It is estimated that 200,000 people were killed or forcefully disappeared during the conflict . Though there was fighting between government forces and rebel groups , the conflict also included much more significantly , a large-scale , coordinated campaign of one-sided violence by the Guatemalan state against the civilian population from the mid-1960s onward . The military intelligence services ( G2 or S2 ) and an affiliated intelligence organization known as '' La Regional '' or '' Archivo '' – headquartered in an annex of the presidential palace – were responsible for coordinated killings and " disappearances " of opponents of the state and suspected insurgents and those deemed by the intelligence services to be collaborators . The Guatemalan state was among the first in Latin America to engage in widespread use of forced disappearances against its opposition with the number of disappeared estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000 from 1966 until the end of the war . In rural areas where the insurgency maintained its strongholds , the repression amounted to wholesale slaughter of the peasantry and massacres of entire villages ; first in the departments of Izabal and Zacapa ( 1966 – 68 ) and later in the predominantly Mayan western highlands from 1978 onward . In the early 1980s , the killings are considered to have taken on the scale of genocide . Most human rights abuses were at the hands of the military , police and intelligence services . Victims of the repression included indigenous activists , suspected government opponents , returning refugees , critical academics , students , left-leaning politicians , trade unionists , religious workers , journalists , and street children . The " Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico " has estimated that 93 % of human right abuses in the conflict have been committed by government forces and 3 % by the guerrillas
genocide
Guatemalan genocide
Guatemalan Civil War