Guatemala's civil war

In November 1960 a group of young army officers rose against the government, and several joined guerrilla groups in the eastern mountains. A civil war followed that lasted until the peace accords of December 29, 1996. The state, led by the army and backed at times by the United States, fought the guerrillas and was responsible for the great majority of the killings.²

The war's roots lay in the 1954 coup against President Jacobo Arbenz, which ended a reform government that had begun land reform. Land and wealth in Guatemala were extremely unequal, and the Maya majority faced poverty and discrimination. Guerrilla groups, inspired in part by Cuba, recruited among peasants and students. The army replied with counterinsurgency that treated Maya communities as the enemy, and violence peaked in the early 1980s under General Efrain Rios Montt, with scorched-earth massacres in highland villages. In 1999 the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission reported that around 200,000 people had been killed or disappeared, that about 83 percent of victims were Maya, and that state forces were responsible for about 93 percent of the violations. In 2013 a Guatemalan court convicted Rios Montt of genocide, but the verdict was overturned within days on procedural grounds. The peace accords of 1996 ended the fighting, but violence, inequality and impunity remain serious problems.¹²