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On May 10, 2013, a Guatemalan court found retired general and former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was convicted for his role as commander-in-chief of the Guatemalan Army’s extraordinarily brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Maya-Ixil during his brief stint in power between 1982 and 1983. To date, this campaign is the only one of Latin America’s many episodes of mass state violence to be legally determined to constitute genocide.
During the trial, Ríos Montt’s defenders rarely contested the shocking facts of the violence visited on Ixiles. Instead, they objected to the word “genocide” as a legitimate description of it. Some critics—including Ríos Montt’s own lawyers—used legal reasoning. Ixiles, they claimed, were targeted not as members of an ethnic or racial group, but as communists, armed terrorists working to seize the state. If a disturbing number of children, women, and old people—unlikely armed combatants—fell alongside the terrorists, it was only evidence of the guerrillas’ nasty tactic of hiding among the innocent to confuse a military trying to defend its nation. Others fought on more psychological grounds. The Army might have committed “excesses,” they acknowledged, but it was offensive and wounding to suggest that the state masterminded the carnage. Calling Ríos Montt a genocidaire, they argued, would tar all Guatemalans with this terrible brush, humiliating the nation before a global audience.
To counter these claims, those fighting to center Ixil suffering at the heart of the story of Guatemala’s armed conflict returned again and again to a single phrase: sí hubo genocidio, there was a genocide. This call to moral and historical clarity cut through the many obfuscations of the state’s guilt, all the more critically after a higher court vacated Ríos Montt’s conviction. In Guatemala, however, calling what happened a genocide remains deeply controversial.
A year after Israel’s escalation of the longstanding war on Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, its actions have been legally judged to plausibly constitute a genocide far more swiftly than Ríos Montt’s were. Despite a superabundance of real-time evidence for this judgment, vastly exceeding anything Ríos Montt’s accusers could have hoped to assemble, Israel’s defenders also insist that there is no genocide and take greater offense at the global insistence that there is than at the horrific violence this charge denounces. These parallels suggest that genocide is a core entitlement of certain state projects. For these states, merely naming the crime of genocide, let alone prosecuting it, poses an existential threat.
For whom is this entitlement a site of identification, and how are different projects for expanding or circumscribing this identification historically related? Israel and Guatemala claim to enjoy a “special relationship.” For Guatemalans, this relationship is no secret: on the Avenida de la Reforma, Guatemala City’s principal artery, a plaza dedicated to the state of Israel boasts an enormous, bright yellow Star of David honoring Israel’s unwavering support for the counterinsurgency that reached its apex under Ríos Montt. But cities and towns all over Israel have also named streets after Guatemala, as Benjamin Netanyahu told Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales when he visited Israel in 2016, just prior to Guatemala’s decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Guatemala’s presence in the fabric of Israeli urban life recognizes the Central American country’s critical role in shepherding the fledgling state of Israel through its late 1940s recognition by the United Nations.
In between these two gestures of international solidarity—support for the creation of the Israeli state and support for the Guatemalan genocide—unfolds a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of claiming liberal states founded in settler colonialism as sites of liberation. Those who identify with both Israel and Guatemala might contest this description of their foundations. Both states rule over majority populations—Maya in Guatemala and Palestinian in the land between the river and the sea—who have histories in these places predating the state itself, and who suffer systemic spatial, political, and economic domination despite the territorial claims to which those histories might entitle them. But both states also position themselves as born out of struggles against colonial formations—Spanish, British, U.S.-American, even Roman—and as embodying projects for self-determination that are more universal and compelling than those of the populations they subjugate.
Guatemala’s Early Support for Zionism
The shared pursuit of self-determination was what prompted Jorge García Granados, Guatemala’s ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1940s, to champion Israel’s statehood and the partitioning of Palestine into two states. As he acknowledges in a 1948 memoir entitled The Birth of Israel: The Drama as I Saw It, his 1947 election to the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) was not because he knew much about the Middle East or the issues at stake in Palestine, but rather because other Latin American nations wanted him to take on this role.
The government García Granados represented was led by President Juan José Arévalo, a proponent of “spiritual socialism” who was democratically elected in 1944 after decades of dictatorships in what was hailed as inaugurating a new “spring” for the country. Like Guatemala, much of Latin America in the immediate aftermath of World War II was enjoying a period of unprecedented political and economic reforms under liberal democratic governments. The UN’s Latin American bloc understood itself as both opposed to ongoing European colonialism and nonaligned in relation to the emergent Cold War powers. Eager to express these commitments within the new international community of the UN, the bloc saw UNSCOP as an important arena for action. García Granados’s peers charged him with countering the potential domination of the commission either by Britain, then holding the mandate over Palestine, or by the United States, understood to be aligned with Britain.
García Granados claimed an instrumental role in developing UNSCOP’s plan for Palestine, which partitioned it into an Arab and a Jewish state, and in promoting this plan over the alternative, a single binational state. A single state, he felt, would be too easily dominated by its former colonial ruler, while a two-state solution would remove the issue of Palestine from the arena of great power politics and locate it squarely within the purview of the United Nations. But the decision to establish a Jewish state in particular also resonated deeply with García Granados’s own political commitments.One of his book’s chapters is entitled “Land of Sorrow,” a designation that he applied to both Palestine and Guatemala. Those who hailed from such a land, he felt, were compelled to struggle for justice—a struggle he identified with Zionism in the Palestinian context. His sense of the sorrows afflicting both countries is different than what present-day observers might assume: his logic had little to do with the Maya or Palestinians. As the grandson of former Guatemalan president Miguel García Granados, a 19th century liberal forced from office by dictator Justo Rufino Barrios, García Granados came from a lineage of opposition to what he calls “tyranny.” In the 1930s, he faced imprisonment and exile due to his involvement in the struggle against dictator Jorge Ubico, whose eventual fall set off the electoral process by which Arévalo came to power. This history of resistance to arbitrary power framed his reading of the situation of Jews in Palestine under the British mandate.
After the 1917 Balfour Declaration proclaimed British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” Jewish migration from Britain and other parts of Europe to Palestine began to rise. After the Nazis came to power, it exploded. Following an armed Palestinian uprising that Britain interpreted as a protest against this influx rather than against the mandate itself, new limits were placed on Jewish migrants in 1939. Anger at these limits sparked a Zionist guerrilla movement that carried out regular actions against the British authorities and demanded a Jewish state.
When García Granados first visited Palestine and saw Jews facing punishment for their struggle, he was horrified. “They fight for their people and their belief,” he said of the Zionist guerrillas, pushing back against the British description of their actions as “terrorism.” “In all conscience I cannot pass judgment upon them.” Rather than the plight of Jews as victims of the Holocaust, which he only seems to have appreciated later in his narrative, or their Biblical claims to the land, which he seems to have found a bit silly, it was this Zionist fight for freedom that drove García Granados’s endorsement of Jewish claims to Palestine. (He was also impressed by the kibbutzim, which he saw a model of a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, akin to Arévalo’s “spiritual socialism.”)
When the British attacked and denied entry to the passengers of Exodus 1947, a ship bearing Jewish refugees of the Holocaust hoping to migrate to Palestine without permission, García Granados saw his assumptions about the justice of the Zionist struggle confirmed. Even the Nakba, undertaken by the fledgling Israeli state in 1948 in violation of the UNSCOP plan, did not deter him from this position. On the contrary, he applauded the violence: “The Jewish State proved that it existed and that the strength and will of its people made it a formidable power: the Jews proved that they could fight and defend themselves.”
Israel, the Counterinsurgency Expert
The next moment of rapprochement between Guatemala and Israel was driven by heightening mutual commitments to repressing other fights for freedom.
In 1954, Guatemala rejected the liberalism of people like García Granados after a CIA-backed coup overthrew Arévalo’s democratically elected successor, Jacobo Árbenz. The coup restored the interests of large landowners and the United States at the heart of the Guatemalan state and positioned the military as the guarantor of these interests. The United States funded and oversaw this restoration, pulling Guatemala into its framing of great power politics. Tiny Guatemala received 15 percent of all U.S. foreign aid to Latin America in the 1950s and early 1960s, making it a kind of experiment for Cold War anti-communist modernization.
The closure of democratic space that this experiment demanded, along with the counterexample of the Cuban revolution, birthed guerrilla movements, and with them came further investments by both the U.S. and Guatemalan governments in counterinsurgency. In a 1963 coup, junior military officers seized power and escalated the army’s battle against guerrillas, kicking off a campaign of systematic repression of both the legal and the armed Guatemalan left. In the late 1960s, Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, the so-called “butcher of Zacapa,” disarticulated a growing armed rebellion in Guatemala’s east by killing between 2,800 and 8,000 people, mostly unarmed peasants. It was the first of what would be many more episodes of mass state murder.
The U.S. role in this process and its feedback loops with counterinsurgency in Vietnam and elsewhere are well known. To a lesser degree, so is Israel’s hand in the 1980s genocide, particularly after the Carter administration’s 1977 decision to cut off some military funding to Guatemala over its human rights abuses. But Israel’s work with the Guatemalan military began well before Carter’s action, belying arguments that treat Israel as a mere proxy for U.S. power. Rule by right-wing terror in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America offered Israel an arena in which to secure its place as a global military, economic, and ideological power in its own right.
Israel’s own decisive turn toward counterinsurgency came with the 1967 Six-Day War, which inaugurated the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, violating the already threadbare terms of the UNSCOP partition. Maintaining the occupation meant brutally suppressing Palestinian resistance and thus remaking the Israeli state ever more decisively in the image of its military. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) grew increasingly autonomous from the civilian sector, bolstered by huge increases in its budget and by the expansion of the Israeli arms industry, one of the few economic powerhouses in a country otherwise dependent on external subsidies and remittances.
For much of the international community, the occupation of these territories cast Israel as a pariah state. This reputation left Israel supported only by the imperial powers, with which it was aligned in the context of broader Middle Eastern conflicts by virtue of its repression of Palestinian liberation. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war showed the IDF to be more vulnerable than its 1967 victory had suggested, the task of securing Israel’s position as both an ally of U.S. empire and a global player in its own right became increasingly urgent.
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Carlota McAllister is an associate professor of anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada and the co-editor, with Diane Nelson, of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Postgenocide Guatemala. Her book The Good Road: An Indigenous Revolutionary Theopolitics in Guatemala, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
