Whereas under the previous administration, the human rights situation in Guatemala had improved, the regime of Lucas Garcia brought the repression to much the same level observed during the "State of Siege" period under former President
Arana Osorio (1970–1974).
Initial protests and early crisis On 4 August 1978, barely a month after he took office, high school, university students, and other popular movement sectors, organized the mass movement's first urban protest of the Lucas García period. The demonstrations, intended as a march against violence, were attended by an estimated 10,000 people. The new Secretary of the Interior under President Lucas García, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, promised to break up any protests done without government permission, as the new government had realized that the opposition and Marxist left had a powerful organization by the time the new president was inaugurated. The protestors, having refused to ask for permission, were met by the Pelotón Modelo (Model Platoon) of the National Police. Employing new anti-riot gear donated by the
United States Government, Platoon agents surrounded marchers and tear-gassed them. Students were forced to retreat, and dozens of people, primarily school-aged adolescents, were hospitalized. This was followed by more protests and death squad killings throughout the later part of the year. In September 1978, a
general strike broke out to protest sharp increases in
public transportation fares; the government responded harshly, arresting dozens of protesters and injuring many more. However, due to the campaign, the government agreed to the protesters' demands, including establishing a
public transportation subsidy. Fearful that this concession would encourage more protests, the military government, along with state-sponsored
paramilitary death squads, generated an unsafe situation for public leaders.
Increased insurgency and state repression: 1980–1982 The effects of state repression on the population further radicalized individuals within the mass movement. They led and led to increased popular support for the insurgency. In late 1979, the EGP expanded its influence, controlling a large amount of territory in the Ixil Triangle in El Quiche and holding many demonstrations in Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal. At the same time the EGP was expanding its presence in the Altiplano, a new insurgent movement called the ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of Armed People) made itself known. Composed of local youths and university intellectuals, the ORPA developed out of the Regional de Occidente, movement, which split from the FAR-PGT in 1971. The ORPA's leader, Rodrigo Asturias (a former activist with the PGT and first-born son of
Nobel Prize-winning author
Miguel Ángel Asturias), formed the organization after returning from exile in Mexico. ORPA established an operational base in the mountains and rain forests above the coffee plantations of southwestern Guatemala and in the
Atitlan, where it enjoyed considerable popular support. On 18 September 1979, ORPA made its existence publicly known when it occupied the Mujulia coffee farm in the coffee-growing region of the Quezaltenango province to hold a political education meeting with the workers. Insurgent movements active in the initial phase of the conflict, such as the FAR, also began to reemerge and prepare for combat. In 1980, guerrilla operations on both the urban and rural fronts greatly intensified, with the insurgency carrying out many overt acts of armed propaganda and assassinations of prominent right-wing Guatemalans and landowners. In 1980, armed insurgents assassinated prominent Ixil landowner Enrique Brol and president of the CACIF (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations) Alberto Habie. Encouraged by guerrilla advances elsewhere in Central America, the Guatemalan insurgents, especially the EGP, began to quickly expand their influence through a wide geographic area and across different ethnic groups, thus broadening the appeal of the insurgent movement and providing it with a more extensive popular base. In October 1980, a tripartite alliance was formalized between the EGP, the FAR and the ORPA as a precondition for Cuban-backing. In early 1981, the insurgency mounted the largest offensive in the country's history. This was followed by an additional offensive towards the end of the year, in which many civilians were forced to participate by the insurgents. Villagers worked with the insurgency to sabotage roads and army establishments and destroy anything of strategic value to the armed forces. By 1981, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 members of Guatemala's
indigenous community actively supported the insurgency. Guatemalan Army Intelligence (G-2) estimated a minimum of 360,000 indigenous supporters of the
EGP alone.
Civil war in the city On 31 January 1980, Guatemala got worldwide attention when the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City was
burnt down, resulting in 37 deaths, including embassy personnel, high-ranked Guatemalan former government officials, and former vice president
Eduardo Cáceres. A group of native people from
El Quiché occupied the embassy in a desperate attempt to bring attention to the issues they were having with the Army in that region of the country, which was rich in oil and had been recently populated as part of the "Franja Transversal del Norte" agricultural program. In the end, thirty-seven people died after a fire started within the embassy after the police force tried to occupy the building; after that, Spain broke its diplomatic relationship with Guatemala. In the months following the Spanish Embassy Fire, the human rights situation continued to deteriorate. The daily number of killings by official and unofficial security forces increased from an average of 20 to 30 in 1979 to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 daily in 1980. Human rights sources estimated that 5,000 Guatemalans were killed by the government for "political reasons" in 1980 alone, making it the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere after
El Salvador. In a report titled
Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder,
Amnesty International stated, "Between January and November 1980, some 3,000 people described by government representatives as "subversives" and "criminals" were either shot on the spot in political assassinations or seized and murdered later; at least 364 others seized in this period have not yet been accounted for." The repression and excessive force used by the government against the opposition was such that it became a source of contention within Lucas Garcia's administration itself. This contention within the government caused Lucas Garcia's Vice President,
Francisco Villagrán Kramer, to resign on September 1, 1980. In his resignation, Kramer cited his disapproval of the government's human rights record as one of the primary reasons for his resignation. He then went into voluntary exile in the United States, taking a position in the Legal Department of the
Inter-American Development Bank. On 5 September 1980, took place a terrorist attack by
Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) right in front of the Guatemalan National Palace, then the headquarters of the Guatemalan government. The intention was to prevent the Guatemalan people from supporting a massive demonstration that the government of Lucas Garcia had prepared for Sunday, 7 September 1980. In the attack, six adults and a little boy died after two bombs inside a vehicle went off. There was an undetermined number of wounded and heavy material losses, not only from art pieces from the National Palace but from all the surrounding buildings, particularly in the Lucky Building, which is right across the Presidential Office. Among the deceased was Domingo Sánchez, Secretary of Agriculture driver; Joaquín Díaz y Díaz, car washer; and Amilcar de Paz, security guard. The attacks against private financial, commercial, and agricultural targets increased in the Lucas Garcia years, as the leftist Marxist groups saw those institutions as "
reactionaries" and "millionaire exploiters" who were collaborating with the genocidal government. The following is a non-exhaustive list of the terrorist attacks that occurred in Guatemala City and are presented in the UN Commission report: Despite advances by the insurgency, the insurgency made a series of fatal strategic errors. The successes of the revolutionary forces in Nicaragua against the
Somoza regime and the insurgency's victories against the Lucas Garcia government led rebel leaders to falsely conclude that a military equilibrium was being reached in Guatemala. Thus the insurgency underestimated the government's military strength. and found itself overwhelmed and unable to secure its advances and protect the indigenous civilian population from reprisals by the security forces.
Operation Ceniza In response to the guerrilla offensive in early 1981, the Guatemalan Army began mobilizing for a large-scale rural counter-offensive. The Lucas government instituted a policy of forced recruitment and began organizing a "task-force" model for fighting the insurgency, by which strategic mobile forces were drawn from larger military brigades. The army, to curtail civilian participation in the insurgency and provide greater distinction between "hostile" and compliant communities in the countryside, resorted to a series of "civic action" measures. The military 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, who would combat the insurgents and kill their collaborators. In 1980 and 1981, the United States, under the
Reagan administration, delivered $10.5 million worth of
Bell 212 and
Bell 412 helicopters and $3.2 million worth of military trucks and jeeps to the Guatemalan Army. In 1981, the Reagan administration also approved a $2 million covert CIA program for Guatemala. On April 15, 1981, EGP rebels attacked a Guatemalan Army patrol from the village of Cocob near Nebaj, killing five personnel. On April 17, 1981, a reinforced company of Airborne troops was deployed to the village. They discovered foxholes, guerrillas and a hostile population. The local people to support the guerrillas fully. "The soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The army killed 65 civilians, including 34 children, five adolescents, 23 adults, and two elderly people. In July 1981, the armed forces initiated a new phase of counterinsurgency operations under the code-name "
Operación Ceniza," or "Operation Ashes," which lasted through March 1982. The purpose of the operation was to "separate and isolate the insurgents from the civilian population." During "
Operación Ceniza," some 15,000 troops were deployed on a gradual sweep through the predominantly indigenous Altiplano region, comprising the departments of
El Quiché and
Huehuetenango. Large numbers of civilians were killed or displaced in the Guatemalan military's counterinsurgency operations. The army, to alienate the insurgents from their civilian base, carried out large-scale mass killings of unarmed civilians, burned villages and crops, and butchered animals, destroying survivors' means of livelihood. Sources with the human rights office of the Catholic Church estimated the death toll from the counterinsurgency in 1981 at 11,000, with most of the victims
indigenous peasants of the Guatemalan highlands. Other sources and observers put the death toll due to government repression in 1981 at between 9,000 and 13,500. As army repression intensified in the countryside, relations between the Guatemalan military establishment and the Lucas Garcia regime worsened. Professionals within the Guatemalan military considered the approach counterproductive because the Lucas government's strategy of military action and systematic terror overlooked the social and ideological causes of the insurgency while radicalizing the civilian population. Together with the government in neighboring El Salvador, the Lucas Garcia regime was cited as the worst human rights violator in the Western-Hemisphere. The daily number of killings by government forces and officially sanctioned death squads increased from an average of 20 to 30 in 1979 to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 in 1980. An estimated 5,000 civilians were killed by government forces in Guatemala in 1980. In June 1981, the Reagan Administration announced a $3.2 million delivery of 150 military trucks and jeeps to the army, justifying these shipments by blaming the guerrillas for the violence perpetrated against civilians. In its later years, Lucas Garcia's regime was perceived as a threat by the military establishment in Guatemala, as it engaged in actions that compromised the legitimacy of the Guatemalan military with both the populace and within its ranks, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency war. In the 1982 elections, Lucas Garcia went against both popular opinion and the military's interests by endording
Angel Anibal Guevara, his defense minister.
1982 coup d'état and "state of siege" On March 23, 1982, junior officers under the command of General
Efraín Ríos Montt staged a ''
coup d'état'' and deposed General Romeo Lucas Garcia. Aside from the junior officers involved in engineering the coup, the coup was not supported by any entities within the Lucas government. At the time of the coup, the most of Lucas Garcia's senior officers were unaware of any previous coup plotting on the part of the junior officers or any other entity. General Lucas was reportedly prepared to resist the coup and could have quickly opposed the coup with his contingent of troops stationed at the presidential palace, but was coerced into surrendering by being shown his mother and sister held with rifles to their heads. == Prosecution ==