The Guatemalan government began to kill indigenous people en masse simply because of their ethnic background. Entire ethnicities, whole tribes, complete villages were marked as either communist or liable to become communist. They were often people who had only a vague idea of what Marxism or the guerrilla groups were. This was new, different from the urban terror tactics, in which government forces kidnapped individual people. For the Mayans and other indigenous groups, the Army would come and simply kill every single one of them.
