These crimes happened during the darkest period of the war that subsumed Guatemala for more than three decades. From 1982 to 1983, the country’s then-dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, ordered his U.S.-supported military to eradicate guerrilla opposition.
It was a brutal period in a conflict that, in total, saw more than 200,000 people killed or disappeared, the majority of them Indigenous Mayans. The United Nations would later conclude that the state committed genocide — as soldiers and the patrollers carried out a scorched-earth campaign.