During the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96), over 200,000 Maya civilians and suspected communists were systematically murdered by the ruling military government in the early 1980s. The government believed the Maya were supporting the rebels. In addition to the military, civilian so-called death squads assisted in the terror by burning villages, destroying crops, and performing random abductions and killings. For the most thorough account of the genocide, see Memory of Silence, Daniel Rothenberg’s one-volume edit in English of the original twelve-volume Guatemalan Truth Commission Report.
