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
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