The Guatemala Genocide.

“The ethnic conflict in Guatemala is manifested in the inequality and marginalization suffered by the indigenous population, whose position is complex because they are an ethnic group and also the lowest social class. The rights of this ethnic group have begun to be recognized only recently following the establishment of the Civil Society Assembly and the peace agreement in the mid-1990’s” (Althoff 1997). Having said that, in Guateamala there has been evidence of one of the worst expressions of ethnic conflicts can have: genocide, which can be defined as the deliberate extermination of an ethnic group. In this article I will realize a chronology of the ethnic conflicts in this country, an analysis of the causes that may have triggered these conflicts and the levels they have reached.

Starting with a chronology of these ethinc conflicts, it can be stated that “for sixty years a war has been waged, especially a crude one in the 1980s, the repercussions of which were felt above all by rural communities, where genuine genocides were committed. It is a constant conflict that, with different variations, has affected the indigenous population because of the policies established during the regimes of Romeo Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt” (ALthoff 1997). During this dictatorship exercised by the respective governments of the people mentioned above, armed movements were generated against that dictatorship, a communist-style guerrilla that tried to overthrow the government. The role of the indigenous community in this movement is one in which they are the social base of said guerrilla, but there were also some indigenous who had nothing to do with it. During the years 1981 and 1983 the decision was to attack, to weaken the resistance in the indigenous communities, which, as already mentioned, were the social base of the armed movement. Thus, the government carried out a massacre of the indigenous communities resulting in ethnic genocide. Some of the actions perpetrated by the Guatemalan government against this group were: killing of leaders, massacres, razed land, forced displacement, militarized resettlement, crimes against humanity.

However, when analyzing the causes of this ethnic conflict, it is worth mentioning this policy within the context of the Cold War where it was intended to eliminate any sign of communism in the region. Given that Guatemala is…