Massacres of the Guatemalan Civil War
The 530 massacres documented in the REMHI database (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica — “Guatemala: Nunca Más”, ODHAG 1998), built from 5,397 witness testimonies. Click a department, then a municipality, to reach individual sites — each with its date, the range of death tolls witnesses reported, the named victims, the responsible force and REMHI’s narrative. Press Play years to watch the events unfold across the country.
REMHI recorded what witnesses told Catholic-church interviewers in the mid-1990s. It is not a census of massacres: regions with a weaker church presence are underrepresented, and the death tolls are witness reports rather than verified counts, so the map shows the median of what witnesses said alongside the full range they gave.
Coordinates are not in the source database — they were matched from place names against the GeoNames gazetteer. Every record carries a precision flag, and events that could only be located to a municipality are listed rather than drawn as points, so nothing on the map claims more precision than the testimony supports. 82 of the 530 massacres have no year recorded and are excluded while a single year is selected.
Source: REMHI / ODHAG, Guatemala: Nunca Más (1998), remhi.org.gt/bd.