Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

the Verapaces, farther east, were the Achi. The Lucas García government adopted a policy that one general called “blindness and madness,” in which the military killed, tortured, and raped as many Maya as it could to instill terror and diminish support for the guerrillas. “The great Indian masses,” as the army called them, were the “social base” of opposition to the military. The premise followed from American counterinsurgency doctrine, but the execution exceeded even the US government’s capacity for geopolitical rationalizations. The Carter administration had cut off aid to the Guatemalan military in 1977; Reagan was trying to restart it. At the same time, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and two hundred thousand people were killed and disappeared. More than a million Indigenous residents were displaced, with tens of thousands fleeing to Mexico.