Speaking through Silence: Violence against the Press and Maya Radio Workers’ Responses during Guatemala’s Armed Conflict, 1978–83

This paper follows a Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala between the years of 1978 and 1983, a time of military scorched-earth campaigns in Guatemala’s central western highlands during the country’s genocidal armed conflict (1960-1996). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, military and paramilitary forces increasingly intimidated, tortured, and assassinated Indigenous and ladino (non-Indigenous) broadcasters throughout Guatemala. Yet, this radio station’s K’iche’ staff were largely able to avoid the direct violence that their peers faced both in urban and rural spaces, despite engaging dangerous lines of inquiry with their audiences, such as deconstructing the legitimacy of elite power and its exploitation of Maya labor. As the military regimes of Fernando Romeo Lucas García (1978-1982) and Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983) silenced outspoken voices throughout the country, these K’iche’ radio workers established, to an extent, credibility in the eyes of the violent state by leveraging tactful programming, strategic alliances abroad, and existing reputations of both their municipality and their work. This paper aims to understand how this group of media makers succeeded not only in personally surviving these extreme moments, but also in keeping their community-based radio and a grassroots political project on air. The paper seeks to answer: What specific strategies did these staffers use to build credibility both with their audience and with the state while working under close military surveillance? How did they communicate sensitive information to their listeners despite that surveillance? Why did the state perceive some radio stations and newspapers that shared similar materials to be bigger threats than this radio station?