Guatemalan Genocide

In, “Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village,” Victor Montejo describes events surrounding the military régimes occurring throughout Guatemala. The book itself is an eyewitness account detailing one instance of violence between the indigenous peoples village's "civil patrol" and the army. This occurrence leads to the execution and imprisonment of many villagers. Even though the book is mainly a testimony by one person, in which he discusses the personal conflicts and struggle between himself and the army, the account is structured around the Guatemalan civil war and the conflict between the government and civilians. The Guatemalan Civil War occurred between the years 1960 to 1996. It was a battle between the government of Guatemala and

During genocides many things happen, homes and lands get rected, women get raped and many people die. A genocide that happened in 1981-1983 was in Guatemala. During the Guatemalan genocide it targeted the Mayan civilization. The first stage was classification. It is when they would put people in categories to determine them by their ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. By the second stage symbolism was used. In this stage, a simple thing or idea represented them. Then the Guatemalan army used their power to deny the rights of the Mayan, which lead to denying the humanity of the Mayan. Organization then began. This meant that plans to start the killings began. Next, the extremist split the group through the use of propaganda. Then, armies

Guatemala Genocide is very interesting so that one of the reason why i had chosen this genocide. It very interesting because they had another type of genocide and a lot of people usually don't talk about the Guatemala Genocide. This genocide is one of the genocide that had so many people killed. It about 60 percent of the population. Another reason why I had chosen the Guatemala Genocide because I had never ever heard about or ever learned about the Guatemala genocide so I thought I should learn about Guatemala. Learning about this Genocide made me realize alot of genocide such like african american and jewish weren't the only one being abuse. Genocide happened almost everywhere in the world and people will never know where else it couldn't of happened. My topic about the Guatemalan just cover everything about the genocide such as the army , how people were treated , how they felt and world response. Just doing research base on the question , there were ruf time to even read the articles. How they describe how the beat newborns and 3 years to death in front of their parent or its vice versa. Guatemala citizens lost everything during 1981-1983 genocide.

The Guatemalan Revolution was on October 1944 and it forced the resignation of Jorge Ubico. He was the President of Guatemala in the previous thirteen years. Ubico's government was a fear period in the country and it was called the “peace on the cemeteries”

The author of this book is Juan Jose Arevalo and he was a professor of philosophy who became Guatemala’s first democratically elected president in 1944. He was elected after a popular uprising against the United States, backed by Dictator Jorge Ubico, which began the Guatemalan Revolution. He stayed in office until 1951 and had survived 15 coup attempts. During his presidency he had passed several social reform policies that included an increase in minimum wage and a series of literacy programs. He also directed and ministered the drafting of a new constitution in 1945. Arevalo focused much on the need of advancement with individuals and communities. After he was exiled as being a university professor he went back to Guatemala to help the new post-Ubico government, focusing on the areas of social security and drafting of a new constitution. He developed the term “spiritual socialism”, in which he defined his political philosophy as. The philosophy was pointed towards the moral development of Guatemalans with the intent to liberate man psychologically. Arevalo strongly believed that this theoretical doctrine was vital to the making of a progressive and peaceful Guatemalan society. He felt in order to create an ideal society it was necessary to allow the citizens the freedom to pursue their own opinions, property, and way of life. He proclaimed that protecting the freewill of the citizens creates more support for governmental institutions, which in turn ensures the security of

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and

The accumulations of all power…. in the same hands, whether of one, or few, or many (is) the very definition of Tyranny. Federalist paper # 47

After generations of oppression, there comes a moment when the people that are being governed unjustly must rise against their oppressor and end the tyranny that is being done to them, even at the cost of death. After centuries of enslaved people, set forth by Spanish colonization, in EL Salvador a social political system developed that placed power, authority, and, most importantly, land directly in the hands of a few Spanish progeniture families. This type of system exploited the indigenous people and uneducated farmers to plow the fields to produce cash crops that yielded a sizeable profit for those elite families. Several attempts by the native people and farmers to change the status quo was met with a decisive and crushing blow by a military

In 1932, the Central American Socialist Party was created in El salvador. The peasants revolted against this with riots. Within a few weeks, the revolt died after the military killed around 30,000 civilians, most people killed were indigenous. Some people were killed just for looking as if they supported the uprising. This massacre is know as the Matanza.

(intro)the 2009- 2010 leaders and supporters of the FNL, The Front of Struggle, were killed by drug hitmen. Ovidio ortiz, a life long leader of the heath union, was a target for the massacre. He was hit with eight bullets. Six days after the health worker massacre on march 30th a passing vehicle shot at residents who gathered at the neighborhood store, only 8 were injured. (history of death squads) The guatemalan army slaughtered politics and suspected

At seven o’ clock in the morning on December 11, 1981 an evil force entered the small El Salvadorian village of El Mezote (School of Assasins). With painted faces and army fatigues, the guerillas carried machine guns and automatic rifles into the peaceful village. As survivor Rufina Amaya recounts, “At ten o’clock the soldiers began to kill the men who were in the church. First, they machine-gunned them and slit their throats” (“Country Sheets for Close it Down Fast!” 3). After the men, the women were placed face down in the dusty streets and shot to

Studying civil wars can be a very complicated endeavor. This is because the topic is very difficult to break down. When scholars study civil wars, there are many variables that can’t be controlled that can skew data. This makes finding interactions between different variables more difficult. Their complex entanglement, in addition to there being many variables to begin with, makes studying civil wars interesting yet particularly challenging. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the world was experiencing a wave of conflict proliferation. From South America to Asia and everywhere in between, many states found themselves embroiled in civil conflict. With the US fighting communism from spreading and the Soviet Union fighting to make sure it spread, many domestic issues became internationalized when super powers (more often so than not) became involved. With the rivalry between both hegemons growing more intense, countries experiencing civil conflicts found themselves aided (and sometimes occupied) by both sides. Conflicts in smaller states became proxy wars as the US and the USSR battled it out for supremacy. In both Guatemala and Vietnam, they too got caught up in the middle of the fight. Although the civil wars of both countries began close in time to one another, it is important to analyze their differences in order to

This article out lines how in Honduras, tens of thousands of everyday Hondurans, created a new form of cultural resistance, that met them with nerves of steel, forged in the horrifying repression that followed the military coup in June of 2008. It outlines how thousands of people in the resistance movement have been killed, more than 3,000 illegally imprisoned, and hundreds raped, beaten, and tortured. For every person who has courageously come forward to testify about human rights abuses, there are five behind him or her terrified to speak out for fear of reprisals. And yet Hondurans have emerged from all this with a new sense of their own personal and collective powers. From a Latin American perspective, the Honduran resistance is historically

Furthermore, in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works”, the US academics Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan challenge the conventional wisdom that the use of force against heavily armed opponents is the most effective way for resistance groups to achieve their aims. They discovered that the historical record between

In this paper I’m going to talk about the situation of impunity in Guatemala, and how there has been attempts to fight it, regulate it and eventually end it. I am going to emphasise in the creation of The International Commission Against Impunity In Guatemala (CICIG) in 2006 The creation of this institution brought hope to most of the people in the country because it seemed like a step in the right