This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A campaign of massacres and scorched-earth destruction was carried out by the Guatemalan Armed Forces against Maya indigenous communities, chiefly the Ixil people of the western highlands, at its most intense between 1981 and 1983, within Guatemala's wider 1960 to 1996 civil war. The campaign fell under the governments of Presidents Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and, from a March 1982 coup, Efrain Rios Montt, a Pentecostal evangelical convert whose eighteen-month rule Guatemala's UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification found to be the bloodiest phase of the entire civil war. Alongside the campaign against Maya communities, the army targeted the rural Catholic Church's network of catechists and clergy associated with liberation theology, viewing their teaching as a source of the insurgency's support.
The Commission for Historical Clarification published its findings in 1999, attributing ninety-three percent of the conflict's documented atrocities to government forces and concluding that acts of genocide were committed against the Maya people during this period. A Guatemalan court convicted Rios Montt of genocide in 2013 over the killing of 1,771 Ixil people, the first such domestic conviction of a former head of state anywhere; Guatemala's Constitutional Court annulled the verdict on procedural grounds ten days later, and his retrial remained incomplete when he died in 2018.