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The Plan de Sánchez massacre took place in the Guatemalan village of Plan de Sánchez, Baja Verapaz department, on 18 July 1982. Over 250 people (mostly women and children, and almost exclusively ethnic Achi Maya) were abused and murdered by members of the armed forces and their paramilitary allies. The killings took place during one of the most violent phases of Guatemala's Civil War, which pitted various groups of left-wing insurgents against the government and the armed forces. After assuming power in March 1982, defacto President Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt embarked on a military campaign that largely succeeded in breaking the insurgency, but at a terrible cost in human lives and human rights violations. The massacre in Plan de Sánchez was an element in the government's scorched earth strategy, and the village was targeted because of the authorities' suspicions that the inhabitants were harbouring or otherwise supporting guerrilla groups. After the massacre, the village was practically abandoned for a number of years and the survivors were told that reprisals would follow if they spoke about the incident or revealed the location of the numerous mass graves they had helped to dig. With the gradual return to democracy that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of the survivors felt they could begin to talk about the killings without fearing for their lives. Accusations were filed with the authorities in 1992 and, in 1993, a criminal investigation was launched. However, faced with delays and other irregularities in the proceedings, and stonewalled by a National Reconciliation Law that granted amnesties to the suspected perpetrators, the survivors saw that Guatemala's domestic legal remedies were ineffective in this case and consequently decided to lodge a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the supranational human rights arm of the Organisation of American States, in 1996. The IACHR began processing the complaint, received a partial recognition of the state's institutional responsibility from democratically elected president Alfonso Portillo in the first year of his term, and finally referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for judgement and settlement. In 2004, the Inter-American Court issued two judgements, in which it established Guatemala's liability in the case and ordered an extensive package of monetary, non-monetary and symbolic forms of compensation for the survivors and the next-of-kin of the deceased. ==National context== :''See also: History of Guatemala, Guatemalan Civil War.'' 1982 was one of the bloodiest years in Guatemala's 36-year-long history of internal conflict (1960–1996). On 23 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by Gen. Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked successor of outgoing president Gen. Romeo Lucas García who had won a disputed election two weeks earlier. The coup leaders asked retired Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of both Lucas and Guevara. Ríos Montt, who had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential election and was widely regarded as having been denied his own victory through fraud, accepted the appointment. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress, and suspended all political parties. After a few months, he dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the ''de facto'' title of President of the Republic; in his inaugural address, Ríos Montt – a lay pastor in the evangelical Protestant Church of the Word – stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God.〔"(Background Note: Guatemala; April 2001 version ), U.S. State Department. Via Internet Archive.〕 The country's guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Ríos Montt, who sought to defeat the guerrilla insurgency with a combination of military action and economic reforms; in his words, "beans and rifles" ''(frijoles y fusiles)''. An army officer was quoted in the ''New York Times'' of 18 July 1982 (the exact day of the Plan de Sánchez killings) as telling an audience of indigenous people in Cunén, in the department of El Quiché, that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you."〔 "Guatemala Enlists Religion in Battle", Raymond Bonner, ''New York Times,'' 18 July 1982. For a number of years, the U.S. State Department, in its background notes on Guatemala, attributed this quotation to Gen. Ríos Montt himself. See: (Background Note: Guatemala; April 2001 version ), via the Internet Archive.〕 The government began to form local "civilian self-defence patrols" (the paramilitary forces known as ''patrullas de autodefensa civil'' or PACs). Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many ''campesinos,'' especially in the north-west, had no choice but to join either the PACs or the guerrillas. The country's conscript army, supported by the PACs, recaptured practically all the guerrilla-held territory – guerrilla activity lessened and was largely limited to hit-and-run operations. However, this partial victory was won at an enormous cost in civilian deaths. Ríos Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in about 200,000 deaths of mostly unarmed, mostly indigenous civilians.〔 Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of non-combatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the military and the PACs they controlled. The internal conflict is described in great detail in the report of the Historical Clarification Commission ''(Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico,'' or CEH), which estimates that government forces and their paramilitary confederates were responsible for 93% of the violations.〔 CEH, ''(Guatemala: Memory of Silence ),'' Conclusions, §15.〕 On 8 August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his own Minister of Defence, Gen. Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, who succeeded him as ''de facto'' president of Guatemala. Victims of the period, organised in the ''Asociación para Justicia y Reconciliación'' (AJR) and their legal representatives the ''Centro para Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos'' (CALDH) brought a criminal case against Ríos Montt in 2001. He was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in a national court in May 2013. The status of the conviction is unclear following intervention by the Constitutional Court.〔http://www.riosmontt-trial.org/2013/06/ixil-genocide-trial-on-hold-other-charges-against-rios-montt-continue/〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Plan de Sánchez massacre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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