¡Si Hubo Genocidio en Guatemala! Yes! There Was Genocide in Guatemala

Abstract

The quantitative and qualitative toll of more than three decades of internal armed conflict was largely unknown in December 1996 when the Guatemalan army and URNG3 guerrillas signed the historic Peace Accords. Indeed, the number and severity of human rights violations had been a hotly contested issue with numbers of dead and disappeared varying widely from 40,000 to 100,000 and everywhere in between. Likewise, the number of village massacres varied from 100 to 440.4 Regardless of whether one pointed to the high or low end of these estimates, there was no doubt that grave human rights violations had taken place in Guatemala. Ward Churchill5 and Ricardo Falla6 were among the first to charge genocide in Guatemala and to do so with as much data as they could gather during the conflict. Still, when the concept of genocide was used to describe what was taking place in Guatemala, in the Cold War context, this description, like any analysis focused exclusively on army atrocities, was mostly dismissed as guerrilla or indigenista propaganda. Since the signing of the Peace Accords, however, genocide is a legal term that has been used by the Commission for Historical Clarification ([CEH] truth commission) in its report, the Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court in its 2004 ruling against the Guatemalan state, and most recently by the Spanish Court in its 2006 international arrest warrant for generals implicated in the genocide. Thus the historigraphy of genocide in Guatemala is one in the making.