Guatemala
Across Guatemalan media and in the US-backed military, the indigenous Mayans were described as, "are, and always have been, sub-human, untrustworthy, gullible, stupid and envious all of them are guerrillas, the internal enemy, and thus all of them have to be annihilated, men, women and children". The military campaign was almost exclusively the reason for the destruction of 660 villages, the massacre of indigenous peasants, systematic mass public rapes, forced sterilization and the internal displacement of approximately 1.5 million people (then amounting to approximately 12% of the population). Of 42,275 individual cases of killing and "disappearances" documented by the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) set up in 1994, 83% (over 35,000) of the victims were Maya. In 1999 the Commission concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the US-backed Armed Forces of Guatemala, and that US training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation".
