Perpetration of Violence, Culture of Impunity

The Latin American subcontinent is renowned for the violence that reigns over the daily lives of its citizens (see Blanco Munoz 1977). This violence, however, “is not totally chaotic and unpredictable” (Huggins 1991: 3).

Guatemala is no stranger to violence, especially that which is “predictable” and or­ganized by the state. Violent social relations in Guatemala have historical roots that date back to the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica (Figueroa Ibarra 1991; McClintock 1985). Guatemala's most recent civil strife has its roots in a nationalist military revolt of No­vember 1960, and the subsequent formation of an organized insurgent movement. This

guerrilla movement, which eventually congealed into the four-group coalition known as the URNG, ostensibly commenced in response to the socio-cultural legacy inherited by a 1954 CIA-sponsored coup that destroyed Guatemala’s most democratically elected and “dangerously” non-aligned government during the height of Cold War hysteria. Since that time, the more than 150,000 politically related assassinations and more than 45,000 enforced disappearances have led to the existence of more than 70,000 widows, more than a quarter of a million children without one or both parents, and an estimated one million persons displaced from their home communities. The vast majority of the pat­terns of violence and their widespread consequences have been consistently attributed to the Guatemalan Army, especially its intelligence division (the G-2), and its extralegal (death squads) and paralegal (military commissioners, civil patrols) counterparts.

Guatemala is world-renowned for the state’s use of the disappearance of persons as a weapon of terror. It is described as being the first nation in the Americas to systemati­cally employ the enforced disappearance of persons (Asociacion Centroamericana de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos [ACAFADE] 1991, 1990, 1989), as well as the nation where the verb “to disappear” was originally employed (Simon 1987: 14). Gua­temala’s disappeared account for 50% or more of all cases in Latin America (Federacion Latinoamericana de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos [FEDEFAM] 1992). In ad­dition to the practice of enforced disappearances, the predominance of phenomena such as extrajudicial execution, mutilation, and torture are highly representative of Guate­mala’s four-decade reign of terror. The detention of persons by uniformed or “unknown” groups and the subsequent reappearance of highly mutilated corpses in public places have constituted consistent and well-documented patterns of violence in that nation.