Complete Thesis_double spaced abstract.pdf

Almost immediately after President Lucas was elected and assumed the presidency the
Lucas regime engaged in violence against perceived enemies. The first targets were those
individuals and leaders protesting the rise in public transportation rates. During the transportation
protests forty people were killed, 300 injured and 1,500 were arrested (REMHI, 1999, 212).
After assuming the presidency in 1978 “five hundred corpses were found, two hundred of which
showed signs of torture” (REMHI, 1999, 212). The Lucas regime targeted any and all perceived
enemies whether they were rural or urban, peasants or students, unions or unemployed, attending
large gatherings or alone. In June of 1978 the priest from the San Jose Pinula parish was
assassinated and one day later a CNT leader Jose Alberto Alvarado was assassinated. Student
leaders, politicians, and union leaders were frequently assassinated in broad daylight in urban
settings. The violence was shocking and terrifying even in a state plagued by violence for
decades.
Labor leaders were an early and preferred target of the Lucas regime. On Labor Day
May 1, 1980 thirty-two people were abducted from Guatemala City. On June 21 twenty-seven
CNT leaders were abducted, on August 24 seventeen more CNT leaders are abducted; in total
during 1980 there were 110 labor leaders killed by the Lucas regime (REMHI, 1999, 212-213).
In the 1980s the Lucas regime focused its counterinsurgency efforts in the southwestern
highlands where the ORPA was operating. The Guatemalan military killed 60 people at San Juan
Cotzal and another 17 CNT leaders in August of 1980. Hundreds of villagers suspected of being
sympathetic to ORPA were kidnapped and killed.
In a particularly horrifying incident in 1980 there were thirty-nine people burned alive
inside the Spanish Embassy. The victims were peasants from El Quiche who had come to the
capital to protest the disappearance of their fellow villagers and demand the removal of the army
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