Victims of Guatemala’s Civil War Are Laid to Rest, 3 Decades Later 21, 2017 SANTA AVELINA, Guatemala — Juana García Gómez, 75, wept over two coffins placed side by side in the sports hall of the Santa Avelina school in the western highlands of Guatemala. The two coffins were among 172 containing exhumed remains of people who had died as a result of a military strategy carried out by the government in the Maya highlands during the bloodiest period of the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. The dictator Gen. Romeo Lucas García ordered the first military sweep into the highlands, in late 1981, attacking villages in a strategy designed to terrorize the civilian population and destroy any possible support for the guerrillas. Anthropologists also showed the clothes of the deceased to the residents of Santa Avelina with the hope that they would be able to recognize their loved ones; the families of 67 victims identified them that way. He forced them into what were called "model villages," requiring them to work for food and pressing them into civil defense patrols, paramilitary groups that were often ordered to support the military massacres. As leftist guerrillas moved their organizing away from cities and into the Maya highlands in the late 1970s, the army identified the Ixil as a base of support for the rebels, even though the insurgents never established a strong presence in the countryside.
