During the Guatemalan Civil War ( 1960 – 1996 ) , the state forces carried out violent atrocities against the Maya . The government considered the Maya to be aligned with the communist insurgents , which they sometimes were but often were not . Guatemalan armed forces carried out three campaigns that have been described as genocidal . The first was a scorched earth policy which was also accompanied by mass killing , including the forced conscription of Mayan boys into the military where they were sometimes forced to participate in massacres against their own home villages . The second was to hunt down and exterminate those who had survived and evaded the army and the third was the forced relocation of survivors to " reeducation centers " and the continued pursuit of those who had fled into the mountains . The armed forces used genocidal rape of women and children as a deliberate tactic . Children were bludgeoned to death by beating them against walls or thrown alive into mass graves where they would be crushed by the weight of the adult dead thrown atop them . An estimated 200,000 people , most of them Maya , disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War . After the 1996 peace accords , a legal process was begun to determine the legal responsibility of the atrocities , and to locate and identify the disappeared . In 2013 former president Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity , and was sentenced to 80 years imprisonment . Ten days later , the Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned the conviction
violent atrocities
Guatemalan genocide
Genocide of indigenous peoples