ABSTRACT
Throughout the early to mid 1980s, over 200,000 Guatemalan people, primarily impoverished indigenous Mayans 1 residing in small countryside villages in the western highlands, were the victims of a vicious state-driven counterinsurgency and genocide. The latter involved extrajudicial killings, hundreds of massacres, and the displacement of approximately one million people. In the process, some 440 villages were utterly destroyed. The attacks and killings also resulted in roughly 200,000 orphans and 80,000 widows.
