ABSTRACT
As lynchings began so distinctly in the same year the civil war ended, there is a clear relationship between old and new violence. This chapter explores how these lynchings, and Guatemalan lynchings more generally, can be seen as a continuity of violence from the civil war. With lynching participants often consisting of former civil patrollers who were armed and forced to police and patrol their own communities, vigilante violence is often seen as a continuation of their war-time policing roles. But as urban areas without civil patrols are also experiencing lynchings and with similar vigilantism now emerging throughout Central America in response to gangs, the relationship between patrollers and lynchings is not so straightforward. With issues of individual and collective trauma affecting responses to threat and the shift from military to civilian policing also contributing to the make-up of lynchings, how much can we (or should we) blame the war? The ubiquity of the term “post-war” is critiqued in this chapter as a reductionist explanation that flattens understandings of reactive violence. Here, the war and the human rights abuses of the past are approached as significant but often overstated factors in the fomentation of lynchings at both local and national levels.
