It’s been a busy month-and-a-half for me at NISGUA, with two weeks of intensive training and month of regular work under my belt. Last week, I took my first salida, or trip, to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the sentence of genocide committed against the Maya Ixil People.(1) On May 10th, 2013, the Guatemalan criminal court found José Efraín Ríos Montt, dictator of Guatemala from 1982-83, guilty of genocide against the Ixil people. Although the verdict was later illegally overturned by the Guatemalan Constitutional Court, the initial verdict still carries a huge amount of significance for Guatemala, and the Ixil people.
On Friday, May 9th, some 200 Ixil gathered in Nebaj, the largest city in the Ixil region of Guatemala, to commemorate and reflect on the genocide sentence and their ongoing struggle for recognition, recompense, and reconciliation. To understand why people still commemorate an annulled decision, I’d like to tell you a bit about the history of the Ixil people, the significance of the genocide conviction, and the issues they continue to face today. Much of the following is informed by Giovanni Batz’s The Fourth Invasion.(2)
The Coordinating Committee of Ixil Organizations, giving a press conference on the morning of the 9th. Their full statement is available in English here. Note the geometric patterns on the women’s shirts – these are distinctively Ixil in style. As a visible symbol of Ixil culture, they stand as a rebuke to the repression and violence the Ixil faced during the Internal Armed Conflict.
Who are the Ixil?
By 1530, a majority of the Ixil people had been killed by the Spanish. The survivors were forcibly assimilated into the Spanish culture. In order to more easily exert their contro, the Spanish forced the Ixil to relocate en masse from the more mountainous regions of their region to centralized areas on lower ground, in villages that remain the municipal centers of the region to this day. Despite being forced to forget their culture and religion in favor of Spanish Catholocism, the Ixil retained a degree of autonomy and continued to work the land for themselves until the start of the 20th century.
By 1902, Guatemala had begun to take a different approach to wealth extraction: that year, large swaths of farmland actively tended by the Ixil were taken from them and given to rich European and Ladino* families, and those same Ixil were then enslaved to farm these new fincas, comparable to southern US plantations of the 19th century. Despite their resistance, the majority of the Ixil people were separated from both their religion and their land, and enslaved to a people who considered them sub-human.
*Ladino is a complicated class distinction within Guatemalan society, but essentially it refers to people who speak Spanish as their first language and do not self-identify as indigenous. While today perhaps half of Guatemalans fit that description, Ladinos in the Ixil region were and remain a small, privileged minority.
Of course, the Ixil people routinely rebelled against their enslavement, and met in response with overwhelming force. On 21/6/1936, Ixil in Nebaj, the largest municipality in the region, revolted and ran the finca owners and their ilk out of town. In response, the federal government sent in the military, arrested 150 people, and publicly executed 7 principales, or local leaders, in the town square shown here.
The degree of oppression that the Ixil faced increased again during the internal armed conflict. Reaching its apex in 1980-83, especially under dictator Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan army pursued a campaign of genocide with the pretext of fighting guerrilla forces. At that time in Guatemala, “being visibly Ixil was a death sentence.” (2, p. 81) Those who were not killed were forced to flee; children were forcibly conscripted into the army or adopted by the soldiers who killed their parents. Ultimately, more than 60% of the Ixil population was forced to flee, many seeking shelter in Mexico through the remainder of the Internal Armed Conflict.(5) Those who remained in Guatemala had to give up all custom and language to survive.
Since the peace accords of 1996, the complete physical displacement of the Ixil from the Ixil region has served as a pretext to strip them of formal recognition, meaning that they lack many basic rights other indigenous peoples in Guatemala enjoy. Today, the Ixil struggle to defend their land and territory from international mineral and hydroelectric interests that seek to once again displace and dehumanize them.
One of the most important projects that the Ixil people pursue today, some 40 years on from the genocide, is maintaining the memory and demonstrating the reality of what occurred. This set of graves in Nebaj contains the remains of 25 still-unidentified victims of a massacre that occurred in 1982 in the village of Xecac, near Nebaj. The victims’ remains were reinterred in the cemetery in July of 2014. There are perhaps a hundred other graves in the same cemetery containing identified and unidentified victims of other massacres perpetrated in the region. Photo by NISGUA staff.
What is the significance of the sentence of genocide?
The genocide conviction had an impact that reverberated beyond Guatemala itself. “The conviction was the first in the world to charge an ex-head of state for genocide in the national court system of the country in which the crimes took place.”(1) How this has impacted Guatemala’s standing on the world stage, and how it is abused to justify gencides today, I hope to discuss at length in a future e-mail. For the Ixil people, the plain fact of the acknowledgement remains supremely important, with the hashtag #sihubogenocidio (“yes, there was a genocide”) being synonymous with the case and the ongoing struggle for justice. Furthermore, this initial legal acknowledgement is widely seen as the first step in other forms of compensation and reconciliation, which are still, haltingly, ongoing.
Trip to Nebaj and Ixil reunion:
It’s a seven-hour drive north from Guatemala City to Nebaj, up and down mountains on steep roads chiseled from the hillside. NISGUA traveled with several partner organizations based in Guatemala City, and we arrived at around four PM the afternoon before the event. We visited a graveyard where victims of the internal armed conflict were interred, as well as other parts of the city associated with the historic oppression of the Ixil. We went to bed early so we would be ready to help set up in the morning.
The following morning around two hundred Ixil people, from every corner of the region and speaking all three major dialects, met to acknowledge the historic achievement of the genocide conviction, honor the many community members who struggled for decades to achieve the sentence and who now seek reparation, and to receive news about the broader struggle from their Guatemala-City-based legal team.(6) Many of the attendees, now in their old age, were victims of, and lost family members to, the atrocities committed in the internal armed conflict. Many had testified in Ríos Montt’s trial, and continue to testify in others. It was a powerful event that demonstrated the strength of the Ixil community. The five hours of proceedings were bookended by a communal breakfast and lunch, and punctuated by a mid-morning snack, giving people who had traveled for hours to attend time to catch up. Two different bands provided entertainment during the breaks. Every announcement was given in both Ixil and Spanish, and dozens of community members were acknowledged for some combined hundreds of years of service to the struggle for justice.
NISGUA and other partner organizations were also acknowledged: for our ongoing service in accompanying Ixil people to the city to testify, and ensuring their safety while there; for our support, as much emotional as logistical, in providing their testimony; and for our championing of their cause internationally.
What obstacles do the Ixil people face today?
The original genocide sentence was almost immediately undermined by a corrupt federal judiciary, and the issue of judicial capture has only made the situation worse since 2013. Because of the way that federal judicial appointments function in Guatemala, buying a vote is simply a matter of having enough money to found a legal school. And that is to say nothing of the many less-than-legal forms of influence that plague the system.(7)
In addition to this ongoing capture of the judiciary, the Attorney General has also, in recent years, been weaponized against the Ixil. The current AG, Consuelo Porras, was appointed under a former president who openly collaborated with the military perpetrators of the genocide.(4) Porras has done everything in her power to provide impunity for those who benefit from corruption, and to criminalize those who would fight for a more just system. Last month, two indigenous leaders of a 106-day general strike–which was held from October 2023 to February 2024 and ensured the just transition of power to president Arévalo–were arrested at Porras’ behest and held on charges of terrorism related to the strike.(8) It’s currently unclear whether those charges will stick, but the naked threat of retaliation against indigenous-lead campaigns for justice was on everyone’s minds at the commemoration.
Nicholas Kohnen is a volunteer with Works in Progress and is currently volunteering with NISGUA, the Network in Solidarity with Guatemala
(1) https://nisgua.org/ixil-genocide-trial/
(2) Perhaps the best english-language source of information on the Ixil people, serendipitously published under an open-access license and hence available as a free download at https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-fourth-invasion/paper
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Mayan_language
(5) Findings of the Commission for Historical Clarification. The conclusion and recommendations of this Commission, in English, can be found here: https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CEHreport-english.pdf
(6) An english translation of the statement of the Coordining Committee of Ixil Organizations (translated by Eleanor!) can be found here: https://nisgua.org/statement-from-the-coordinator-of-ixil-organizations-on-the-12th-anniversary-of-the-genocide-verdict-comunicado-de-la-coordinadora-de-organizaciones-ixiles-en-el-12-aniversario-de-la-sentenci/
(7) I cannot recommend this organizations analyses highly enough, very good and approachable analysis of contemporary issues in Guatemala and elsewhere https://insightcrime.org/investigations/guatemala-elites-and-organized-crime-series/
(8) www.hrw.org/news/2025/04/30/guatemala-indigenous-leaders-face-terrorism-charges
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