Guatemalan Civil War - Increased Insurgency and Repression: 1981-1983

Increased Insurgency and Repression: 1981-1983

In early 1981, the insurgency mounted the largest offensive in the country's history. This offensive was followed by an additional offensive towards the end of the year, in which many civilians participated at the behest of the insurgents. Villagers worked with the insurgency to sabotage roads and army establishments, and destroy anything of strategic value to the armed forces. In response, the Guatemalan Army began mobilizing for a large-scale rural counter-offensive. Under Lucas Garcia's orders, the Guatemalan army began bolstering its ranks through a policy of forced military recruitment. The army also began organizing a "task-force" model for fighting the insurgency, by which strategic mobile forces were formed from larger military brigades. To curtail civilian collaboration with the insurgents, the army under Chief of Staff Benedicto Lucas García (the President’s brother) began to search out communities in which to organize and recruit civilians into pro-government paramilitary patrols, in order to both combat the insurgents and provide greater distinction between "hostile" and compliant communities, as part of a "civic action" program.

The army's first major counteroffensive took place in mid-1981 in the mountainous coffee-growing coastal regions and in Chimaltenango. What followed was a meticulously planned and executed strategy aimed at terrorizing the civilian population for the purpose of decimating the support base for the insurgency. The Military of Guatemala initiated a large scorched-earth campaign in November, 1981 under the code-name "Operación Ceniza" or "Operation Ashes" which lasted through 1982. The stated purpose was to "separate and isolate the insurgents from the civilian population." The first phase of the operation involved mass killing of civilians and destruction of rural villages to instill terror among the civilian support base of the insurgency. The second phase of "Operación Ceniza" involved the deployment of 15,000 troops on a gradual sweep through the predominantly-indigenous Altiplano region, comprising the departments of El Quiché and Huehuetenango. Sources with the human rights office of the Catholic Church estimated the death toll from military repression at 11,000 in 1981, most of the victims indigenous peasants from the Guatemalan highlands.

Meanwhile, relations between the military establishment in Guatemala and the Lucas Garcia regime worsened. Lucas Garcia's government was perceived as problematic by elements within the Guatemalan military, which saw the Lucas government's actions as being counterproductive with respect to fighting the insurgency in the long term. The successes of the counterinsurgency under Lucas relied largely on military strategy which failed to account for the political and ideological causes that comprised the roots of the insurgency. Additionally, Lucas Garcia went against the military's interests through his endorsement of his own defense minister, Angel Anibal Guevara, in the March 1982 presidential elections.

On March 23, 1982, junior officers under the command of General Efrain Rios Montt staged a preventative coup d'état and deposed Lucas Garcia. Afterwards, a junta was established with Efrain Rios Montt at its head. The coup was initially welcomed given the constant cycle of electoral frauds and corruption within the government over the years, and there was hope that the human rights situation would improve. This changed when the junta initiated a "state of siege" in April 1982 within the framework of the so-called 'National Plan for Security and Development.' This plan led to greater restrictions on civil liberties, formally suspended the constitution and escalated the counterinsurgency in the countryside. "The killings have stopped," declared U.S. Ambassador Fredric Chapin. "The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light."

In the two months after seizing power, Rios Montt resorted to despotism to strengthen his personal power and began eliminating those officers which he believed to be involved in counter-coup plotting. One particularly cohesive group of officers opposed to Ríos was the Guatemalan Military Academy promotion class number 73. In an effort in intimidate these officers and stifle any plans for a counter-coup, Ríos Montt ordered the arrest and investigation of three of its most prominent members Captains Mario López Serrano, Roberto Enrique Letona Hora and Otto Pérez Molina, and threatened to expose evidence of their corruption if they continued to oppose him. On July 9, 1982, two members of the junta were forced to resign, leaving Rios Montt in complete control of the government as both the de-facto head of the armed forces and minister of defense.

During Rios Montt's presidency, the Military of Guatemala began to pursue its objective of restructuring and bolstering the effectiveness of its counterinsurgency program in the highlands, which had been the catalyst behind the March 23rd coup. The military conceived and implemented "Victoria 82" (Operation Victory 1982), which combined the scorched-earth and killing strategies of "Operación Ceniza" with highly effective forms of population control, such as food for work programs, militarized "model villages" to process refugees displaced by state violence, and the enhancement of the civil patrol system in which the army forced rural villagers to purge their own communities of government opponents. A major component of "Victoria 82" was "Plan Sofia" which was an operation designed specifically to "exterminate the subversive elements in the area - Quiché" Rios Montt also expanded on the "civic action" strategy which began under Chief of Staff Benedicto Lucas García, and implemented the use of civilian militias on a country-wide scale. Within the framework of this program, the civilian paramilitary bands were renamed "civilian self-defense patrols" (PAC), and the army began conscripting large portions of the rural civilian population into the militias.

The use of state-terror and indiscriminate repression reached its highest levels during Rios Montt's presidency, mostly within the framework of the rural counterinsurgency. The CIIDH database documented 18,000 state killings in the year 1982. In April 1982 alone (General Efrain Rios Montt's first full month in office), there were 3,330 documented killings, a rate of approximately 111 per day. It is estimated that the actual death toll could exceed this number by the tens of thousands. Although violence was most intense in rural Guatemala in the early 1980s, the urban regions also experienced an increase in state-violence. In February 1983, a then-confidential CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with an increasing number of kidnappings (particularly of educators and students) and increasing number of corpses appearing in ditches and gullies, a common characteristic of state-terror under the Lucas Garcia regime. The cable traced the wave of repression to an October, 1982 meeting with officers of the Security Section of the Presidential Staff (known as "Archivos") in which Rios Montt stated that “known guerrillas will no longer be remanded to the special courts,” and that they were free to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”