Since early 1982, the pressure on Plan de Sanchez had been mounting. Guatemala was in the grip of its 36-year civil war, and General Efrain Rios Montt, who had seized power in a March coup, pursued a scorched earth strategy against communities the military suspected of supporting guerrilla groups. An army officer was quoted in the New York Times on the very day of the massacre, telling an audience of indigenous people in Cunen: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you." In Plan de Sanchez, many men had refused to join the regime's paramilitary civilian self-defense patrols. The military responded with a permanent presence in the area. Some men fled to the mountains, leaving their families behind. Others filed formal complaints about the army's threatening behavior with the justice of the peace in Rabinal. The complaints were never investigated. The men who filed them were fined. In early July, a military aircraft flew over the village and dropped bombs near several homes. On July 15, soldiers set up camp in Plan de Sanchez and began house-to-house inspections.

At eight that Sunday morning, the military detachment fired two 105-millimeter mortar shells into the village -- one landing east of the main cluster of houses, one to the west. Between two and three in the afternoon, a force of roughly sixty men arrived: regular army led by a captain and a lieutenant, paramilitary patrolmen, police, and armed civilians in military fatigues. They stationed themselves at every entry and exit point, intercepting people returning from market. Others went house to house, gathering the inhabitants. Some men escaped into the surrounding woods. The soldiers separated the villagers. Men, children, and older women were directed to one house. A group of around twenty young women, aged twelve to twenty, were taken to another building, where they were accused of supporting the guerrillas, beaten, and raped. A few managed to escape into the countryside. The rest were killed. The children were beaten and kicked to death. At around five in the afternoon, soldiers threw two hand grenades into the house where the remaining adults were held and sprayed the walls with automatic gunfire. Witnesses watching from the surrounding hills reported that the gunfire continued until roughly eight that evening, when the army set fire to the buildings. The soldiers left around eleven at night.

The next morning, survivors returned to find their village in smoking ruins. Bodies in the burned houses were unidentifiable. Those who had fallen in the yards bore bullet wounds to heads, chests, and backs, but identification was complicated because animals had already reached many of the charred remains. That Monday afternoon, military commissioners and paramilitary patrolmen returned and ordered the survivors to dig graves, threatening aerial bombardment if they refused. More than twenty clandestine communal graves were filled. The patrolmen looted the surviving houses, stole livestock, and destroyed identification papers. Over the following months, regular army visits kept the survivors under constant threat. Most abandoned the village for the mountains, other towns, or Guatemala City. When families began trickling back in 1985, they were allowed to stay only if they joined the patrols and submitted to military oversight. By 1987, about twenty families lived in Plan de Sanchez again, under strict orders never to discuss the massacre. Survivor Benjamin Manuel Jeronimo later testified that the militarization destroyed their ancestral traditions: the elders who had officiated the devotion ceremonies had been killed, and their knowledge died with them. Young men, forced into military service, lost their connection to the customs of their ancestors.

The silence held for a decade. In 1992, villagers finally reported the existence of clandestine graves. In 1993, the country's human rights ombudsman lodged an official accusation. The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team began exhuming remains in 1994, recovering 84 bodies from 21 graves, with four more found in 1996. But the domestic legal system stalled. Ballistic evidence from spent cartridges found in the graves was reported "lost" by prosecutors and did not resurface until 2000. Faced with these obstructions and a reconciliation law granting amnesty to perpetrators, the survivors turned to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1996. In 2000, President Alfonso Portillo admitted the state's "institutional responsibility" for the massacre. In 2004, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued two landmark judgments establishing Guatemala's liability and ordering compensation for survivors and the families of the dead. In domestic courts, five members of the paramilitary patrols were finally convicted of murder in 2012, each sentenced to 7,710 years in prison. Rios Montt himself was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013, though the Constitutional Court subsequently intervened in the case.

Plan de Sanchez was one of three massacres in Rabinal municipality in 1982, alongside Chichupac and Rio Negro. Together, they were denounced in 1996 as crimes against humanity carried out as part of a premeditated state policy. The 36-year civil war would ultimately claim approximately 200,000 lives, the vast majority unarmed indigenous civilians. The exact death toll at Plan de Sanchez remains uncertain. The survivors' petition set the figure at 268; the state accepted that number. But the Inter-American Court could confirm only 170 names, other reports cite figures between 150 and 200, and forensic teams have exhumed fewer than 100 sets of remains. Entire families were killed, scattering the survivors who might have identified the dead. The burning of bodies in a single small enclosure made identification almost impossible, and not all the clandestine graves may yet have been found. What is known is that the people of Plan de Sanchez -- the Maya Achi farmers, the women who went to market, the children, the elders who kept the devotion ceremonies -- were real people with families and traditions, and that when they were silenced, they found their way back to speech.