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| 1972 |
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| Guerrillas in northern Guatemala founded the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). Building a base among highland Indians, this movement numbered over 6,000 by 1980. | 1 |
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| 1974–78 |
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| Gen. Kjell Langerud García became president. | 2 |
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| 1977 |
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| Citing massive human rights violations, the Carter administration refused further military aid to Guatemala. By this point Guatemala was noted as one of the worst violators of human rights in the hemisphere. | 3 |
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| 1978–82 |
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| Gen. Romeo Lucas García was sworn in as president. His “pacification program” involved forced relocations and a massive increase in death squad activity, destroying an estimated 500 Indian villages. | 4 |
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| 1980, May 27 |
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| The secretary-general of the Coca-Cola workers' union was murdered by rightists linked to the plant's U.S. owner. The third union member murdered in 18 months, he had led a strike in April. An international outcry followed, and after a brief troop occupation of the plant, the union was recognized, and some concessions were granted. | 5 |
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| 1981 |
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| Three major guerrilla organizations agreed to unify their military command under the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (URNG). | 6 |
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| 1982, March |
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| After Lucas García tried to impose a successor in fraudulent elections, an ultrarightist coup installed Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian, as head of a junta. Ríos Montt instituted a scorched-earth policy against rebel areas, murdering all inhabitants of villages suspected of pro-rebel sympathies. | 7 |
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| April |
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| The U.S. National Security Council decided to circumvent a congressional ban on military aid to Guatemala and provided the regime with $22 million in counterinsurgency aid. | 8 |
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| July 16 |
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| Over 300 Indians were massacred in Huehuetenango after being driven from a church by government troops. By the end of the Ríos Montt regime, over 30,000 Indian villagers had been killed in the counterinsurgency war. | 9 |
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