48 […]The clear purpose is to create panic and intimidation among the other persons present […] In some instances they are taken, as an exception and for very short periods, to military barracks or police stations for questioning. Later they almost always appear mutilated and with signs of having suffered brutal torture, floating in the rivers, inside plastic bags, thrown on the streets, in highway ditches or in gorges. As a rule, when the bodies are discovered, they appear brutally disfigured, nude and without documents or signs of identification. In many instances they have been burned, thrown into the ocean or into de mouths or craters of volcanoes. Also, as it has been possible to ascertain in a large number of cases, especially when dealing with members of Indian or rural communities, whose populations have been decimated quite frequently, their bodies have been found already 302 decomposed and rotting, buried together in large common graves. […] 213. Various statements in the court record and in the record of the case with the IACHR describe the brutality with which the people of the indigenous community of Chichupac and neighboring communities were treated before being extrajudicially executed. 214. In the Commission’s view, this is particularly egregious case, not just because the victims were utterly defenseless when the patrollers and Army soldiers extrajudicially executed them through barbaric acts, but also because the massacres and executions perpetrated against these people were not isolated events within Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, but rather part of a policy of the State, framed in the so-called national security doctrine and within the notion of an “enemy within”. The goal of the policy was to eliminate the supposed social base of insurgent groups at the time.303 Thus, the massacres committed in the present case were special operations, planned and carried by agents of the State, as previously noted, involving systematic persecution of a community in order to wipe it out. 215. Based on the foregoing, the Commission concludes that the Guatemalan State violated the rights to life and to personal integrity protected under articles 4(1), 5(1) and 5(2) of the American Convention, read in conjunction with Article 1(1) thereof and to the detriment of i) the 32 persons killed in the January 8, 1982 massacre in the village of Chichupac, and ii) the other 39 people who were extrajudicially executed between 1981 and 1986. 216. Moreover, the Commission regards as established fact that prior to extrajudicially executing the Chichupac villagers on January 8, 1982, the Guatemalan Army held the victims against their will for at least six hours at the community health center. The facts established show that a number of victims were deprived of their liberty just moments before being extrajudically executed. 217. The Commission is of the view that the very circumstances under which these deprivations of liberty occurred and the clear objective of conducting extrajudicial executions, 302 IACHR, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Republic of Guatemala, October 13, 1981, Chapter II.B, paragraphs 4 and 5. 303 Annex 3. CEH, Memory of Silence, Volume III, The human rights violations and acts of violence, paragraphs 30833084: “The figures [626 massacres] reveal the magnitude of the massacre phenomenon in the Army’s military operations to annihilate the enemy within. In applying the counterinsurgency strategy, hundreds of communities in different parts of Guatemala became the victims of the scorched-earth policy during the armed conflict. The methods used during these collective executions demonstrate the degree of cruelty unleashed upon the victims, all of whom were defenseless and unarmed. (…) And yet, the impact of the massacres cannot be grasped by just looking at the figures; instead, a qualitative analysis of this merciless violence is needed in order to discover the underlying logic of the military’s strategies and tactics and the horror that they meant for the victim populations […].”