Guatemala: Recent History-Present and Civil War
David Smith
To understand Guatemala’s Civil War, the defining moment in modern Guatemalan history, that officially began in 1960 and ended 36 years later, it is necessary to first explore the economic and social conditions of the country with an indigenous Maya majority. Dating back to Spanish Colonial times, Guatemala’s governments have been racist, elitist, militaristic, and corrupt. Access to land and resources, the lifeblood of the Maya people, has been historically restricted, and the landowners who controlled the agricultural economy have consistently used coercive methods to extract extremely cheap migrant labor from indigenous and mixed-race (ladino) people. In the 20th century, United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, employed what was essentially a monopoly over Guatemala’s economy, acquiring 40% of the arable land in the country through a series of contracts that they signed with dictator Jorge Ubico. In October of 1944, Guatemala’s government changed when the people elected Jose Arevalo, ushering in the “Ten Years of Springtime,” a brief era in which democratic reform in the country blossomed. Arevalo enacted a series of reform that provided basic social services to poor people across the country, but the glaring obstacle to a truly independent Guatemala was United Fruit Company’s concentration of land and their dominance of the economy. Arevalo’s democratically elected predecessor, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, decided to confront the foreign influence over the nation’s economy by nationalizing the land and re-distributing it, principally to the indigenous Maya.
Arbenz’ move, while perhaps justified, was certainly radical to the United States. What was perhaps even more radical was that Arbenz had legalized the Communist party in Guatemala, and while Arbenz was not himself a Communist, the members of the PGT (Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo) were active in the government, especially on the issue of land reform. In an Eisenhower administration that was engaged in militant anti-communism around the world, the United States saw the seizure of land, the re-distribution of land, and the existence of an active Communist party as a serious threat to regional security. In 1954, in an operation named PBSUCESS, the CIA planned and executed a coup against Jacobo Arbenz by supporting Colonel Castillo Armas in the first Cold War conflict in the Western hemisphere. In a daring and, perhaps, arrogant display, the United States asserted control over the domestic affairs of Guatemala, ensuring the restoration of United Fruit Company’s landholdings and providing military and economic assistance to a military regime that supported US interests. The consequences of the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz, executed nearly flawlessly from a US perspective, would reverberate around not only Guatemala for the next four decades, but around the entire Western Hemisphere for the duration of the Cold War. The events of 1954 played a direct role in the Cuban Revolution five years later, including that a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was in Guatemala City and an ally of Arbenz when the United States executed the coup, was profoundly impacted by the experience.
The vast majority of the people in Guatemala were opposed to the United States influence in their country, but any outward expression of opposition to the new military regime was met with secret police death squads. Castillo Armas unleashed a repression that murdered thousands of communists, teachers, students, and others who they perceived to be a threat to stability. The armed resistance to the government began in 1959, when some members of the military became angry that the United States had used Guatemala as a launching point for their Bay of Pigs invasion. They launched a coup that failed, but the seeds of revolution had been sown. Members of this attempted coup fled the cities and retreated into the countryside to form the origins of guerilla factions, like the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes), who were determined to lead a communist revolution.
The communists failed miserably in their mission during the 1960s. Superior government forces who had been trained by the United States routed the communists, including a visit from the Green Berets that nearly decimated the communists into non-existence. After their failures, some leaders decided to change strategies. Whereas before the communists had tried to re-create the foco strategy of the Cuban Revolution of the island nation just across the Gulf of Mexico, some of the leaders now believed that they needed more of a prolonged people’s war, similar to the likes of the successful North Vietnamese movement. In Guatemala, the “people” are indigenous, so the communist guerilla Mario Payeras started creating alliances with indigenous people in the remote Western Highlands. Payeras’ band of guerillas, known as the EGP (Ejercito de Guerillas Pobres), built a coalition with the largest indigenous peasant organization in Guatemala, the CUC (Comite de Unidad Campesina). As the road to widespread war became more and more inevitable, the communist guerillas believed they had the support of hundreds of thousands of peasants by 1980.
What followed is one of the saddest chapters in the spiral of violence that encompassed the entire Western Hemisphere through the second half of the 20th century. A difficult question that Guatemalans and historians have to confront is how and why this Civil War, a common experience among Latin American countries at the time, turned to genocide. There are no easy answers. When the communists launched their offensives against the military, the government responded with a scorched-earth campaign that is responsible for the slaughter of 200,000 Mayan people. The government would sweep through the village and murder anyone who was there, regardless of their involvement (or lack thereof) in the guerilla movement. Unarmed women, children, and men were raped, terrorized, tortured, and murdered, their bodies desecrated by soldiers who were often recruited from the same types of communities they were razing. The Reagan regime funded the military’s efforts, afraid of another Nicaragua in Central America.
Following the genocide, the guerilla movement was essentially over. After the Cold War, the military regime was forced to negotiate a peace process and conclude the Civil War. Their crimes against humanity were investigated by the United Nations. Their report details the genocidal terror unleashed upon the Maya people.
Following the peace process, Guatemala dismantled 2/3 of its military. The soldiers who had belonged to one of the most highly trained and organized militaries in the Western hemisphere were largely granted immunity, allowing them to participate in private and public life within Guatemala. Some of these soldiers formed criminal organizations that provided intelligence gathering and hit squads for people willing to pay. Many former officers in the military became high-ranking politicians, ascending to the presidency and the Interior Minister in some cases (Insight Crime investigation). In addition to these criminal organizations who are highly connected to corruption in Guatemala’s government, there has also been the development of a serious gang problem in the country. Thus, a highly complex picture of crime, corruption, impunity, and violence in Guatemala arises. Alliances among criminal organizations can quickly disintegrate, people with enough money and power can bribe judges and dismantle investigations, and in order for anything to be done, international organizations attempting to bring some semblance of justice to the country must work with government officials who are often profoundly corrupt.
International and domestic attempts have been made to hold high-ranking members of the military accountable for the genocide they ordered and carried out. These efforts have produced mixed results. One such example was the trial of General Efrain Rios Montt. In 2013, a court in Guatemala City convicted Rios Montt of genocide and other crimes against humanity, but, three days later, the Guatemalan Supreme Court nullified the decision on a technicality. Before the re-trial, Rios Montt died. Some military officers and criminals responsible for extraordinary violence have been found guilty, but the reality is that most of the former members of the military and the members of the criminal organizations that exist today live with impunity from their crimes, though it remains a violent, tumultuous, and uncertain impunity.
What is overwhelmingly tragic about the circumstances in Guatemala is the vulnerability of indigenous and mixed-race women and children. Indigenous Maya have faced violent oppression from racist governments for centuries. Now, heavily-armed gangs and criminal organizations control the territories in which these people live and exert a reign of terror over these communities. Over time, these people have responded to this oppression in a variety of ways. Sometimes, they protest non-violently, sometimes they take up arms against those persecuting them, sometimes they co-exist with their enemies and carve out whatever opportunities they can find, and sometimes they flee the violence, seeking a better set of circumstances than those in their home country.
Source: Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited and Introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Translated by Ann Wright. London, UK: Verso, 2009.
Further Reading:
https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2016/11/19/american-intervention-guatemala/
This article offers a detailed description of the Guatemalan Civil war, its origins, and its impact. Beginning with an analysis of the economic and racial conditions that preceded the Civil War in Guatemala, it describes the Arevalo and Arbenz administrations and the land reforms they pursued. The article then offers an account of the CIA-sponsored coup in 1954 and the Civil War that was started in 1960. Finally, the conflict between the government and the indigenous communities that resulted in a genocide is explained. This article focuses on the role of US Intervention and claims the responsibility for the genocide lays in the United States government and the military regime of Guatemala.
https://www.insightcrime.org/guatemala-organized-crime-news/guatemala/
Insight Crime is a fantastic resource for learning more about organized crime in Central America. This Guatemala profile reflects on the history of the Civil War, and connects this history to the modern circumstances in Guatemala. It explains the rise of drug smugglers, or transportistas, and how they established drug transportation networks with the support of corrupt military and police. As the country exited Civil War, it explains that the military and police stayed heavily involved in organized crime, and it also explain the growth of gangs, such as MS-13 and Barrio 18. This profile also seeks to explain the relationship between Mexican cartels and the organized crime networks in Guatemala. Additionally, the profile explores the judicial system and the prison systems in the largest Central American nation. Insight Crime has also conducted numerous investigations about Central American corruption and criminal organizations that offer a clearer picture of organized crime across the region.
https://www.usip.org/publications/1997/02/truth-commission-guatemala
This is to read more about the conclusions of the UN Truth Commission that found evidence of the genocide, find the report here. This also has some information about the prosecutions of war crimes over the last 2 decades.
https://www.thenation.com/article/border-patrol-guatemala-dictatorship/
To read about direct United States intervention in Guatemala and to learn about how Washington trained army commanders that ordered a genocide, see this source.
https://www.thenation.com/article/guatemala-refugee-crisis-jakelin-caal-maquin/
To read a heartbreaking account of what is happening at the border in the Trump administration, and to read about the intersections of race, gender, and age that produce particularly vulnerable migrants, read this source.