Concept
Anti-communist mass killings are the politically motivated mass killings of communists, alleged communists, or their alleged supporters which were committed by anti-communists and political organizations or governments which opposed communism. The communist movement has faced opposition since it was founded and the opposition to it has often been organized and violent. Many anti-communist mass killing campaigns waged during the Cold War were supported and backed by the United States and its Western Bloc allies. Some U.S.-supported mass killings, including the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and the killings by the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War, are considered acts of genocide by some scholars. White Terror is a term that was coined during the French Revolution in 1795 in order to denote all forms of counter-revolutionary violence, referring to the solid white flag of the loyalists to the French throne. Since then, historians and individual groups have both used the term White Terror in order to refer to coordinated counter-revolutionary violence in a broader sense. In the course of history, many White Terror groups have persecuted, attacked, and killed communists, alleged communists and communist-sympathizers as part of their counter-revolutionary and anti-communist agendas. Historian Christian Gerlach wrote that "when both sides engaged in terror, the 'red' terror usually paled in comparison with the 'white", and cited the crushing of the Paris Commune, the terrors of the Spanish Civil War, and the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 as examples. Central American crisis Latin America was ravaged by many bloody civil wars and mass killings during the 20th century. Most of these conflicts were politically motivated, or they revolved around political issues, and anti-communist mass killings were committed during several of them. Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and Dirty War From 1976 to 1983, the military dictatorship of Argentina, the National Reorganization Process under Jorge Rafael Videla, organized the arrest and execution of between 9,000 and 30,000 civilians suspected of communism or other leftist sympathies during a period of state terror.