By the time Guatemala’s decades-long civil war came to an end in 1996, some 200,000 people had died or disappeared in the violence, most of them by far having been killed by government forces. Guatemala is one of the few countries in Latin America where the indigenous population forms the majority, and most of the human rights violations committed under the military dictators during the civil war were directed at the native ethnic Mayan population. At times this led to a mass exodus of the repressed rural poor to neighbouring Mexico, while others went underground and into hiding, for example, in the northwestern lowlands.
Producer: Dheera Sujan
Broadcast: September 6, 1996