But going back to Guatemala's history provides enough information to prove that genocide took place. For example, we may look through the general timeline of events, and choose details of Victoria 82 and Sofia military operations which were run based on "frijoles and fusiles" policy, where civilians didn't receive any "frijol" as promised by military rhetorics, but just "fusiles".
Ten years of democratic reforms under Arévalo and Arbenz ended in 1954 with the triumph of a coup supported by the United States. The United States disseminated the idea throughout Latin America that any government that took direct responsibility for the welfare of its people, showed intellectual curiosity or desire for economic independence was considered “communist.” The U.S. systematically intervened from then on to maintain the regime installed by the CIA and, when Congress imposed some limitations, delegated responsibility for supplying the means, weapons, military advisers and training necessary to commit the brutal crimes to various client states (Israel and Argentinean neo-Nazis).
The inability of the Guatemalan State to address legitimate social demands and claims led to a repressive system, whose main objective was controlling the population that wanted to rebel against their miserable living conditions. The rural population undertook community programs to pull themselves out of their silent suffering, which were immediately destroyed by those who wanted to reimpose the traditional order.1
The direct or indirect collaboration of key economic and political sectors is more than demonstrated in both the successive military governments and also the civilian ones “overseen” by the army. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a leader in the Reagan Administration said:
“Traditional autocrats [the ones we do and should support, Kirkpatrick explains] leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos.… Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill.”5
Anti-communist policy received strong support from right-wing political parties and powerful sectors of society in Guatemala. The U.S. did not hesitate to support the successive military regimes in its “strategic backyard.” The National Security Doctrine was taken up without problems in Guatemala, expressed first in terms of anti-reform, then anti-democracy, and finally, as counter-insurgency with criminal intent. The anti-communist thinking took root in the country and was joined by a vigorous defense of religion, traditions and conservative values that supposedly saw themselves threatened by the world expansion of atheist communism.6 In the case of
GENERAL TIMELINE
March 23, 1982
General José Efrain Rios Montt succeeds in a military coup, deposing General Fernando Lucas Garcia prior to the presidential transition, and initially establishing a three-member military junta before assuming total control as the de facto head of state.
April 10, 1982
Rios Montt launches the National Plan of Security and Development (Plan Nacional de Seguridad y Desarrollo, or PNSD), linking socioeconomic development and the extermination of subversive elements.
December 7, 1982
Army Special Forces, known as kaibiles, commit a massacre at Dos Erres in Petén, raping the women and girls, and killing men, women and children; they then kill other villagers over a three-day period during Operation Brushcutter as they return to their base of operations, leaving in total more than 200 people dead.
1982 – 1983
The army launches a series of military operations, code-named Operation Victoria 82, Operation Sofia, Operation Ixil and Operation Firmeza 83. The UN truth commission determined that during the implementation of Victoria 82, “the repression in some areas was indiscriminate, while in others it was selective, depending on the information provided by the military intelligence”. Annex H of the plan describes “the mission” as being “to annihilate the guerrillas and parallel organizations”. The 359-page operational plan for Operation Sofia says it is aimed at “exterminating subversive elements in the area” of Ixil, in northwestern Quiché.
The army's determination to wage total war was driven not simply by military imperatives, but by deep political concerns as well. Lucas García's regime had put the military on warning about the potential political power of the indigenous population. The perceived success of the guerrillas (particularly the Guerrilla Army of the Poor — the EGP — operating in the northwest of the country) in appealing to the Mayan population on the basis of the State's record of violence and neglect in those communities alerted the armed forces to the dangers of ignoring the country's indigenous poor. The nation would now be guided by the armed forces toward a "controlled" democratic transition without constitutional constraints.
In a report dated May 23, 1983, the CIA pointed out that "The insurgency has already forced the military, the strongest institution in Guatemala, to acknowledge that long-ignored sections of the country like the Western Highlands are exploitable political power bases." [Document 2] Ríos Montt characterized the same problem in an interview with political analyst Jennifer Schirmer. "Listen well: subversion or the guerrilla is not a military problem. It is eminently a political problem. And, as a consequence, every State apparatus must act where there exists a political vacuum. Knowing that, we addressed the entire problem in 1982: justice, beans and bullets."[1]
That same month, the US Embassy declared that the Junta "has announced a pacification campaign based on the two F's, 'Fusiles and Frijoles (Rifles and Beans).' It has announced instructions to the security forces to 'protect campesinos, not repress them.' It has arranged mass demonstrations of civilian militiamen in the war torn 'Ixil Triangle' of Quiché, and provides food and medical aid to Quiché refugees… The Junta has clearly embarked on a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the campesinos, and probably to improve the GOG's international image." [Document 3]
"One of the first things we did was to draw up a document for the campaign with annexes and appendixes. It was a complete job with planning down to the last detail," Col. Héctor Gramajo Morales — an architect of Ríos Montt's pacification campaign — told analyst Jennifer Schirmer in an interview.[2] Gramajo was referring to Plan de Campaña "Victoria 82."
The idea behind the creation of Victoria 82 — issued on June 16, 1982 — was the imposition of a systematic and controlled strategy on a counterinsurgency campaign that had been characterized under former President Romeo Lucas García by indiscriminate and chaotic violence. The military officers who launched Victoria 82 recognized the failure of the previous regime, the antipathy that it created within the population against the State, and the corresponding increase of support for the insurgents. For that reason, Ríos Montt and his army designed a plan that sought the total elimination of the armed subversion, as well as the "parallel organizations," combined with economic and social development programs to change the mentality (or "win the hearts and minds") of society toward the State. "The population's mentality is the principal objective," according to Victoria 82.[3]
This new plan, created by the army to "guarantee the Nation's peace and security," established a mission for all military units in the country: "The commands involved will conduct operations of security, development, countersubversive and ideological warfare in their respective areas of responsibility… with the objective to locate, capture or destroy subversive groups or elements [individuals]." (IV) The document identified psychological and counterinsurgency operations as twin strategies necessary for achieving victory over communism in the country. Accordingly, Ríos Montt's new plan combined the tactics of Benedicto Lucas with social welfare programs in an effort to mitigate the brutal counterinsurgency sweeps with government assistance. [ ]
Victoria 82 sought first and foremost to destroy the guerrilla forces and their base through operations of annihilation and the scorched earth tactics. As stated in the plan's "Purpose" (II/A/1-3), the army's job was to:
- Defend the population
- Recover members of the Irregular Local Forces (Fuerzas Irregulares Locales-FIL) when possible while eliminating subversives who refuse to lay down their weapons
- Annihilate the Clandestine Local Committees (Comités Clandestinos Locales-CCL) and the Permanent Military Units ( Unidades Militares Permanentes-UMP) of the enemy
Despite the distinctions of Victoria 82, it is clear from the plan that the armed forces regarded the indigenous communities as fatally intertwined with the insurgency. In order to eradicate the base, Victoria 82 promoted a scorched earth strategy, ordering the destruction of homes, local crops, animals and other potential sources of guerrilla supplies. "In addition to trying to destroy the subversive groups completely, their collective farming enterprises must be destroyed, once they are identified or when they are in areas where their encampments are suspected to exist, with the aim of cutting them off from their supply source and forcing them to surrender out of hunger or to be discovered through their movements in the areas they frequent and in that way be able to combat them…" (Instrucciones de Coordinación, 18)
The Communities of Population in Resistance - groups of unarmed indigenous who had fled their homes en masse and were on the run from the army in the mountain - were also considered a target for annihilation by the armed forces, and were hunted down through search and destroy missions or extensive bombing campaigns. One of the responsibilities of the army's intelligence services was to "Determine the concentrated areas of the population, mobilized by subversion (refugee sympathizers)." (Anexo B, Inteligencia, II/A/5)
Parallel to the counterinsurgency operations set into motion by Victoria 82 were the psychological operations and civic actions programs, ostensibly intended to rescue the indigenous communities from the guerrilla forces and provide them with the economic support they needed to thrive. The plan mandated a broad strategy of welfare programs, "prioritizing important reforms of a social and economic nature in the areas affected by the state of violence where the enemy has developed an effective program of consciousness raising, and which will give preferential treatment to infrastructure projects in the areas of health, education, agriculture and housing, as well as ideological preparation for incorporation of the different affected ethnicities into society…" (Anexo F, Plan de OPSIC, III/A/3/a/1)
The social programs were provided within the context of militarized communities created by the State for civilians displaced by the conflict, under the strict surveillance of the army and civil patrols. Victoria 82 ordered all commands to "Carry out operations of control of the population and its resources …" (Anexo G, Asuntos Civiles, III/C/5). In practice, such operations ensured total control over a region considered suspect and ideologically vulnerable, and comprised a wide range of activities including - as described by the CEH - "registration posts on the highways and in urban centers, population censuses, curfews, inspections of individual documents and issuance of passes, search operations, capture of guerrilla sympathizers. In addition, political meetings were prohibited and control exercised over the water supply in rural areas, over munitions, explosives, medicine and money, over the production, storage and distribution of food."[5]
In sum, Plan Victoria 82 described the creation of a State purged of subversive elements by a war "without limits," in the words of the new Chief of State Efraín Ríos Montt, and then totally militarized through an extensive infrastructure of social control, indoctrination and repression. The army commanders throughout the country were ordered to hurry their preparations for the offensives that would follow immediately after the end of the amnesty.
NOTES
[1] Schirmer, Jennifer. The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, p. 35.
[2] Ibid , p. 44.
[3] Plan de campaña Victoria 82 , Anexo "H" (Ordenes Permanentes para el Desarrollo de Operaciones Contrasubversivas), I. Although Victoria 82 is not a public document, the National Security Archives possesses a copy and will post it as soon as it becomes public with the end of the Ríos Montt trial.
[4] CEH, Capítulo II, Volumen 1, Las Estrategias Contrainsurgentes Durante el Conflicto Armado, parr. 21-22
[5] CEH, Capítulo II, Volumen 1, Las Estrategias Contrainsurgentes Durante el Conflicto Armado, párr. 38
[6] CEH, Chapter II, Vol. 1, sections 101-110
OPERATION SOFIA
This plan of operations shows that in 1982, during Ríos Montt’s government, there was a strategy, formulated down to the last detail, to destroy every sign of life in the Ixil area and to leave it in ashes, including the municipalities of Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul.
As we shall see in discussing the plan for Operation Sofía, the State’s repressive response was completely out of proportion to the military strength of the guerrilla groups and can only be understood within the framework of the country’s profound social, economic and political conflicts. In the period 1978–1982 there was, among large sections of the population, growing social activism and political opposition to the continuation of the established order, whose organized expressions, in some cases, maintained links of various kinds with the insurgency. However, at no point in the internal armed conflict did the guerrilla groups have the military capabilities necessary to pose a threat to the State. The State and the Army were aware, at all times, that the insurgency’s military capacity did not represent a real threat to the political order in Guatemala.
In 1982 they devised plans for a military campaign—Operation Victoria 82—knowing full well that they were not fighting against the guerrillas but rather wiping out whole villages, inhabited only by an unarmed population of indigenous peasants, all under the guise of regarding them as the guerrillas’ social support.
Racism was an inseparable element of these operations.
Marta Casaus Arzú *
Professor of History of the Americas, Universidad Autуnoma de Madrid. Author of numerous publications, including: Genocidio: їLa ma_xima expresio_n del racismo en Guatemala? (Genocide: The Ultimate Expression of Racism in Guatemala?) and Guatemala: linaje y racismo (Guatemala: Race and Racism).
The historical-political foundations of genocide are rooted here in the way that the homogeneous states in Latin America were constructed.4 In the State and its repressive apparatus, genocide operates as the ultimate expression of racism, because it constitutes an intrinsic element of the state itself and forms part of a central axis that is used and manipulated by elites in power who consider themselves white. Studies on genocide have shown how responsibility for the enormity of genocide rested not only with the fascist state, but with the civilian population, and they give warning of the enormous dangers that we run if we do not deactivate these racist practices that lead to genocide.5
In the case of Guatemala, it is necessary to investigate those sociological, political and psychological variables, and especially the historical background that gave rise to the survival and normalization of racism and genocidal acts.6 In that context, in view of documents recently brought to light about Operation Plan Sofía, along with many other Army and CIA documents, I consider that the state has played an essential role in the reproduction of racism and the planning of genocide. In fact one of the main contributions of Operation Sofía is to confirm the seamless operation of a chain of command that begins with the orders of Chief of Genral Staff, López Fuentes, coordinator of the plan Victoria 82, and reaches down to the leaders of each one of the patrols that made up the three paratroop companies.
The 20 copies of Operation Plan Sofía distributed to the various battalions confirm the explicit mission to exterminate the civilian population and how that order came directly from high command in order to develop “counter-subversion operations, population control and psychological operations with to exterminate all ENO” encounters with the enemy and the FIL, local Irregular Forces, namely indigenous civilians in the Ixil area with no links to the armed struggle.7 The following are some of the basic premises about the State’s involvement in the genocide in Guatemala which reinforce the narrative in Operation Sofía: • The Guatemalan racist state perpetrated a genocide against the indigenous population and this was because, historically and structurally, it possessed, in its intrinsic nature, the repressive, ideological and legal apparatus to carry it out. •
The Guatemalan State is a racist state that uses state racism as a technology of power, when it loses “control of the indigenous population” and fears that they might rise up and take revenge. In this sense, everyday racism and the normalization of racism play a crucial role in the imagination of the ladinos, the military and political elite, who have revived the fear of reverse racism, in the form of a backlash against their own historical and social domination.
Yes, genocide tood place: because of racism
Some of the massacres committed in Guatemala during this period allow us to see how, in the form of the violence, torture and elimination directed against women, children and indigenous people, there was planning and premeditated strategy from the high command, a deliberate intentionality coming from military leaders targeted at physically exterminating a people and their offspring and triggering genocide against the civilian population of Mayan origin.9
The Army’s brutality was merciless in areas of Mayan population and most of them were accompanied by insults such as “raza de coches,” “indias de mierda.”10 There were also practices such as extracting the fetus alive from a pregnant woman or even amputating her breasts, as well as leaving signs of rape on dead bodies, such as objects in their vaginas or stakes in their bellies.11 One of the most striking elements in all these testimonies—and of course fully reflected in Operation Sofía—is the objectification of the Other or their animalization.
Regarding these Others as things or objects was one of the most effective tactics for Nazi executioners and the killers of other genocides in carrying out their mission “to save” humanity, where cleansing of the population, in many cases, or improvement of the race played a crucial role. The fact that in none of the documents related to Operation Sofía are the victims considered as people or indigenous people or individuals, and certainly never as victims, is one of the ways the military objectified them away took away their humanity.12
The documents of Operation Sofía list the dead or murdered in the same way as animals, houses, traps or other objects; at no time does it speak of either the indigenous population or Mayans, a term that is absent from the entire plan: they are enemies, “ENO,” local irregular forces, “FIL,” or subversives.13 Children are referred to as “chocolates,” a clear reference to their copper-colored skin. What appears in the reports is that two chocolates were eliminated, or five FIL dead, or they are referred to as a “17-year-old undocumented element,” or “an item in plain clothes was eliminated,” “25 horses, 70 sheep, 35 cows and 15 FIL were eliminated”....
Only when they are evacuated, or made prisoners, do they become subjects again, “three orphaned children were evacuated,” “female and male children, and old people were evacuated,” “captured: children, women and old people.” Only then do they regain their humanity, become “people” again, human beings with identifiable gender or age. During Operation Sofía which lasted for only one month three days (from July 16 to August 19, 1982), the area was devastated with an indescribable level of violence, villages were destroyed, there were massacres, sieges of the civilian population, indiscriminate bombing, destruction of animals and goods, and the Army instilled a level of psychological terror, as it forced more than 100,000 Indians into internal displacement, many dying of starvation and cold in the mountains or trying to cross the border.
All these data in the plan for Operation Sofía mean that we are in complete agreement with the assessments given by Victoria Sanford,14 the Fundación Rigoberta Menchú, CALDH (Center for Human Rights Legal Action), Chirix,15 Montejo, Payeras, Brett,16 Prudencio García,17 Castellanos and many others, concerning the responsibility of the Guatemalan State, the Army and the power elites who designed and implemented a strategy of genocide against the Mayan population.
Tracing the orders set out in Operation Sofía confirms that the High Command and the people involved in the governments of Kxel Laugerud, Lucas García, Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores, had the clear intention of committing genocide against the indigenous population and that it was designed, planned and executed from the military leadership, with the collusion of the power elites and the CIA. Operation Sofía gives concrete proof of the two elements that enable us to classify the strategy as genocide. There was both the intent to exterminate the Ixil population, and also the motivation to gain control of the population “in order to make them more ladino and erase the Ixil in them.” The means used were the massacres within broader psychological warfare and displacing the population to development stimulus zones, or using a “strategic hamlet program” copied from Vietnam, all in order to achieve dissociation from their culture. Operation Plan Sofía, once again, gives clear evidence not only that they aimed to destroy the internal enemy, but to debase and animalize it, meaning that the Mayan people, the indigenous population, were objectified and dehumanized, referred to impersonally as FIL, ENO, the children termed derogatorily as “chocolates,” and the women called by the names of animals, as well as stripped of their physical and moral integrity.
Other considerations that arise from this:
1) The foundations on which the genocide is built—both in its institutional aspect, the racist state, and in its repressive and ideological apparatus— remain intact.
2) The perpetrators of genocide are fully identified but have not been punished, not even named individually as in other Truth Commissions, and they are responsible for much of the current violence. Despite being mentioned in the documentation of Operation Sofía, no cases have been filed against them or brought to trial.
3) The power elites, who govern and lead the country, and the economic elites continue expressing their racist and discriminatory attitudes, practices and displays all the time. Within the “white” elite, racism has worsened, reactivated in behavior and practices that are even more intolerant without, any need for cause, but particularly when they fear the arrival of “an Indian in power.”
In the face of these situations of helplessness and impunity
Why should we not seriously consider the possibility of a revival of racist and genocidal prejudices that can raise their heads at any time, giving rise to further acts of genocide, such as those that happened less than a decade ago and that are occurring elsewhere in the world, with the silence and complicity of the entire international community? Why not be aware that we continue to have a ticking time-bomb in our hands?
I think all men and women have in our hands the duty and moral responsibility to think about it and to try to prevent it. I will conclude with the words of one witness, who carried the bones of a member of his family wrapped in his backpack, and told the tribunal the following: “I will not bury him yet, I want a paper saying they killed him (...) that he was guilty of no crime, was innocent .... then we will rest” (testimony to the CEH). This terrible lesson cannot be forgotten, nor is it healthy for a society that aims to live in peace and democracy to try to erase the past, to forget it and not to demand justice for these crimes against humanity.
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