The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

confronting genocide of indigenous peoples 69
not prepared to allow Indians to participate in the workings of the government or in
local-level decision making. By the late 1970s some of the Indians had joined guerrilla
groups that had as their aims the expansion of political participation and the improvement
of the lives of peasants. The Guatemalan government responded to the
organizational efforts of indigenous peoples and others with repressive tactics. Death
squads kidnapped and murdered political leaders. Counterinsurgency operations were
launched in the mid-1970s, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s the government was
engaged in a full-scale frontal assault against indigenous peoples and peasants in
Guatemala.
Indians joined the guerrilla movements not so much because they agreed with
their ideology but because they saw such movements as being among the few means
available for protecting themselves against the acts of terror perpetrated by the government
forces (Carmack 1988). As Stoll (1993:xi) notes, most of the Maya “were
rebels against their will, and they were coerced by the guerrillas as well as the army.”
In February 1996, anthropologists from the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology
Team, human rights workers, and local people excavated a mass grave at Agua Fria,
a village in the state of Quiche. This grave is but one of literally dozens of clandestine
cemeteries that contain the victims of brutal military operations against Indian
peasants who were suspected of providing support for rebels opposed to the
government of General Efrain Rios Montt, who ran Guatemala in 1982–83. The
mass murders were part of a general campaign on the part of the government to
terrorize the populace.
At the height of the Guatemalan civil war, there were as many as forty-five to
fifty thousand Quiche Maya refugees living in camps in Mexico. Even there, people
were not completely safe. There is evidence of assassins going into the refugee
camps in Mexico and killing suspected guerrilla leaders (Victor Montejo, personal
communication). Mayan peasants argued that they were “living between two fires”
and that they wanted simply to be treated with respect by the government and those
with whom they lived in rural Guatemala.
The second type of genocide that we will deal with here is retributive genocide,
those actions taken by states or other entities in retribution for their behavior. A
classic statement recommending retributive genocide came from a member of
Chase Manhattan Bank’s Emerging Markets Group, Riordan Roett, who, in January
1995, made the following comment about the Zapatista uprising in southern
Mexico: “While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to
Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community.
The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their
effective control of the national territory and of security policy” (quoted in the
Washington Post, February 13, 1995). Amnesty International and other human rights
organizations reported on human rights violations by the Mexican army in its efforts
to quell the Zapatista uprising in 1994–95. Not only were members of the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) killed, but so, too, were noncombatants
(Collier and Quaratiello 1999). Although the Zapatistas were not wiped out,