The Guatemalan Genocide was a genocide of Mayan Indians who took place in Guatemala in the 1980s.

The genocide took place during the Guatemalan Civil War (around 1960-1996), which became ever more intense as the struggle progressed: government forces camped out villages whose residents were suspected to sympathize with communist guerrilla movements and around 1980 began the systematic assassination of Mayan villages; hundreds of villages are completely murdered. Infamous bloodbaths were included in Plan de Sánchez and Dos Erres. Survivors, as well as other Mayas imprisoned, were often forced to join 'self-defense battalions' and forced themselves to blame for atrocities. In addition to Mayas, Catholic followers of liberation theology, leftist intellectuals and German landowners as well as political opponents of the regime were killed.

The number of deaths is not certain. The entire civil war has cost about 200,000 people, of which half are by the genocide. The Historic Accident Investigation Commission, which examined the genocide between 1994 and 1999, has mentioned in its 1999 final report Guatemala: Reminder to silence 42,275 victims by name. 83% of them were Maya, and 93% of the victims were killed by government forces. Under the rule of General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), at the height of the genocide, 75,000 people were killed. Guatemala changed under Ríos Montt's regime in an international pariah, although its regime, as well as the other guilty guilty of the genocide, were supported by the United States, and reports of atrocities were rarely dismissed in the US media as "left-wing propaganda" . In 1999, US President Bill Clinton expressed his apologies for American involvement in the genocide.

After the return of democracy and the end of the civil war, attempts have been made to prosecute prosecutors for the time being without much results. Opposition to Ríos Montt has been issued in Spain, but as he is currently a congressman, he enjoys political inviolability in Guatemala. Generals Romeo Lucas García and Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores are also sought by the Spanish authorities. The existence of the self-defense battalions, which made victims offenders, significantly complicated prosecutions of the guilty.

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