This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Between November 1976 and December 1977 alone, ahead of the campaign's most intense phase, death squads killed 143 Catholic Action catechists of the Diocese of El Quiche, and the killing of priests and catechists continued through the early 1980s as the army came to view the rural Church's liberation theology teaching, alongside Maya spiritual leaders and community elders, as sources of support for the insurgency. Rios Montt's own government simultaneously favored United States Protestant evangelical missions, including the one he had himself belonged to, in evangelizing the same Maya communities his forces were attacking, a pairing of persecution and parallel proselytizing that Guatemalan and international observers at the time found difficult to separate.
The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification formally concluded in 1999 that the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against the Maya people, and a domestic court reached the same conclusion against Rios Montt personally in 2013, only for Guatemala's own Constitutional Court to annul that verdict on procedural grounds within ten days. No international judicial body issued a binding determination, and the domestic conviction was never restored before Rios Montt's 2018 death ended the retrial, leaving the Commission's own genocide finding as the more durable of the two verdicts against the campaign.