9 - The Ethnic Question in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict

Summary

This chapter explores the complicated question of ethnicity in Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, a war primarily driven by economic and political grievances, but one that culminated in state “acts of genocide” against Maya communities. The war’s “ethnic component” was a significant concern of counterinsurgency strategists and guerrilla forces alike. This chapter examines ethnic dynamics both in the state’s counterinsurgency war and within opposition movements through an episode that put a public spotlight on the subject: the army’s capture and exploitation of guerrilla member and K’iche’-Maya organizer Emeterio Toj Medrano in 1981, followed by his remarkable escape. The case illustrates state efforts to exploit and exacerbate ethnic tensions on the left, and to try to prevent indigenous support for revolution. It also highlights the possibilities and challenges inherent in broad and multiethnic alliances among Guatemalan opposition movements. Attention to this subject helps us to understand the history of Guatemala’s civil war, and the fraught and unsettled “peace” that has followed it.