peasant leaders who died in the Spanish Embassy massacre on 31 January 1980. She was later awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize -on the year of the Fifth Centennial celebration of America Discovery- for her work in favor of broader social justice. Her memoir drew international attention to Guatemala and the nature of its institutional terrorism. After the August 1983 coup, both the U.S. intelligence community and human rights observers noted that while cases of human rights abuses in rural Guatemala were on the decline, death squad activity in the city was on the rise. Additionally, as the levels of wholesale extrajudicial killings and massacres decreased, the rates of abduction and forced disappearance increased. The situation in Guatemala City soon began to resemble the situation under Lucas Garcia. In Mejia Víctores's first full month in power, the number of documented monthly kidnappings jumped from 12 in August to 56 in September. The victims included a number of U.S. Agency for International Development employees, officials from moderate and leftist political parties, and Catholic priests. In a report to the United Nations, Guatemala's Human Rights Commission reported 713 extrajudicial killings and 506 disappearances of Guatemalans in the period from January to September 1984. A secret United States Department of Defense report from March 1986 noted that from 8 August 1983 to 31 December 1985, there were a total of 2,883 recorded kidnappings (3.29 daily); and kidnappings averaged a total of 137 a month through 1984 (a total of approximately 1,644 cases). The report linked these violations to a systematic program of abduction and killing by the security forces under Mejía Víctores, noting, "while criminal activity accounts for a small percentage of the cases, and from time to time individuals ‘disappear’ to go elsewhere, the security forces and paramilitary groups are responsible for most kidnappings. Insurgent groups do not now normally use kidnapping as a political tactic." As under Lucas García, part of the modus operandi of government repression during the Mejía government involved interrogating victims at military bases, police stations, or government safe houses. Information about alleged connections with insurgents was "extracted through torture." The security forces used the information to make joint military/police raids on suspected guerrilla safe-houses throughout Guatemala City. In the process, the government secretly captured hundreds of individuals who were never seen again, or whose bodies were later found, showing signs of torture and mutilation. Such activities were