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nine Imissed the visit of Pope John Paul II by only a few days. He was in Guatemala on March 7, 1983, during one of his whirlwind pastoral engagements. Part of his address to an assembly of indigenous Mayas was delivered in K’iche’. “The Church is aware of the discrimination you suffer and the injustices you must put up with,” the Pope told his audience. “It raises its voice in condemnation when your dignity as human beings and children of God is violated.” Pope John Paul’s words were spoken exactly one year after General Angel Aníbal Guevara was declared to have won an election even the most blinkered of Guatemalans knew to be rigged. Discontent with the election outcome so troubled junior officers in the armed forces that they closed ranks and plotted a coup that led to the overthrow, on March 23, 1982, of the government headed by General Romeo Lucas García. Guevara never got to serve as president because the removal of Lucas García brought about the political resurrection of the man denied the presidency in the fraudulent elections of 1974, General Efraín Ríos Montt. From their days in military college the junior officers responsible for the coup remembered Ríos Montt as a soldier of impeccable integrity, an honest, moral, consummate professional. They asked him to head a military junta that also included General Horacio Maldonado Schaad and Colonel Francisco Luis Gordillo. Ríos Montt re-entered national politics at a time of widespread public disgust with the Lucas García administration. There was also growing concern among the armed forces that the war against guerrilla insurgents was not yielding satisfactory results. Ríos Montt, it was hoped, would turn things around. Three stages can be distinguished that allow an assessment to be made of the consequences of the junior officers’ coup, consequences that can be attributed in large measure to the return of Ríos Montt. peACe of the deAd (12–13) a Beauty that hurts  Stage one lasted a little over five months, from March through August 1982. It represented, in essence, the declaration of war on any individual or group suspected of assisting, or even sympathizing with, the guerrilla insurgency. This phase of counterinsurgency was especially harmful to Maya communities within whose territory the Guerrilla Army of the Poor and the Organization of People in Arms had established a strategic, insurgent base. Having realized, to paraphrase Mao Tse-Tung, that the native settlements were the water in which the fish to be caught swam freely, the armed forces unleashed a fearful repression on them—worse than anything experienced even under Lucas García, whose soldiers were responsible for an estimated twenty-seven thousand killings between 1978 and 1982. One of the first public notices of renewed and even intensified atrocities came on May 12, 1982. Following a peaceful occupation of the Brazilian Embassy in Guatemala City, members of the peasant organization known as the Committee for Campesino Unity (cuc) issued a statement later circulated among the national and international press. The cuc declared: We wish to denounce before our people and the peoples of the world the brutal repression that the indigenous communities of Guatemala are suffering at the hands of the military junta’s army.We wish it to be known that this junta of generals and colonels, since March 23, has not only continued the policy of massacres and destruction practised by the previous military government, but in some regions has intensified the massacres to levels never before experienced. Since March 23, far from seeing an end to the massacres, we have seen the junta continue and intensify them. The cuc’s claim was reiterated, only five days later, in an editorial that appeared in El Gráfico. Signed by the newspaper’s general director, Jorge Carpio Nicolle, the editorial observed: Massacres have become commonplace, massacres in which no respect or mercy is shown for grandparents, children, or grandchildren. Shortly before the coup we published an editorial entitled “At least spare our children .” The cases discussed in that article are very similar to the current one: excessive use of force, unrestrained sadism, psychotic mercilessness. It would be difficult for any person in his right mind to imagine this kind of extermination. How is it possible to decapitate an eight- or nine-yearold child? How is it possible for a human adult to murder, in cold blood, a baby of less than a year...

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