Country: Guatemala

Group: K’iche’

Date Finalized: 2/24/2020

Team: Rayna Castillo (lead), Sophia Agne, Kimberly Prete

Content warning: genocide, homicide, war

Approximate Time Period: 1960-1996

The K’iche’ ethnic group in Guatemala was one of four Mayan groups targeted by the Guatemalan army in the second half of the 1900s (Holocaust Museum Houston, n.d.). In 1954, a CIA-backed coup overthrew Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Arben, under the guise of eliminating a “communist threat” (Barrett, 2007). Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas seized power and began enacting policies that harmed (and stripped the rights) of indigenous communities (PBS, 2011). This led to a civil war in the early 1960s that continued well into the 1970s as economic and political inequalities grew, particularly affecting many of the Mayan people (HMH, n.d). In 1980, the Guatemalan army began targeting the Mayan population to repress guerrilla warfare after many Mayans demanded greater equality and cultural inclusion (Holocaust Museum Houston, n.d). This grew into a full-scale genocide as, over the course of three years, more than 200,000 people were killed (or “disappeared”) and 1.5 million were displaced (Holocaust Museum Houston, n.d). Further erasure of Mayan ethnic identity occurred with the government’s scorched earth policy that sought to destroy buildings, livestock, water supplies, sacred places, and cultural symbols (Holocaust Museum Houston, n.d). In 1999, the United Nations created a “Commission for Historical Clarification” to document the events that occurred during this period, and determined it should be deemed a genocide (United Nations CHC, 1999). Since this has been determined to be a genocide by the UN, that means this is defintiely an appropriate coding of targeted lethal violence. However, the data quality for this case would be a 2 because while ample information was available on the impact of these actions on the Maya people as a whole, there was a limited amount of information regarding the K’iche people specifically, though they were one of four ethnic groups specifically identified by the UN.

Sources

  1. Barrett, D. (2007, May 8). Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954. Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol44no5/html/v44i5a03p.htm
  2. Holocaust Museum Houston (n.d.). Genocide in Guatemala. Retrieved February 16, 2020, from https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-guatemala-guide/
  3. United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification. Guatemala-Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification: Conclusions and Recommendations. (1999). https://www.jstor.org/stable/23778631?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
  4. PBS. Timeline: Guatemala’s Brutal Civil War. (2011, March 7).  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/latin_america-jan-june11-timeline_03-07