News Release

AAAS Report Attributes Majority Of Killings In Guatemala To State

Peer-Reviewed Publication

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Washington, D.C. -- For the first time, scientific analysis places responsibility for the majority of killings that occurred in Guatemala over a 36-year period of armed conflict in the hands of the government regimes that ruled the country.

A new report by AAAS and the International Center for Human Rights Research (CIIDH) presents quantitative data that attributes 97 percent of the 37,255 documented cases of killings and disappearances to the state as part of a deliberate government policy of extra-judicial killing, and less than 1 percent to the armed opposition. The report, titled State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection, will be released in English and Spanish in Guatemala on January 14.

Although much of the political violence in Guatemala over the last three decades has been attributed to the state, this is the first time that scientific analysis has been used to reach such a conclusion. The quantitative report uses statistics from documentary sources, press reports, and interviews, together with historical analysis, to tell the story of state violence in Guatemala. Numbers and graphs help establish who the victims were, how they were killed, when they were killed, and who killed them.

Since 1993, AAAS has advised CIIDH, a small non-government organization, on analyzing the information collected on extrajudicial executions and disappearances, as well as thousands of other gross human rights violations. Scientific methods allow those investigating human rights abuses to see otherwise invisible patterns in the violence.

Patrick Ball, deputy director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program and primary author of the report, said despite the fact that it is impossible to know the full extent of the violence committed in Guatemala, "the evidence is clear -- tens of thousands have died at the hands of the state." According to the report, the level of state terror peaked in 1982, under the regime of General José Efrain Ríos Montt. "Seeing the trends between urban and rural areas, and seeing changes in the age and sex distribution of the victims, we must conclude that indiscriminate mass killing became official state policy in 1982-1983," Ball said.

The report makes a number of analytic comparison on such topics as methods of terror, urban versus rural violence, and selective versus mass killing. For example, according to the report, "29% of the victims of killing were assassinated individually and 23% were killed in groups of between 2-50 victims. 48% of all victims were killed in groups of larger than 50 people, victims of the government destruction of entire rural communities."

The report concludes that "Despite gross violations of the law during the counterinsurgency, the army high command, as well as members of Guatemala's political class, continues to evade responsibility for its deliberate long-term policy of extra-judicial murder, even for the army's well-planned early 1980s scorched earth policy." Many leaders of the counterinsurgency have escaped trial and live comfortably. General Ríos Montt, under whose rule more state killings occurred than any other, continues to exercise power as the head of the Guatemalan Republic Front.

The report also notes that those who work to clarify this history still face repression. On April 24, 1998, the Catholic Church presented its Recovery of Historical Memory report on the armed conflict, detailing both the operation and effects of the state violence. Two days later Juan José Gerardi Condera, the church's bishop for human rights, was murdered inside his parish garage.

The AAAS report, written by Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer, includes a narrative of state violence, analytic comparisons, information on the victims and perpetrators, appendices, and a bibliography. The report draws from the CIIDH database, which consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources. CIIDH members collected more than 10,000 cases in a review of Guatemalan newspapers in the national archives for the 36-year period; another 4,000 cases came from documentary sources; and more than 5,000 testimonies, most of which were collected directly from the CIIDH. The data used in the analysis presented in the report are available on the Internet at http://hrdata.aaas.org/ciidh.

Meanwhile, the Guatemala Commission for Historical Clarification is nearing completion on its study of human rights violations, and will submit its page report in January to the parties in the Guatemalan peace accords -- the government and the former guerrillas -- and the United Nations. The commission expects to publish the report so that the information is available to the Guatemalan public and the international community. AAAS also helped the commission by designing the information management system and inventing new statistical techniques to analyze the data gathered through thousands of interviews.

AAAS has been involved in Guatemalan human rights issues since the early 1980s when its Science and Human Rights Program conducted casework for university students and scientific professionals who had been disappeared or murdered by the government. AAAS involvement continued in the early 1990s with support for the organization and training of a forensic anthropology team that exhumed and identified hundreds of cadavers.

AAAS works to guarantee human rights around the world. For South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, AAAS furnished technical assistance to establish a database of gross human rights violations during apartheid -- the largest structured database on human rights abuses ever collected. The association has also worked on human rights projects in Honduras, Argentina, Haiti, and Guatemala.

###

Founded in 1848, AAAS represents the world's largest federation of scientists from a variety of disciplines and has more than 143,000 individual members. The association publishes the weekly, peer-reviewed journal Science and administers EurekAlert!, the online news service featuring the latest discoveries in science, medicine, and technology.



Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.