Between 1980 and 1983, through the presidencies of Romeo Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt, the PMA played a key role in the counterinsurgency operations in the predominantly indigenous Altiplano, where the EGP maintained its strongholds.
Throughout the conflict, the PMA maintained a rapid action battalion with a base located 30 miles southeast of Guatemala City near Escuintla, which could be deployed to virtually any region in the country.
Within the framework of SIPROCI, PMA units were devoted to operations targeted at crime and drugs, and much less towards counterinsurgency activities, having largely succeeded in subduing the insurgency in the early 1980s.
The captain went with 150 soldiers and went to the aldea of Chicamán to interrogate the people...they tied them up and began to put needles under their fingernails and they were screaming terribly...The captain cut the young man's throat and he made a terrifying noise, fell to the ground and blood poured out...the people began to cry..." During the Guatemalan Civil War, the PMA was particularly notorious for systematic and widespread human rights violations, including abduction, torture, extrajudicial killing and disappearances.
"[5] A report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights detailed the systematic murder of over 100 peasants in the municipality of Olopa, Chiquimula by the Mobile Military Police (PMA) detachment of Monteros, Esquipulas between 1977 and 1979.
[6] Due to its involvement in human rights abuses, it was required within the framework of UN Peace Accords of December, 1996 that the Mobile Military Police be deactivated and demobilized.
This is consistent with allegations made in a report published on 30 June 1986 by Allan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon that detainees "were being held at the headquarters of a security force called the Ambulant Military Police (PMA) outside the capital.