On April 17, 1981, a reinforced company of Airborne troops was deployed to the village. They discovered fox holes, guerrillas and a hostile population. The local people appeared to fully support the guerrillas. "The soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The army killed 65 civilians, including 34 children, five adolescents, 23 adults and two elderly people. In July 1981, the armed forces initiated a new phase of counterinsurgency operations under the code-name ""Operación Ceniza,"" or "Operation Ashes," which lasted through March 1982. The purpose of the operation was to "separate and isolate the insurgents from the civilian population." During ""Operación Ceniza"" some 15,000 troops were deployed on a gradual sweep through the predominantly indigenous Altiplano region, comprising the departments of El Quiché and Huehuetenango. Large numbers of civilians were killed or displaced in the Guatemalan military's counterinsurgency operations. To alienate the insurgents from their civilian base, the army carried out large-scale mass killing of unarmed civilians, burned villages and crops, and butchered animals, destroying survivors' means of livelihood. Sources with the human rights office of the Catholic Church estimated the death toll from the counterinsurgency in 1981 at 11,000, with most of the victims indigenous peasants of the Guatemalan highlands. Other sources and observers put the death toll due to government repression in 1981 at between 9,000 and 13,500. As army repression intensified in the countryside, relations between the Guatemalan military establishment and the Lucas Garcia regime worsened. Professionals within the Guatemalan military considered the Lucas approach counterproductive, on grounds that the Lucas government's strategy of military action and systematic terror overlooked the social and ideological causes of the insurgency while radicalizing the civilian population. Additionally, Lucas went against the military's interests by endorsing his defense minister, Angel Anibal Guevara, as a candidate in the March 1982 presidential elections. Together with the government in neighboring El Salvador, the Lucas Garcia regime was cited as the worst human rights violator in the western hemisphere. The daily number of killings by government forces and officially sanctioned death squads increased from an average of 20 to 30 in 1979 to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 in 1980. An estimated 5,000 civilians were killed by government forces in Guatemala in 1980. In 1981 the number of killings and assassinations by government forces exceeded 9,000. He was president during Spanish embassy fire in Guatemala City on 31 January 1980, in which 37 people died.