Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz provoked foreign elites and local landowners by cultivating a class conscience and eventually instituting land redistribution, including land for indigenous communities. The economy improved under the agrarian reform, and exports from the country diversified as indigenous people participated in the economy. After the coup, however, the new military government reversed all of these redistribution policies and began a counterinsurgent campaign against supporters of the previous government. This included communists, leftists, and poor and indigenous people who supported the Arévalo and Árbenz administrations. What on the surface was a counterinsurgent campaign against communist ideology and influence, was a period of genocide, surveillance, and terror for campesinos, indigenous, and leftists from the 1960s to 1990s.

The government considered indigenous participation in the guerrilla movement as a legitimate threat that required extermination. In a testimony by a woman who lived in a refugee camp, she quotes President General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983) as saying that if they have to kill 4.5M Indians in order to wipe out the guerrillas, that they would.[2] While soldiers maintained that they were protecting indigenous communities, they would indiscriminately attack civilian camps they suspected had guerrilla presence. She continues, ‘’All they said was that the soldiers had fought the guerrillas, and that they had killed many. But it wasn’t the guerrillas that died; it was the people of the village.’’ The killings were often cruel, with soldiers at times murdering children as their parents watched on. Indigenous culture was equated to subversion, meaning army units destroyed sacred places and ceremonial sites important to the predominantly Q’eqchi’ Maya people. By the time that the war ended in 1996, the state had killed 200,000 people and disappeared 40,000, of which a large majority included indigenous people.[3]

It had not been an easy feat for the Peace Accord Deals to come into fruition. Despite the international pressures and visibility of the CPR, the government claimed the CPR was the political arm and base for the counterinsurgency. Although attacks slowed down due to scrutiny, the military continued to raid and capture people from the CPR. The government and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), a coalition of guerrillas and far left- political parties, had not come to any agreements and this would be the case for several years until 1996.[6] Throughout the years-long negotiation process, indigenous people’s concerns were central to the conversations held. Indigenous leaders, like Rigoberta Menchú, were crucial figures to voice the needs and demands of the Maya community. Although the URNG and CPR did not succeed in reinstating the Jacobo Arbenz-era of agrarian reforms, the accords did codify the right and cultural respect for indigenous people and outlined the transition that would make the government more open, participatory, and democratic. The accords would also signify the rest of arms for the guerrillas, a substantial shrink in the Guatemalan military, and an official end to the counterrevolution.