ABSTRACT
Between 1981 and 1983, the Guatemalan anti-communist army and its right-wing paramilitary allies executed over one hundred thousand Mayan peasants so unlucky as to live in a region identified as the seedbed of a Leftist insurgency. But for the international community, Guatemala's was, and remains, a quiet genocide. The Comision para el Esclarecimiento Historico (CEH) named three mutually-dependent "structural" or "historical" causes of state violence which led to genocide: economic exploitation, principally associated with Guatemala's plantation economy, racism directed at the country's majority Mayan population, and political authoritarianism, that is, profoundly undemocratic and unrepresentative political institutions. Expectations raised and struggles fought during this period reverberated throughout Guatemala's subsequent civil war. First, Cold War anticommunism revitalized nationalist racism against Maya Indians and reinvigorated old forms and justifications of domination. Second, the Cold War fundamentally transformed the possibilities of political alliances. The alchemy of postwar counterinsurgent repression throughout 1960s and 1970s was that it transfigured the promise of state intervention into terror.
