1982 жылғы Гватемаланың Ачи тайпасына жасаған қырғыны

1982 mass killing of indigenous people by Guatemalan armed forces

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.

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. 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." 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. 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.

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.

They separated the children, and the girls of 15 to 20 years old. Then they began the massacre. First, they tortured the elderly, because they said the latter were guerrillas; then they threw two grenades and fired weapons After executing the women, the men and the elderly, they took the children one by one, smashed them against the ground, and threw them into the flames. No one could escape because the Army had surrounded the entrance and exit of Plan de Sánchez, as well as the adjacent roads [The next day] he braced himself to leave the place where he was hiding to go and examine the havoc that had been wrought. Together with his brothers, Juan, Buenaventura and Esteban, and with Eulalio Grave Ramírez, he put out the fire that was still consuming the corpses.|Benjamín Manuel Jerónimo, Inter American Court's reparations judgement. They separated the girls who were 15 to 20 years old from this group, and took them to Guillerma Grave Manuel's house; they raped them; they broke their arms and legs, and then they killed them The children were smashed against the floor, and then thrown into the flames together with their parents At 8 pm, he was able to enter his own home and saw that his wife and three of his children were dead. He found one of his daughters alive; she had managed to escape, because she was buried under the bodies of her two siblings.|Eulalio Grave Ramírez, Inter American Court's reparations judgement. My sister went shopping in Rabinal but when she got to the hamlet of Plan de Sánchez the army was already there. There they grabbed her and raped her in a house. There were fifteen girls raped and then they were riddled with bullets. Afterwards, they were buried by the people, in a clandestine cemetery.|Unidentified female villager, Draining the Sea (CIIDH). The witness heard her mother, who was walking through the village, scream and saw when they seized her nine month old nephew from her mother, with its shawl and everything, and took them to the house where all the people were gathered At the time of the massacre, she was 13 or 14 years old. She lost her mother, sister, grandmother, aunts and all her cousins, even the babies The following day, she was able to see the corpses, but only for a short time, because the soldiers granted three hours to bury her next of kin.|Narcisa Corazón Jerónimo, Inter American Court's reparations judgement.

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.

The militarisation of Plan de Sánchez prevented them from continuing their ancestral traditions. Before the massacre, they performed individual and private ceremonies, called "devotions". Several of the older men were responsible for officiating these acts, but many of them died in the massacre and their knowledge could not be transmitted to the new generations Owing to the repression exercised by the Army and the obligation for the young men to do military service, the latter lost their faith, their devotion for the traditions and knowledge of their ancestors, and did not want to continue the traditions They performed a few Mayan ceremonies very infrequently because the military agents did not allow these rites, alleging that they were practicing witchcraft against their enemies." – Benjamín Manuel Jerónimo, Inter American Court's reparations judgement. The witness was obliged to enlist in the Army for 30 months. On 31 October 1987, he left the military barracks to return to Plan de Sánchez [and] was obliged to join the patrol again. The men who survived found second wives among women from other communities, because very few women were left in Plan de Sánchez after the massacre." – Buenaventura Manuel Jerónimo, Inter American Court's reparations judgement.

On 10 December 1992, a group of villagers reported the existence of a clandestine grave in Plan de Sánchez and, on 7 May 1993, Ramiro de León Carpio, the country's human rights ombudsman (Procurador de los Derechos Humanos), lodged an official accusation with the public prosecution service, reporting the massacre that had taken place 11 years earlier. A criminal investigation was begun by an investigating magistrate in Salamá, Baja Verapaz, and, on 8 June 1994, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team (EAFG) began examining the clandestine graves in the community. Two months later, the forensic anthropologists had exhumed a total of 84 corpses from 21 graves. An additional grave site was identified during the field work and, once the legal formalities had been met, the EAFG was able to examine it, and exhume four sets of human remains, in August 1996. On 2 September 1996, Ombudsman Jorge Mario García Laguardia issued a historic resolution in which he denounced the massacre of Plan de Sánchez (and two others that took place in Rabinal the same year: Chichupac and Río Negro) as crimes against humanity, laid the blame for them firmly at the feet of the government and the military, and said that they had been carried out as part of a premeditated state policy. In May 1997, the villagers named as plaintiffs in the criminal investigation gave the authorities a list of names of soldiers and patrolmen who had been involved in the massacre. In June 1997, their legal representatives the Centro para Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH) requested ballistic tests on the spent cartridges found in the graves; the ballistic material was reported as "lost" by the prosecution service and did not resurface until February 2000. Following sustained efforts by victims and CALDH, and the appointment of a new Attorney General in Guatemala, five direct perpetrators were convicted in domestic criminal proceedings and in October 2012 their conviction was upheld on appeal.

Courts in Guatemala convicted five members of a paramilitary organization, Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil, of murder in the 1982 massacre. Each of the five were sentenced to 7710 years in prison on 21 March 2012.