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What Happened
Response of International Community
President Garcia claimed that all the Indians were communist scum that needed to be wiped out (The Indians were actually socialist) or they would over take their government. With the army, a counter-insurgency Interahamwe-like, conscripted, ‘patriot’ ‘Civil Patrol’ militiamen, policemen, and scores of Kapos-like freed Spanish criminals under his command, they swept the Guatemalan countryside with a scorched-earth policy, sacking villages, burning crops, tainting water supplies, confiscating livestock, and destroying areas of religious significance. Children were smashed against walls, tortured, raped, or thrown into grave pits alive, women were systematically tortured, raped, and finally killed. Many victims had their limbs hacked off with machetes or impaled on spikes and left to die slowly. A forced Civil Patrol conscript recounts, “The lieutenant handed me a machete and said ‘Kill him with this. If you don’t kill him, I’ll kill you,’. Taking turns, we were ordered to not hit the men with lethal blows because their deaths should be slow to extend their suffering. When the first victim died after three machete blows, the lieutenant said, ‘Too bad he couldn’t tolerate more, he died with just three machete blows,’,” Many of us, myself included, cried over what we had in the safety of our own homes,” Mayas were considered lucky to be shot or burned alive. In 1982, President Garcia was overthrown by General Ros Montt, who continued the genocide with even greater enthusiasm after ‘being cheated out of a presidency in a fraud election’. During the two-year genocide, 626 villages were destroyed, 1.5 million displaced (many fled to El Salvador), and 200,000 were murdered.
