Guatemala City, Guatemala - Indigenous survivors of Guatemala's genocide of the Maya Ixil people recounted the horrors of massacres committed by the military at a retired general's historic trial on Monday.

Juan Brito said his wife and four young daughters were shot dead and their bodies burned in a remote Mayan village in January 1982.

"Only a few bones and ashes remained," he told the judges on the second day of the trial of former armed forces chief Benedicto Lucas Garcia.

"The soldiers killed quite a few children... and pregnant women," added the 70-year-old, speaking the Ixil language and assisted by an interpreter.

Catarina Chel (87) said that her two teenage children were murdered by soldiers when they were harvesting corn.

About 30 survivors are expected to testify at what is Guatemala's second genocide trial.

Lucas Garcia is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and forced disappearance, which carry a possible sentence of more than 100 years in prison.

He led the country's armed forces during the 1978-1982 presidency of his brother Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, who died in 2006.

The 91-year-old is accused of planning and executing dozens of massacres in villages in the western region of Quiche during the country's 1960-1996 civil war, with the Maya population seen by the military as serving as a support base for leftist guerrillas.

Lucas Garcia followed the trial by video link from a military hospital where he is serving a 58-year prison sentence for forced disappearance, rape, and torture.

Some 200,000 people died or disappeared in Guatemala's civil war, more than 80% of them ethnic Maya, according to UN figures. The US was heavily involved in propping up successive right-wing regimes, providing military and diplomatic support, as well as counterinsurgency advisers, while helping to cover up widespread abuses.

Former military dictator Efrain Rios Montt was in 2013 sentenced to 80 years in prison for the genocide of Ixil Maya people during the civil war. The sentence was later overturned and he died in 2018, aged 91, as a retrial was under way.