Guatemalan Police Find Bodies of 1,000 War Dead

Police have discovered about 1,000 charred bodies of men, women and children who apparently died in the civil war violence that swept Guatemala in the 1980s.

The remains were discovered in the remote Playa Grande region, about 100 miles north of the capital and about 12 miles south of the Mexican border, police announced Friday.

It was by far the largest in a series of recent discoveries of graves of victims of the 34-year civil war between leftist guerrillas and the government.

A local police station in Playa Grande reported the discovery by telegram to the National Police station in Coban, capital of Alta Verapaz province.

There was no word about who had killed the people or how the remains were buried, but the report said they were discovered in four locations.

The army conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the rebels during the early 1980s, when a large proportion of the war’s 120,000 victims died. The campaign largely broke the back of the rebel movement but at a huge cost in civilian lives.

Officials recently exhumed 18 bodies of people slain during a 1982 massacre in La Libertad, about 70 miles northeast of Playa Grande in Peten province.

Fifty-six more bodies, victims of a July, 1982, massacre, were discovered in the town of Rabinal, 30 miles north of the capital, according to the federal human rights office.