The Plan de Sánchez massacre took place in the Guatemalan village of Plan de Sánchez, Baja Verapaz department, on 18 July 1982. Over 250 people (mostly women and children, and almost exclusively ethnic Achi Maya) were abused and murdered by members of the armed forces and their paramilitary allies.
The killings took place during one of the most violent phases of Guatemala's Civil War, which pitted various groups of left-wing insurgents against the government and the armed forces. After assuming power in March 1982, de facto President Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt embarked on a military campaign that largely succeeded in breaking the insurgency, but at a terrible cost in human lives and human rights violations. The massacre in Plan de Sánchez was an element in the government's scorched earth strategy, and the village was targeted because of the authorities' suspicions that the inhabitants were harbouring or otherwise supporting guerrilla groups.
After the massacre, the village was practically abandoned for a number of years, and the survivors were told that reprisals would follow if they spoke about the incident or revealed the location of the numerous mass graves they had helped to dig. With the gradual return to democracy that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of the survivors felt they could start to talk about the killings without fearing for their lives. Accusations were filed with the authorities in 1992 and, in 1993, a criminal investigation was launched. However, faced with delays and other irregularities in the proceedings, and stonewalled by a National Reconciliation Law that granted amnesties to the suspected perpetrators, the survivors saw that Guatemala's domestic legal remedies were ineffective in this case. They consequently decided to lodge a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the supranational human rights arm of the Organisation of American States, in 1996.
The IACHR began processing the complaint, received a partial recognition of the state's institutional responsibility from the democratically elected president Alfonso Portillo in the first year of his term, and finally referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for judgement and settlement. In 2004, the Inter-American Court issued two judgements, in which it established Guatemala's liability in the case and ordered an extensive package of monetary, non-monetary and symbolic forms of compensation for the survivors and the next-of-kin of the deceased.
National context
1982 was one of the bloodiest years in Guatemala's 36-year-long history of internal conflict (1960–1996).
On 23 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by Gen. Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked successor of outgoing president Gen. Romeo Lucas García who had won a disputed election two weeks earlier. The coup leaders asked retired Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of both Lucas and Guevara.
Ríos Montt, who had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential election and was widely regarded as having been denied his victory through fraud, accepted the appointment. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution dissolved Congress, and suspended all political parties. After a few months, he dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the de facto title of President of the Republic; in his inaugural address, Ríos Montt – a lay pastor in the evangelical Protestant Church of the Word – stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God."Background Note: Guatemala; April 2001 version, U.S. State Department. Via Internet Archive.
The country's guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Ríos Montt, who sought to defeat the guerrilla insurgency with a combination of military action and economic reforms; in his words, "beans and rifles" (frijoles y fusiles). An army officer was quoted in The New York Times of 18 July 1982 (the exact day of the Plan de Sánchez killings) as telling an audience of indigenous people in Cunén, in the department of El Quiché, that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you.""Guatemala Enlists Religion in Battle", Raymond Bonner, New York Times, 18 July 1982. For a number of years, the U.S. State Department, in its background notes on Guatemala, attributed this quotation to Gen. Ríos Montt himself. See: Background Note: Guatemala; April 2001 version, via the Internet Archive.
The government began to form local "civilian self-defence patrols" (the paramilitary forces known as patrullas de autodefensa civil or PACs). Participation was, in theory, voluntary, but in practice, many campesinos, especially in the north-west, had no choice but to join either the PACs or the guerrillas. The country's conscript army, supported by the PACs, recaptured practically all the guerrilla-held territory – guerrilla activity lessened and was mostly limited to hit-and-run operations. However, this partial victory was won at an enormous cost in civilian deaths.
Ríos Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in about 200,000 deaths of mostly unarmed, mostly indigenous civilians. Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of non-combatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the military and the PACs they controlled. The internal conflict is described in great detail in the report of the Historical Clarification Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, or CEH), which estimates that government forces and their paramilitary confederates were responsible for 93% of the violations.CEH, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Conclusions, §15.
On 8 August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his own Minister of Defence, Gen. Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, who succeeded him as de facto president of Guatemala. Victims of the period, organised in the Asociación para Justicia y Reconciliación (AJR) and their legal representatives the Centro para Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH) brought a criminal case against Ríos Montt in 2001. He was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in a national court in May 2013. The status of the conviction is unclear following intervention by the Constitutional Court.
Local context The central Guatemalan department of Baja Verapaz comprises eight municipalities, one of which is Rabinal (), some 70 km to the north of Guatemala City. In 1982, the municipality was made up of the municipal seat of Rabinal town, along with another 14 villages and 60 hamlets. Among the villages was Plan de Sánchez, located in a hilly woodland area some 9 km from the town of Rabinal. The local inhabitants were overwhelmingly Achi Maya Native Americans. Achi is one of the 21 varieties of the Maya language recognised in Guatemala; according to a 2002 government census, it was spoken by some 105,000 people in the Baja Verapaz highlands.Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, Comunidad Lingüística Achi. Via the Internet Archive.
The events of July 1982
Since early 1982, the inhabitants of the area had been facing increasing pressure from the authorities. Many of the local men had refused to participate in the self-defence patrols and, as a result, the military kept a strong presence in the area. Many men fled their homes for the mountains, leaving the womenfolk and children behind. Others had already, before the massacre, filed formal complaints – reporting the armed forces' constant threatening behaviour and harassment – with the justice of the peace in Rabinal, but these allegations were never investigated; on the contrary, the men who lodged the complaints were fined.
In early July 1982, a military aircraft flew over the village and dropped a number of bombs on areas close to several homes. On 15 July, an army detachment set up camp in the village and began house-to-house inspections, asking after the menfolk and threatening the villagers.
Sunday, 18 July, was market-day in Rabinal. The pathways and roads of the municipality were, from an early hour, crowded with people from local villages and farms taking their goods to market. The village of Plan de Sánchez was one of several settlements crisscrossed by the network of routes leading to the municipal seat.
At around 08:00 that Sunday morning, soldiers at the military detachment fired two 105-mm mortar shells at the village. One of these landed to the east of the main group of houses; the other to the west. Later that same day, between 14:00 and 15:00, a military detachment arrived in Plan de Sánchez. This force of some 60 men – comprising regular army (led by a captain and a lieutenant), PAC patrolmen, police, and civilians dressed in military fatigues and armed with assault rifles – took up stations at the village's points of entry and exit, heading off people from other settlements returning from market. Others went from house to house, gathering the inhabitants together. At this point, some of the men succeeded in fleeing the round-up and took to the surrounding woods and hills.
The younger women were sent to one house, with the men, children, and older women directed to another. A group of around twenty of the younger women (aged between 12 and 20) were separated from the main group and taken to another building; there, they were humiliated, accused of supporting the guerrillas, beaten, and raped. A handful of these women managed to escape and take refuge in the surrounding countryside, while the remainder were killed.
The children were separated from the main group and beaten and kicked to death. Then, at around 17:00, the soldiers threw two hand grenades into the house where the adults were being held and began spraying the walls with automatic gunfire. Residents of nearby villages and those from Plan de Sánchez who was observing the massacre from vantage points in the surrounding hills report that intense gunfire continued until about 20:00 when the army set fire to the buildings. The armed forces finally left the village at around 23:00.
The next morning, some of those who had fled returned to the smoking ruins of their village. None of the bodies in the houses could be identified; many of the others who had fallen in the yards adjacent to the houses had bullet holes in their heads, chests, and backs, but identification of these victims was made difficult because dogs and other animals had partially devoured many of the charred corpses.
At around 15:00 on that Monday, two military commissioners and a squad of PAC patrolmen arrived in Plan de Sánchez and ordered the survivors to dig graves and bury the victims' remains, threatening them that the air force would bombard the village if they failed to comply. More than 20 clandestine communal graves were dug and filled. Meanwhile, the patrolmen ransacked the houses that had not been burned down, stealing personal property and livestock and destroying identification papers.
Witness testimony
Aftermath Over the ensuing months, because of regular visits by the army during which they were threatened, harassed, and intimidated, most of the survivors abandoned the village for the mountains, other towns and villages, or Guatemala City. In 1985, they began to trickle back and were allowed to resettle in Plan de Sánchez and work their land, provided that they served in the PACs and remained subject at all times to military oversight. By 1987, some 20 families were again living in the village, albeit under strict orders from the military not to discuss the massacre. The harassment and threats from the military and paramilitaries continued, and the requirement that they patrol with the PACs was enforced until the peace accords were signed and the civilian self-defence patrols were dissolved in 1996.