The Mayas were especially targeted. Accused of harboring or supporting the rebels, entire villages were burned to the ground by the kaibiles, the government's elite counterinsurgency units, many of whom were young Indians forced to wage war against their own people.71 Entire communities were slaughtered. Soldiers used guns, knives, and machetes, or doused their victims with gasoline and burned them alive. Bodies were mutilated before and after death: limbs and heads severed, women's breasts cut off and stuffed into the mouths of their dead children. Even fetuses were cut out of their mothers' pregnant bodies to ensure that there would be no survivors.72 One scholar has appropriately called this period “the time of mass terror.”73
As one example, on July 17, 1982, five hundred Guatemalan army troops entered the tiny Chuj Indian village of San Francisco, rounded up the men, women, and children, and brutally murdered roughly 350 villagers. The four men who survived the massacre did so by hiding in the mounds of corpses to await the chance to escape into the jungle, and into Mexico. “I was under about ten bodies,” reported one fifty-seven-year-old survivor. “Then the soldiers began shooting again…. I lay still, my face covered in blood, and they lifted me and said, ‘This one is done,’ and threw me on a pile of bodies.” Later that night he escaped the village and traveled nine hours on foot to reach the border of Mexico.74 Throughout the early 1980s, Mexican campesinos in Chiapas reported that the rivers flowing from Guatemala were filled with so many corpses—many exhibiting the visible signs of torture—that it became impossible to bury them all. The smell of burning and rotting corpses became an everyday fact of life along the Guatemala-Mexico border.75
The army called such actions “scientific killings” designed to eliminate the rebels' base of support. (Many of these atrocities were chronicled by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú in her controversial memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú.)76 Survivors and nearby villagers fled deeper into the mountains to avoid a similar fate, or crossed the border into southern Mexico, where they hoped to find refuge among kindred cultural groups. Those who appealed for amnesty or who were caught by the Guatemalan military and allowed to live were “reoriented”: interrogated for information on the guerrillas and then subjected to “reeducation” classes for twelve to fifteen hours every day for several months, where they were lectured on the “falsehoods” of the guerrillas' political campaign. Finally, in strategic areas, the so-called polos de desarrollo, inhabitants of towns and villages, were relocated to heavily patrolled “model villages,” where their actions were strictly regulated.77
The government's policy of indoctrination and cultural annihilation continued in the model villages. Residents were allowed to speak only Spanish, and Catholicism and indigenous rituals were strongly discouraged in favor of some form of evangelical Protestantism—particularly that espoused by Ríos Montt himself—that taught subservience to authority.78 The traditional Maya government was replaced with army-appointed commissioners and the civilian defense patrols that spied on camp residents and controlled the movement of the villagers. As part of the government's rural pacification policy, the Maya populations were forced to engage in public works projects, including rebuilding the structures and communities that the army had so assiduously burned down.79
From 1978 to 1984, approximately 100,000 Guatemalans were killed and 40,000 “disappeared” (their whereabouts unknown and presumed dead); 440 villages were destroyed, and 750,000 people internally displaced. Over a quarter-million people fled the country.80 The Catholic Church was one of the few institutions to denounce the human rights violations. In one of their many official protests, the Conference of Guatemalan Bishops denounced the “massive assassination” of Indians and campesinos, as well as the lack of democratic institutions that could guarantee the welfare of the Guatemalan people. “Guatemala has experienced, and continues to live and endure a grave crisis,” wrote the bishops in one 1984 document, “and [the country] is sinking further into the abyss.”81 As in El Salvador, clergy, nuns, and missionaries became popular targets for the counterinsurgency units, forcing many to flee the country and form the Guatemalan Church in Exile.82
US aid to Guatemala shifted according to human rights reports and the domestic pressure that these elicited. Military aid was temporarily suspended in 1977, but the United States continued to train officers in the Guatemalan armed forces, facilitate corporate investments, and provide humanitarian and development assistance to those in power. After a meeting with General Ríos Montt in Honduras in 1982, President Reagan remarked that Ríos Montt was a man of “great personal integrity” whom human rights monitors had given a “bum rap.”83 Military aid was reinstated a few years later. But in March 1990, under domestic and international pressure, the Bush administration recalled its ambassador in protest over the Guatemalan government's failure to investigate and punish human rights abuses; and military aid once again ceased in 1992.
As with the rest of the United States' Central America policy, its actions in Guatemala drew international criticism, particularly from its neighbors. This time, Canada served as cosponsor of the 1982 UN resolution condemning Guatemala. But to the disappointment of many Canadians, that was as far as Ottawa went to distinguish its foreign policy from that of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Mexico, in turn, was surprisingly less critical of Guatemala's human rights violations than it was of El Salvador's rightist regime, much to the dismay of moderate-to-left groups within Mexico. The silence was inconsistent but pragmatic: the Guatemalan conflict was closer to home and threatened to spill over into Mexico's southern states. Thousands of Maya refugees crossed Mexico's southern border and sought safety in the state of Chiapas, also home to a large Maya population that was actively involved in legal disputes over land and labor. Local and federal officials feared that the refugees would conspire with domestic opposition groups, and debated ways to control the border. The Guatemalan army, in turn, charged that the refugee camps were guerrilla bases and, beginning in 1981, crossed the border into Mexico to kidnap or murder suspected guerrillas. Nationalists demanded that their government stop this brazen violation of their sovereignty, but the Mexican government sent contradictory signals: while filing official diplomatic protests, it assisted Guatemala in its hunt for subversives and deported thousands of refugees. Not surprisingly, much of the rhetoric coming out of Mexico City blamed the country's problems on the United States, but the government was pragmatic enough to avoid any direct confrontation with either the United States or Guatemala. Domestic concerns far outweighed ideological commitments. In this particular instance, Mexico's policy vis-à-vis Guatemala complemented Washington's.
THE REFUGEES
Before 1970, migration within Central America was common. People migrated within and across borders for temporary work in farming, construction, and domestic service. Salvadorans had the longest tradition of cross-border migration, particularly to Honduras, where 350,000 had settled by the end of the 1960s, lured by the higher wages offered by the banana companies.84 In administering the most densely populated country in Central America, the Salvadoran government encouraged seasonal or permanent migration of rural workers and unemployed urban dwellers as a safety valve to avoid uprisings such as the one that occurred in 1932. In 1967, the Honduran government tried to discourage further Salvadoran immigration through legislation that restricted land ownership to the Honduran-born and, by mid-1969, through the deportation of three hundred thousand Salvadorans. Hostilities between Hondurans and Salvadorans climaxed in the 1969 “soccer war”: violence erupted at a series of soccer