The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

112 identify themselves as having some indigenous ancestry. The majority of people in Guatemala can identify with those targeted during the civil war. Since so many people suffer, the United States must take responsibility for their actions. As the American-backed army targeted the indigenous people, many Mayans were killed in Guatemala during the civil war. Historians consider the civil war a “‘dirty war’… in which thousands of people [were] murdered or simply ‘disappeared’” (Wiarda and Kline 89). Many of the people who “disappeared” were taken to remote parts of the country to be killed. The families of these lost people never knew where their loved ones were. For many years, the families of those victimized during the war never received any form of apology or explanation. As early as in the first years of the war, “in the cities and countryside suspects of left-wing sympathies picked up by the army increasingly tended to either turn up dead or remain ‘disappeared.’ The army and police consistently denied responsibility” (McClintock 83). Although thousands of people suffered and died during the war, the Guatemalans responsible for the murders never admitted to the atrocities. This caused emotional distress to family members from the mystery of where their loved ones could be. As a majority “more than four-fifths of the deaths from the civil war era were indigenous” (Booth 155). The families of these people suffered from the loss of loved ones and from the anxiety of the unknown details of their loved ones’last days. Because of their anti-government opinions, some families also had legitimate fear of retaliation. The Mayan people suffered numerable losses and emotional distress; the United States should provide retribution to the families who lost loved ones. Aside from those who suffered physical and emotional damage, other indigenous people who were living in the highlands were displaced during the civil war. Many indigenous people left their homes as the militants took over the land that once belonged to them because “much of the violence… took place in Guatemala’s indigenous highlands or lowland jungles and away from urban areas” (Booth 139). The poorest people living in the mountains of Guatemala owned precious highlands, which the army used for strategic positioning. The Guatemalan government easily took advantage of the poor, and “most of the poor were indigenous groups who spoke little Spanish” (McPherson 82). The army confiscated