The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco, Genocidio maya, or Holocausto silencioso), was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S. backed military regimes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.
The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against them began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983. In some municipalities, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A March 1985 study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court estimated that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war, and that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed between 1980 and 1985. Children were often targets of mass killings by the army, including in the Río Negro massacres between 1980 and 1982. A 1984 report by HRW discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". In fact, the rights abuses were so severe that even the U.S. with its fervent anticommunist policy "kept its assistance comparatively limited. For most of the 1980's the Guatemalan army relied on fellow pariah-states like Argentina and South Africa for supplies."
