Early references to genocide in Guatemala

I was involved in a brief Twitter exchange with someone who asked when people started to use the term genocide in reference to Guatemala. He believed that it only began after the Peace Accords.

In many ways, discussion about if, when, and where the Guatemalan State committed genocide increased with the release of the United Nations' Commission for Historical Clarification in 1999. The report found that the State had committed acts of genocide. It wasn't just in Guatemala where genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity were discussed. The end of the Cold War, genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the outbreak of civil wars centered around issues of identity and political power in parts of Africa and elsewhere, caused people to more closely reflect upon various Cold War-era conflicts, such as Guatemala.

However, the 1990s was not the first time that genocide was used to describe what happened in Guatemala fifteen years earlier. Two articles in the New York Times from 1982 make it clear that people were were using the term genocide to describe state violence in real time.

On June 6, 1982, Raymond Bonner wrote the following in Giving is No Picnic in Guatemala:

But Indian peasants - who account for two-thirds of the 7.2 million people - are still being killed. Recently 21 peasants were found in a mass grave, including nine children aged seven months to 13 years. Victims in another village included 26 children, three men and 14 women, four of them pregnant. The publisher of the conservative newspaper, El Grafico, called the mass killings of Indians ''genocide'' and said, ''we really are not worthy of any aid while this continues.''

Three months later on September 12, Marlise Simons wrote in  Guatemalans are Adding a Few Twists to 'Pacification':

Catholic workers and Guatemalan refugees arriving in Mexico also charge the army with responsibility for numerous massacres of Indian villagers in recent months. The country's traditionally conservative Conference of Bishops noted May 27 that ''never in our history have such extremes been reached, with the assassinations now falling into the category of genocide.''

Claims of genocide were not invented at the end of the war or by foreign actors. In the midst of some of the worst killing, people in Guatemala were using the term to describe what was happening in their country.

See also my contribution to a "debate" on Was Rios Montt responsible for Guatemala's genocide? from August 2015.