Guatemalan genocide

Uncommon card · No. 128436

The Guatemalan genocide (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco), also referred to as the Maya genocide (Genocidio maya), or the Silent Holocaust (Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S.-backed military regimes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians. Anti-communism was one of the main justifications for the mass killings with the military conflating Maya identity with communist subversion. In the 1970s, the Guatemalan military began a genocidal campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants in...

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