Guatemalan genocide

The Guatemalan genocide (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco), also referred to as the Maya genocide (Genocidio maya), or the Silent Holocaust (Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S.-backed military regimes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians. Anti-communism was one of the main justifications for the mass killings with the military conflating Maya identity with communist subversion. In the 1970s, the Guatemalan military began a genocidal campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces. They accused the Maya of siding with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor who operated in the region. While massacres had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against the Maya began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out at least 626 massacres against the Maya during the civil war. They also acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages just between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of all villages were evacuated or destroyed by the army. Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982. A 1984 report by HRW discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". In fact, the rights abuses were so severe that even the U.S. with its fervent anti-communist policy "kept its assistance comparatively limited. For most of the...