved issue. And the victims are perfectly aware of it.
Why, after the exhumations, are the trials
not starting in Guatemala?
The Team for Community Studies and Psycho-social
Action (ECAP) and the Community Action Group
(GAC) carried out a study in Rabinal as part of the
same research project, which analyzed the reasons why
processes of exhumation almost never led to a subsequent prosecution, using focus groups. These threw
up three groups of reasons why families did not ini-
Police officers taking away students from San Carlos
University who were protesting against state violence.
Guatemala City, 1985.
tiate proceedings: (1) Personal reasons related to fear,
feeling alone, fear of retaliation from the perpetrators
and the political framework, the need to act collectively and not as individual victims and to feel support
from the authorities; (2) Reasons linked to social and
political context, related to the confusion over whether
to report the actual person who murdered or “disappeared” the family member or the commanders who
gave the orders; (3) Reasons related to perceiving some
social and media pressure toward “reconciliation,” the
dissuasive role of religion; (4) Reasons related to having
little knowledge of positive experiences of using the judicial system such as the case of the massacre caused
by the Sánchez plan or other cases where the victims
had achieved justice; (5) Reasons related to the complexity of the judicial process itself in Guatemala including ignorance of how to go about it, lack of practical
access for people living in rural areas, in a precarious
economic situation and unable to bear the costs, lack of
confidence in the judge, and skepticism that after years,
threats and efforts, the results would probably be only
minimally positive or lead to a new form of harm.11
Not surprisingly, therefore, the study shows that
while the majority of the population (particularly
people in the capital, who have not been victims, Spanish-speaking, educated and young people) believe
that truth, justice and reparation must happen at the
same time and together, there is a group of people (including most of the victims interviewed) which was
in favor of finding out the truth and of reparation to
victims, but considered that trials could not or should
not be initiated with a view to obtaining justice. In
Guatemala, the data indicate that the victims view
justice as something so unattainable that they do not
even envision it as a possibility. And this perception
is not a result of damage caused by the victimization
itself, it is, as we have seen, the reality in the country
as shown by the data. It is interesting to observe that
among the reasons referred to by people in Guatemala for supporting the exhumations as part of the sear-
31
THE PAIN OF IMPUNITY
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010.
Presidential Sermon
The Army passed and in the pretty
little town that used to be a tourist attraction
on the multicolored postcards, no wall still stood
or anyone to tell of it:
the bodies of pregnant girls were
found
with the fetus peering from the belly
wound.
Boys of five years old and less were
found
hanging from their guts on the branches of a tree.
The village elders,
Venerable,
were beheaded in the square opposite the church.
Not a single one was left to tell the tale.
Not even dogs.
And today, Monday, the press, radio
and television
repeated the Sunday sermon
by the President
ógeneral and evangelical pastoró
who started, saying:
”God is Love, brothers ...”
Manuel José Arce
(Guatemalan poet)
ch for truth, there is no mention of “reconciliation,”
a word that crops up so often in political discourse.
Despite great pressure from the media, politicians,
and the Church, the discourse of “reconciliation”
does not permeate society as might be hoped in the
visions of politicians.
Perhaps one reason is that experience has shown
victims that the association of pardon/amnesty “reconciliation” is a huge fraud. Here are just two examples: Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira showed, in
a comprehensive and minutely documented study,
how in Chile the many successive processes of amnesty and impunity that took place between 1814 and
1994 not did not serve to achieve that abstract and
indefinite ideal of “reconciliation,” but were actually the cause of cycles of violence-amnesty-impunity-violence that have dominated Chile’s history since
its foundation, which created a collective social concept of amnesty for soldiers and perpetrators as the
“logical” route to reconciliation.12 Secondly, a recent
study published in Colombia analyzes the repentant confessions of the perpetrators of crimes against
humanity from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and South
Africa; the impact of the confessions on the victims
and relatives; and the consequences of the trials in
12B.
Loveman and E. Lira (2000). Las suaves cenizas del olvido, Vol I:
1814-1932; Vol. II: 1932-1994.
13Leigh Payne (2009). Testimonios perturbadores: ni verdad ni reconciliación en las confesiones de violencia de estado (Bogotá: Universidad de
los Andes, CESO).
14George Bizos (1998). No one to blame? In pursuit of justice in South
Africa (Cape Town: David Philip).
15B. Flanigan (1992). Forgiving the Unforgivable (New York: Macmillan).
16Jean Améry (1966). Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne; trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on
Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
Fleeing in terror,
the people left the
streets of Nebaj
empty.
the medium and long term.13 Its subtitle sums up the
findings in a single phrase: “neither truth nor reconciliation in confessions of state violence.” Both this
study and some originating from the Commission in
South Africa14 point to the danger and damage in terms of victims’ mental health caused by the absence
of Justice, and that Truth not only does not replace
Justice, but that it can worsen the consequences of
impunity.15 And this is something that many of the
victims live with in Colombia today when, in public
hearings, they hear that the perpetrators are availing
themselves of Law 970, called the Justice and Peace
Law, which provides for maximum sentences of up
to 3 years for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity if they confess the crimes committed; so far
and despite the hundreds of hearings where victims
had to testify and listen, these hearings have still not
produced a single effective case of conviction.
Living with impunity
Beyond opinions, the data show that the possibility
of access to finding out the facts and who planned
them brings to light the social fractures (crevasses)
and that after revealing them it is essential for the social body to be able to address what has come to light.
When the social body is not ready or willing, revealing such evidence often strikes and hurts those who
were already wounded. Living with shameful impunity makes people who have been sinned against
relive their pain and heightens it and even in some
cases makes it feel like a mockery. This has been raised by victims within the context of the work of the
Commission of Truth and Reconciliation in Peru,
and similar views are expressed in the forums where
victims have been able to speak in Guatemala (ODHAG, 1998). In several cases, even the victim’s own
family or community assume that the complaint and
the search for justice have been in vain and they express it openly, further wounding and often isolating
the person who was and still is a victim. Thus impunity not only presents itself as the absence of access
to justice but it also hurts and it harms the possibility
of initiating future trials to search for truth, sets the
stage for future violence, and conduces to climates
and contexts which foster violence and transgression.
Jean Améry, a German concentration camp survivor,
recalled that, faced with an attitude of resignation and
looking away on the part of most people in post-war
Germany in the interests of pragmatism, he claimed
the right of victims to resentment as something legitimate. Resentment toward the perpetrators, but also
toward a society that accepted looking the other way
and knew that there were torturers still holding responsible positions in politics and business.16
Cases of criminal prosecution (Pinochet in Chile,
Fujimori in Peru or the trials of the military junta in
Argentina) do, however, allow for the consolidation of
a social concept which restores the idea of seeking justice, participation, institutions, security and creation of
democratic spaces, and thus opens up some collective
hope that there may be other logics of power.
Finally, from a psycho-social point of view it is
necessary to propose a self-critical perspective of the
human rights movement’s work to promote “no to
impunity,” which often presents a logic of “pushing”
cases toward the clarification of truth and the pursuit
of justice, including in this mechanism encouragement
or acceleration of the victims’ own process of moving
toward complaint. When, in contexts such as Guatemala and Peru, the right conditions are not present,
this may entail a revictimization of those affected. This
means that it is necessary to provide interdisciplinary backup that is closely tied to the victims’ needs.
The long road between the complaint and the trial itself
and the subsequent imposition of the sentence (over)exposes the person, not only in terms of security, but
also through reliving harmful experiences, bringing the
past to mind, and questioning his or her behavior at the
time of the aggression, calling up difficult situations in
a context that may be new (new partner, new children,
new job, new community), etc. It is therefore necessary, in contexts of impunity as complex as those in
Guatemala, to maintain a psycho-judicial approach to
supporting the cases. And to remember that the search for justice is not the victims’ task. Impunity (close companion of indifference) is not only shelving the
case, but is also what many citizens do today: not listening, not paying attention, not reporting, not considering that the issues of transgression and violation of
human rights are part of a shared agenda. This subject
is not only the province of judges and prosecutors, it is
also part of everyday life. Impunity not only “attacks”
the victims, it affects all citizens, indeed the very notion of being part of a group and therefore being part
of a national project. Améry spoke of this 50 years ago
in post-Hitler Germany and it should be remembered
today in post-R’os-Montt Guatemala when reading
the documents of Operation Sofia.
C Lorena Pajares
32
“Land distribution in
Guatemala is one of the
most unjust in the continent.
Only 23.6% of farms are
in the hands of indigenous
people, who are the majority
of the population, and about
6.5% of plots are controlled
by women. A few families,
headed by non-indigenous
men, own 70% of the land.
Pablo Ceto *
The signing of the peace in 1996 stands as a
historic date between the exclusive colonial
past and the inclusive and plural future
I
t is very important to talk about the Guatemala Peace Accords, signed on December
29, 1996, because they closed 36 years of internal armed conflict, ushering in a process of
great transformations as part of a project shared
between Guatemalan society’s social, economic
and political forces and state. They also laid the
groundwork for continuing to bring an end 500
years of dispossession, exclusion and exploitation of indigenous peoples, and to move toward
the construction of a new country with rights
for all men and women.
In the Agreement on Identity and Rights of
Indigenous Peoples, signed on March 31, 1995,
the Guatemalan State is obliged, for the first time
since 1524, to recognize the existence of the Mayan, Garifuna and Xinca Peoples and to sit with
their representatives to address issues of vital importance for the future of the country. This is a
historic victory, the fruit of 500 years of indigenous resistance on one side and, on the other,
the efforts of progressive sections of society and
the revolutionary movement that, since 1960, has
sought to resume the advances of the democratic
decade, which began with the fall of Jorge Ubico’s
dictatorship in 1944 and was interrupted by the
American intervention in 1954.
Following the nationalist military officers’
uprising against President Idígoras Fuentes on
* Pablo Ceto. Ixil Mayan. Agronomist. General Coordinator of the Mayan foundation, FUNDAMAYA. Former congressman in Guatemala’s Congress (2000-2004)
for the URNG party.
A New Dawn
The plural Guatemala of the Peace Accords
against the State’s current racism and weakness
Reflections on the recent past and immediate future
of Guatemala
November 13, 1960, the Indigenous Peoples of
Guatemala initiated the revolutionary armed
struggle. This became the continuation of their
centuries-long resistance, accelerated their political consciousness of the need for a new country,
made up of Indian and ladino, men and women,
and enabled them to go about creating their own
role. They played a part that contributed decisively here and also elsewhere, winning important recognition such as the creation of the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala.
This meant that the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala became new political actors in the country,
within a context of social and political dynamics
of large movements, of intense political activity in
different regions of the country to assert their
rights, of an upward and generalized revolutionary
guerrilla struggle. In an international situation
conducive to peace and respect for human rights, the
movement 500 Years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance, held its Second Continental Meeting
in Quetzaltenango on October 12, 1991.
It is this historical, social, political and indigenous peoples’ force that has made viable dialogue
and negotiation between four successive governments of Guatemala and the Guatemalan National
Revolutionary Unity (URNG - Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca). It obliged the
state to accept the recognition of the existence of
the Mayan, Garifuna and the Xinka Peoples in the
Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous
Peoples of March 31, 1995, and, 10 years later, to
sign the Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace
of December 29, 1996, approving the Framework
Law of Peace Agreements (Decree 52-2005).
However, 14 years on from that historic date, the
hoped-for changes have not yet arrived.
What has turned Guatemalan peace into a wilted
plant?
In trying to ascertain why the Guatemalan State has
failed to honor the Peace Accords over the past 14
years, we should start by saying that, as surely occurs in all processes of civil war, some forces were
in favor of its ending while others were not.
While the URNG opened the way to dialogue
and negotiation, the economic, political and military sectors were at odds among themselves over the
business that would result from the peace. Some
were in favor of peace and others against it, all for
the benefits they would obtain or would stop obtaining, but they did not debate the causes of armed
conflict of course.
This contradiction—added to the fact that the
Guatemalan Army had nothing more to show for
its huge mobilization of troops and military equi-
33
A NEW DAWN
C copy right de CAFCA
pment than the genocide committed against the
indigenous communities and not defeat of the revolutionary guerrilla ranks—partly explains why
the peace was not signed until 1996, nine years after the first meetings between the URNG and the
government of Vinicio Cerezo in 1987.
A rapid review of the Governments that have
been in power during these years of peace shows
how these and other elements explain the failure
of the Peace Accords.
Peace was signed in 1996 with the government
of Álvaro Arzú who won the presidency in the
general elections in November 1995. Joint commissions were established for the Agreement on
Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples and
others for the implementation of Peace Accords.
However, in 1999, mistakes on the part of the
trade union, campesino and popular movement, of
social and political organizations and the lack
of a clear endorsement from the incumbent
government, meant that the Peace Accords’
constitutional reforms were not approved in the
referendum of May of that year.
In the next government, 2000-2004, Alfonso Portillo tried to implement tax reforms,
closing loopholes and removing tax privileges, but
business’s controlling interests ended up imposing
a rise of 10 to 12% in the value-added sales tax. He
also attempted some measures against certain monopolies in the country’s economic sectors, but finally his FRG government sank in corruption. As
for the Guatemalan Congress, on issues related to
the contents of the Peace Accords: it adopted the
definition of ethnic discrimination in a reform to
Article 202 of the Penal Code (Decree No. 17-73);
it also achieved some improvements in the decentralization laws, which incorporated recognition
of the country’s multicultural reality and of institutions such as the Indigenous Authorities and
approval of the National Language Act.
Oscar Berger, representing the country’s cane
and sugar sector, began his term of office in 2004. It
is hard to record any acts by that government that
related to compliance with the Peace Accords. It initiated some mega-projects, such as the road to the
Northern Transversal Strip. People’s insecurity grew
significantly in all corners of the country.
In 2008 the government of Álvaro Colom, the
current President, took over, after winning the
2007 general election with a majority of the
vote from the indigenous, peasant and rural
population, probably in response to his electoral pledges to benefit the most vulnerable sectors
and deal with problems of lack of security, facing
off against a military opponent with “firm hand”
policies. At the beginning of his term in January
2008, he declared a social democratic government
and offered a government with a Mayan face.
Two aspects of the current government are
positive: on the one hand, there is support for the
most dispossessed sections of society, with programs of social cohesion, and, on the other, it has
made an effort to declassify information about
the Army from during the internal armed conflict, such as the 1982 Operation Sofía in the Ixil
region, where the Army committed more than 58
massacres.
However, weighing against it are its policy of
Zero Information and Zero Consultation with
the Indigenous Peoples in relation to the exploi-
“The conservative and racist mentality of the Guatemalan state and
society toward indigenous peoples
make it more difficult and complex
to build a plural and inclusive Guatemala.”
tation of natural resources in indigenous territories, where it is favoring multinational companies. There is a total of more than 400 licenses,
clearly endorsed or promoted by the previous
and the current governments. This is a violation
of the rights of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala by the state and multinational companies.
The situation has been highlighted by a variety of international organizations, which have
also asked for the suspension of licenses for exploration and exploitation of mines and of water
resources for the construction of hydroelectric
installations.
President Álvaro Colom continues to disregard
popular demonstrations in Guatemala, international complaints and petitions, as well as ignoring
the most recent demands of the global celebration
of Mother Earth day and the summit in Bolivia of
indigenous peoples to defend Mother Nature. For
example, he has extended the operating license to
the oil company Perenco in the Protected Area
Laguna del Tigre, in the Petén Region, despite the
resignation of his Minister of Environment and
Natural Resources, precisely because of his opposition to this extension. This company, like other
multinational companies, grants the State of Guatemala just 1% in royalties from the profits they
declare, without any form of compensation for
the substantial environmental, social and cultural
damage that they cause.
It is clear that in these years of peace building,
the Guatemalan State, far from being strengthened
to ensure the common good that the Political
Constitution sets out, has been weakening: tied
to various powers, impunity and corruption are
daily eating away at it, it is more and more subject
Burial of the 80 victims massacred by the Army in April
1981 in Cocop, Nebaj, El Quiché.
to the interests of multinational corporations and
has abandoned its commitments in the Peace Accords.
In the case of the Indigenous Accord, out of
51 commitments, only 14% have been fulfilled
to a significant extent, 34% have been partially
fulfilled and 49% unfulfilled. State agencies over
the years have suffered deterioration in their
function, rather than being strengthened and expanded with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996.
In other words, since the signing of the peace in
1996 to date, neither the traditional economic sectors
nor the military counter-insurgency have addressed
the substance of the Accords, and they have been repositioning themselves over the past years within state
structures, with their intelligence networks, paramilitary arms and various business interests started during the internal armed conflict, as is evidenced by the
most recent denunciations of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
Neither have the new economic groups that
support the current government, or are benefiting
from it, taken on board the goals of the Peace Accords. This situation, along with the conservative
and racist mentality of the Guatemalan state and
society toward the indigenous peoples, makes it
more difficult and complex to build a plural and
inclusive Guatemala.
Faced with this political situation, there is still
no popular, social force, nor is there a political organization with the ability to counter the political
inertia of the Guatemalan state in short order.
Fortunately there is a growing indigenous
peasant movement, as well as numerous women’s
and youth organizations, which exert a wider and
more diverse social supervision and monitoring of
the state. More than 40 municipalities have conducted community consultations in good faith,
within the framework of the application of ILO
Convention 169 and the recent United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
where they have rejected mining and hydroelectric
projects.
34
operaTion Sofia
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
Military
control of
daily life.
I’m alive like ripe fruit ...
I’m alive
like ripe fruit
mistress, now, of winters and summers,
grandmother of birds,
weaver of the sailing wind.
My heart has not yet been educated,
and, a girl, I tremble at nightfall,
I am dazzled by green, marimbas
and the noise of the rain
matched with my wet belly
when everything is softer and brighter.
I grow and do not learn to grow,
I am not disillusioned,
Nor do I come back a woman wrapped
/in veils,
disbelieving everything, bewailing her lot.
No. Each day, my eyes are born anew
/with wonder,
birthed by the earth,
the singing of the villages,
the arms of the worker building,
the storekeeper with her bunch of children,
the happy kids walking toward school.
Yes.
It is true that sometimes I’m sad
and go out to the roads,
as loose as my hair,
and cry for sweeter and more tender
/things
and cherish memories
sprouting between my bones
and I am an endless spiral that twists
between moons and suns,
moving by day,
unrolling time
with fear or impudence,
unsheathing stars
to climb higher, farther up,
giving chase to the air,
rejoicing in the being that sustains me,
in the eternal tide of ebbs and flows
that moves the universe
and that drives earth’s round whirls.
I’m the woman who thinks.
Someday
my eyes
will light fireflies.
Gioconda Belli
(Nicaraguan poet)
On the other hand, the psychological warfare
has been prolonged, as has the persistent alienation of the population with respect to the changes necessary for Guatemala. They are still burdened with the effects of the terror, the forced
disappearances of leading men and women, and
the dismantling of social and community organizations conducted by the Army and the domi-
nant economic sector during the internal armed
conflict.
In summary, we can say that, despite all the obstacles, in recent years the social, trade union, campesino, popular and community movement has
been experiencing a process of revival, re-articulation, revitalization, which is the strategic force for
redirecting course to build a new Guatemala. Important efforts in restructuring and unifying democratic, progressive and revolutionary political forces
are opening new prospects and expectations.
The Guatemalan indigenous movement,
before and after the signing of the peace
The Guatemalan indigenous movement had one
of its periods of greatest growth and militancy during the 1990s, when there was a coming together
of dialogue and negotiation between the Government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary
Unity (URNG), along with the favorable climate
created by the campaign 500 Years of Indigenous,
Black and Popular Resistance (500 Años de Resistencia Indigena, Negra y Popular). However, the
indigenous movement in its many and diverse manifestations did not manage to marshal either sufficient organization or mobilization to extend these
and make more gains in the negotiations opened up
by the joint committees of the Indigenous Accord.
After a low in organization, mobilization and
proposals, in recent years there has been abundant growth in the community and local organization of Indigenous Peoples.
There are new initiatives all the time: Followup to initiatives in the law concerning the rights of
indigenous peoples in Guatemala’s Congress has
opened up a space for the recognition of Mayan
law in the judicial system and, although it is only
a start, this is significant. There is also an attempt
to organize a political party with predominantly
indigenous membership. Other communities and
organizations are struggling for access to Mother
Earth; for higher wages and better working conditions on farms; for technical, commercial and credit
assistance to improve their crops and products; and to
give greater momentum to awareness in the country’s
indigenous communities and in important
progressive sections of society of the need to defend
Mother Nature’s rich biological diversity and goods.
There is also a political scheme of indigenous revolutionary militants around the 13 Baktun Political
Council, which seeks to recapture the revolutionary
aspirations that inspired the revolutionary insurgency in the middle of the last century and the heroic
indigenous resistance during the colonial period and
to date. It claims the right of indigenous peoples to
participate with their own identity in the great changes that Guatemala needs, taking as a starting point
the content and goals of the Peace Accords.
We may conclude that there are many initiatives, a lot of organization in all parts of the country, despite the reactivation of civil patrols by the
Portillo and Ríos Montt governments that carries
on, despite the repression against campesinos and
communities struggling to defend their rights
and natural resources and to oppose the imposition of multinational companies’ mega-projects, as
recently happened in San Juan Sacatepequez, Izabal
and San Marcos.
Some see this situation of organizational growth
in the indigenous communities as a major fragmentation of the indigenous movement, while others
feel that the most important thing is to have as many
seeds as possible germinating and shoots sprouting
after the terror imposed by the 600 massacres, the
440 missing villages, and the 200,000 Guatemalans
disappeared by the Guatemalan Army during the
recent internal armed conflict.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons that
we are learning, in addition to the social and political organizational renewal is that, as in former times
our ancestors fought, it is now our turn to follow
the path started with the Mayan, Xinca, Garifuna
and Popular resistance, together with whole range of progressive, democratic and revolutionary
sections of society and organizations. We must carry
on building up our energy and strength on the way
to transformation of the colonial, exclusionary and
racist State, aware that there are no single roads,
single organizations or institutions. There is seed,
much seed sown in the fields, regions and municipalities, there are more and more green shoots and
construction of the future is under way.
C Jean-Marie Simon/2010
Seeds against
forgetting
35
There is seed, plenty of seed sown
in the fields and regions of Guatemala. There are more and more
green shoots and building the
future is under way.
Fundación Madrid Paz y Solidaridad
A
fter analyzing the documents that make up the
plans for Operation Sofía, we can draw a series
of conclusions that are hard to express but cannot remain unsaid. What the plans behind Operation
Sofía show is that the crimes committed in Guatemala between July and August 1982 in the Ixil area
were not the result of the excesses of some military
or paramilitary personnel with a particular animus
against the indigenous people, or the result of isolated acts committed by an unscrupulous minority
in the Army who were exceptional in torturing or
raping girls. What is clear from the plans is that the
genocide of the Mayan people was the result of a
military campaign designed coldly and in detail in
the offices of the military administration of General
Efra’n R’os Montt. The mother of the military plans
designed at national level by the President’s advisers
was called the National Plan of Campaign “Victoria
82” (“Victory 82”) and her favorite daughter for the
Ixil area, the plan for Operation Plan “Sofía.”
It is painful to admit that those involved in Operation Sofía gained promotions for their cruelty, which that the Army turned into “valor”; that they were
honored for hands bloody from the killing of defenseless civilians, women, girls and boys turned into “enemies of the nation” because they said so; that they were
supported in their torture, titled in the military plans
themselves “tactical interrogation” and that usually led
to death; that they were trained in rape and sexual violation committed systematically on the bodies of women, who were transformed by the School of Military
Studies and the Victoria 82 Campaign Plan itself into
objects of entertainment for the troops and the most
vulnerable battlefield on which to attack the “enemy”
and destroy them. In order to perform such violent
practices it seems essential to create the idea that “we”
are confronting “them,” who are different and inferior.
We can only wonder when the Mayan concept of Inlakesh—“you are me, I am you”—was banished from
Tierra de Árboles?
It is impossible to hide the fact that those who
drew up the plans received international support
to annihilate the “friends of Nicaragua and Cuba.”
Everything was thought out in advance so that the
international crimes planned and executed faithfully
by an Army without moral inhibitions, would be
glossed over with the excuse that they were dealing
a brutal and decisive blow to the guerrillas, and in order to satisfy the country’s exploitative oligarchy and
states who had exported the ideology, the methods
of torture, the resources and weapons—notably the
United States and Israel—with the defeat of “international communism.” And in any case, everyone involved in the government crimes was very proud of the
successes achieved on the bodies and in the minds of
defenseless Guatemalan men and women in erasing
“the mark of Indian” or, at least, of the benefits for
those who aimed to “whiten the race.”
The persistence of racism, exclusion and structural
injustice that prevents the majority of the population
not only from gaining access to and control of resources, but also from defending their fundamental rights;
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the growing violence against women, attacks against
human-rights defenders, trade unionists and peasant
leaders; and the devastating effects of businesses’ neoliberal policies (mega-projects): all of these underscore
the need for research into what happened in Guatemala during the armed conflict in connection with what
is happening now. Has the armed conflict in Guatemala really ended? Why is the reporting of injustices still being criminalized? Who today defines the interests
of Guatemala? Are we still seeing the same methods
of repression used during the conflict to silence those
who want to change the unjust status quo for the vast
majority? Who made sure at any cost that the freedom
to plunder and loot was preserved? In whose interest
is it that Guatemala carries on being an impoverished
country? What today is forcing the indigenous peasant
population to become displaced? Could it be that Guatemala is a setting that sometimes changes owners but
always seeks to control and drive out the same people?
It is possible that at present a second part of those
military plans is being implemented in a land already
burned by order of the Army and now pock-marked by the dynamite used to extract mineral resources without the consent of the people. Just as most of
the international community looked the other way as
200,000 innocent people were killed, it is silent today in the face of this second stage of the plundering
of resources and lives. Surely greed has limits? There have been no limits for the criminals, since none
of those in positions of command who planned and
gave the orders for genocide has been brought to
trial, and only a single soldier has been convicted of
just eight of the 45,000 “disappearances.”
The situation challenges us and reminds us of
all the innocent people killed in Guatemala when,
in the words of Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo, they just wanted to “live life and not die it.” His
poems, along with those of other poets—many of
them killed or exiled—accompany the articles here
along with the magnificent pictures that Jean-Marie
Simon took during the armed conflict. There are
thousands of seeds sown in the fields of Guatemala that remind us what happened—so that it is not
forgotten, so that there is justice, so that it is not
repeated.
Genocide, never again!
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Testimony from participants at the First Meeting “Genocide, the
ultimate expression of racism,” Guatemala, 2004.
Let us know our past to punish all this
country’s genocides.
Let us unite to demand Justice.
I don’t feel well,
there is a lot of pain
in my heart.
No more hatred
between brothers
and sisters, may
peace and justice
rise for all.
No more genocide or racism!
We want Peace
first, so that our
rights are not violated.
Community Mural done by women at “El Incienso,” Guatemala City, coordinated by the artist A. C. G. Cabezas.
No more massacres. No more violence against women.
No more women raped. They were taken away alive, we
want them alive.
Hope never ends.
May Guatemala and every citizen rise,
may nobody be left behind. Let us as citizens reclaim our rights to freedom and
peace. United we shall conquer!
The victims will rest in peace if
we give them justice and demand
the peace that never came.
They were killed for their ideals, we will continue fighting to achieve them.
Let us not forget, let us not be silent, let us talk, say and
hear, so that what happened in Guatemala is not repeated
anywhere in the world, ever again.
The consequences of rape last until death. Rape is a
crime against humanity.
I have lived through horrors. It makes me sad that as fellow
citizens we, the children of this country, live like stepchildren experiencing daily cruelty, caught up in poverty, forgotten, relegated to exclusion.
How sad that we kill our brothers and sisters, people like us who were born in
this land blessed by God. We are human beings, this history must never be repeated again. The debt to the indigenous peoples goes beyond our imagination.
Remembering the horror of our brothers, as the Guatemalans we are, the color of
our skin must never again be the reason for us to fight, let alone for us to kill. May
God forgive us and make us wiser so that we do not repeat the past in any way.
Peace is achieved in a society that is fair for all,
not by killing its people.
Occasionally I walk backwards:
it’s my way of remembering.
If I only walked forward,
I could tell you
What forgetting is like.
Humberto Ak’abal
(Poeta maya)
Not so long ago someone spoke of a solidarity among human beings, natural to each and every one of us, making us
responsible for all the sufferings and sorrows of the world,
and meaning that if I don’t do what I can to prevent these,
I’m just as responsible … each person who does nothing is
responsible. In Guatemala, those responsible have not paid
for their faults, let alone done so publicly. When that happens there will be peace, not before! Courage!
“Freedom for the Indians wherever
they are in the Americas and in the
world, because, while they live, there
lives a gleam of hope and an original
way of thinking about Life!”
Rigoberta Menchú,
Premio Nobel de la Paz.