Guatemalan Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Guatemalan Civil War began not with an ideological declaration but with a mutiny. On the 13th of November 1960, a group of junior military officers at the Escuela Politécnica national military academy staged a revolt against General Ydígoras Fuentes, not over land or communism, but over a secret deal. Fuentes had quietly allowed the United States to train Cuban exile forces on Guatemalan soil as preparation for the planned Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, without informing the Guatemalan military and without sharing the payment he received. Unmarked American warplanes piloted by Cuban exiles flew openly over the country. A secret airstrip and training camp appeared at Retalhuleu. The officers felt their nation's sovereignty had been sold.

  The revolt failed. The CIA bombed rebel bases using B-26 aircraft disguised as Guatemalan jets. The surviving officers fled into the hills of eastern Guatemala and across the border into Honduras. From that flight grew a guerrilla movement. And from that movement grew a war that would consume thirty-six years, claim the lives of between 40,000 and 200,000 people, and see the Guatemalan state commit what a UN-appointed commission later concluded could be called genocide against the indigenous Maya population.

  What followed was not simply a Cold War proxy conflict. It was a collision between an entrenched social order built on land theft and coerced labor, a U.S. government determined to crush anything that looked like communism in its hemisphere, and a population composed mostly of indigenous Guatemalans who had been dispossessed of their land for nearly a century. How the country reached that breaking point, and what was done in the name of order, is a story that Guatemala only began formally reckoning with in 2013 when a former president stood trial for genocide.

• 2. Land, Labor, and Hierarchy

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  Justo Rufino Barrios came to power after the 1871 revolution and immediately set about turning Guatemala into a coffee economy. Coffee required large tracts of land and armies of workers. Barrios solved both problems at once. He established the Settler Rule Book, which forced the native population to work for low wages on the estates of landowners who were Criollos and, later, German settlers. He also confiscated communal indigenous land that had been legally protected under the Spanish colonial period and under the subsequent Conservative government of Rafael Carrera. He handed that land to his Liberal allies, who became the new landowning elite.

  By 1920, when the Swedish prince Wilhelm visited Guatemala and published his observations in Between Two Continents, the country's social structure had calcified into three sharply defined classes. The Criollos, descendants of Spanish conquerors, held political and intellectual leadership and largely owned the cultivated parts of the country. The Ladinos, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, formed a middle tier of artisans, tradesmen, and minor officials but held almost no political power. Indigenous Guatemalans, most of them Mayan, made up the majority of the population and most of the agricultural workforce.

  Prince Wilhelm described three sub-categories within the indigenous working class. The Mozos colonos lived on plantations and received a small plot of land in exchange for a fixed number of months of labor each year. The Mozos jornaleros were day laborers who were, in theory, free to sell their labor where they chose. In practice, owners extended credit and cash to encourage debt, kept the accounts themselves, and ensured the illiterate workers could never verify the figures. Workers who fled could be pursued and imprisoned; the costs of their capture were added to their debt. If a worker refused to work, they were jailed on the spot. The independent tillers, the Artesanos independientes, scraped by in remote provinces growing maize, wheat, or beans and sometimes carried their goods on their backs for up to 25 miles a day to reach a market.

  After 1929, when the crash of the New York Stock Exchange destabilized the plantation economy, the dictator Jorge Ubico, who came to power in 1931 backed by the United States, simply encoded debt slavery more explicitly into law. With an estimated personal income of $215,000 a year in 1930s dollars, Ubico sided consistently with the United Fruit Company, Guatemalan landowners, and urban elites. He gave the company hundreds of thousands of hectares in the Tiquisate region, exempted it from taxes, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala. He reportedly passed laws permitting landowners to execute workers as a disciplinary measure. He called indigenous people "animal-like" and compared their mandatory military training to domesticating donkeys. He identified himself as a fascist, citing admiration for Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler. He once said: "I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later."

• 3. Revolution and Its Reversal

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  Ubico's grip finally broke in 1944. Urban middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers organized pacific resistance, culminating in a general strike. On the 1st of July 1944, Ubico resigned. He tried to hand power to General Roderico Anzueto, but advisors warned that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies made him too toxic even for the military. Ubico instead chose a three-man ruling group. When congress met on the 3rd of July, soldiers held members at gunpoint and forced them to elect General Federico Ponce Vaides over the popular civilian candidate, Dr. Ramón Calderón.

  The Ponce regime lasted only months. On the 19th of October 1944, a small force of soldiers and students led by Jacobo Árbenz and Major Francisco Javier Arana attacked the National Palace. Ponce was forced into exile. The subsequent democratic election was won by Juan José Arévalo, a university professor who had left Guatemala under Ubico and spent years working at universities in Argentina. Arévalo won 85 percent of the vote in elections that observers considered genuinely open. He introduced minimum wage laws, expanded educational funding, and extended suffrage nearly universally, though excluding illiterate women. Despite being relatively moderate, his government survived at least 25 coup attempts, many led by wealthy military officers. The United States government, the Catholic Church, and the United Fruit Company all viewed even his modest reforms with hostility.

  His successor Árbenz went further. In 1952, Decree 900 ordered the redistribution of fallow land on large estates, directly threatening the interests of the United Fruit Company, which held vast idle tracts. The brothers John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, who was CIA director, both sat on the board of the company. The U.S. government ordered the CIA to launch Operation PBFortune, running from 1952 to 1954, and selected right-wing Guatemalan Army Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead what was framed as an insurrection. Armas overthrew the Árbenz government in 1954. He immediately dissolved a decade of reform. He banned labor unions and left-wing parties. He returned confiscated land to the United Fruit Company and the landowning elite. A series of military coups followed, marked by fraudulent elections in which only military candidates won. The structural grievances that Arévalo and Árbenz had tried to address were left intact, with one difference: now there was a generation of Guatemalans who had glimpsed what reform could look like.

• 4. The Architecture of State Terror

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  On the 3rd and the 5th of March 1966, military intelligence agents and the Judicial Police raided three houses in Guatemala City and captured twenty-eight people, including most of the central committee of the Guatemalan Labour Party and peasant federation leader Leonardo Castillo Flores. All twenty-eight subsequently disappeared. The case became known to the Guatemalan press as "the 28." It established a template that would define the following decades: mass abduction, official denial, and the use of bureaucratic infrastructure to organize murder.

  By November 1965, U.S. Public Safety Advisor John Longan had arrived in Guatemala on temporary loan from a posting in Venezuela to help establish urban counterinsurgency. Under his assistance, the military launched Operation Limpieza, an urban program coordinated by Colonel Rafael Arriaga Bosque. With U.S. money, President Enrique Peralta Azurdia built a Presidential Intelligence Agency in the National Palace. Under it ran a telecommunications network called La Regional, linking the National Police, the Treasury Guard, the Judicial Police, the Presidential House, and the Military Communications Center through a shared VHF-FM radio frequency. La Regional also maintained a database of suspected subversives. This entire structure was built on the network of Committees against Communism the CIA had created after the 1954 coup.

  Parallel to the official apparatus ran the death squads. The MANO, or Mano Blanca (White Hand), was initially formed by the right-wing MLN in June 1966 to prevent President Julio César Méndez Montenegro from taking office. It was quickly absorbed into the state's counter-terror program. The first MANO leaflets appeared on the 3rd of June 1966 in Guatemala City. In August 1966, they were distributed over the city from light aircraft landing openly at the Air Force section of La Aurora airbase.

  In January 1967, the army formed the Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army, known as SCUGA, a thirty-five man unit that the CIA itself later described as a "government-sponsored terrorist organization used primarily for assassinations and political abductions." A month later, a fifty-man National Police unit called the Fourth Corps was created to carry out extralegal operations alongside the SCUGA, answering directly to Col. Sosa and Col. Arriaga. By 1967, at least twenty death squads operated in Guatemala City, posting blacklists of suspected communists, complete with police mugshots and passport photographs accessible only through the Ministry of the Interior. In January 1968, a booklet listing 85 names was distributed nationally under the title People of Guatemala, Know the Traitors, the Guerrillas of the FAR. Many named in it were killed or forced into exile.

• 5. The Butcher of Zacapa

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  In October 1966, a 5,000-man Guatemalan Army force launched an operation in the departments of Zacapa and Izabal called Operation Guatemala. Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio commanded the Zacapa-Izabal Military Zone with guidance and training from 1,000 U.S. Green Berets. Arana armed and deployed various paramilitary death squads to work alongside regular army and police units, targeting not just guerrillas but their perceived civilian support base. Personnel, weapons, funds, and operational instructions flowed from the armed forces.

  Blacklists were compiled. Troops and paramilitaries moved through Zacapa arresting suspected insurgents and collaborators. Prisoners were either killed on the spot or transported to clandestine detention camps. In villages the army suspected of pro-guerrilla sympathies, all the local peasant leaders were publicly executed. Villagers were told that additional civilians would be killed if they did not cooperate. A 1976 Amnesty International report estimated that between 3,000 and 8,000 peasants were killed by the army and paramilitary organizations in Zacapa and Izabal between October 1966 and March 1968. Other estimates placed the Zacapa death toll alone at 15,000 during this period. Arana earned the nickname "The Butcher of Zacapa."

  A nationwide state of siege was declared on the 2nd of November 1966, suspending civil rights including habeas corpus. Press censorship accompanied it, ensuring the Zacapa campaign remained entirely shrouded in secrecy. The only public reports came from the army's own public relations office. A separate directive banned any reporting on arrests without prior military authorization.

  Despite Arana's brutal efficiency in suppressing the insurgency, the killings did not stop once the guerrillas were defeated. In December 1967-26-year-old Rogelia Cruz Martinez, former Miss Guatemala of 1959, who was known for her left-wing sympathies, was picked up and found dead. Her body showed signs of torture, rape, and mutilation. The FAR responded on the 16th of January 1968 by attacking a carload of American military advisors, killing Colonel John D. Webber, chief of the U.S. military mission in Guatemala, and Naval Attache Lieutenant Commander Ernest A. Munro. In a subsequent statement, the FAR claimed the killings were reprisal for the creation of "genocidal forces" responsible for the deaths of nearly 4,000 Guatemalans in the previous two years.

• 6. Genocide in the Highlands

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  On the 31st of January 1980, a group of displaced K'iche' and Ixil peasant farmers occupied the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City. They had come to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants in Uspantán by the Guatemalan Army. President Romeo Lucas García, Colonel Germán Chupina Barahona, and Minister of the Interior Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz met at the National Palace and, despite direct pleas from Spanish Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López to negotiate, ordered a forced expulsion. About 300 heavily armed state agents cordoned off the building, cut electricity, water, and telephone lines. Under orders from Lieutenant Colonel Pedro García Arredondo, the Commando Six unit of the National Police occupied the building's first and third floors while the Ambassador shouted that they were violating international law. A fire broke out. Thirty-six people died. Among them was Vicente Menchú, father of Rigoberta Menchú. The Guatemalan government claimed its forces had entered at the request of the Spanish Ambassador and that the occupiers had set the fire themselves. Spain immediately severed diplomatic relations with Guatemala. Relations between the two countries were not normalized until the 22nd of September 1984.

  The incident the civil war's historical commission later called "the defining event" of the entire conflict was followed by the worst years of killing. In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan military assumed what the record describes as close to absolute government power. General Efraín Ríos Montt, who had actually run as a center-left candidate in the fraudulent 1974 elections, seized power in a coup on the 23rd of March 1982. During his rule from 1982 to 1983, more than 1,700 indigenous Ixil Maya were killed or disappeared. The UN-appointed Commission for Historical Clarification, whose findings formed the basis of the "Memoria del Silencio" report, concluded that the government could have committed genocide in Quiché between 1981 and 1983. The commission also estimated that government forces were responsible for 93 percent of all human rights abuses across the entire conflict, against 3 percent committed by guerrillas. Of 1,465 reported cases of rape, soldiers were found responsible in 94.3 percent of them.

  In 2009, Guatemalan courts convicted Felipe Cusanero, a former military commissioner, making him the first person in the country's history convicted of ordering forced disappearances. In 2013, Ríos Montt was put on trial for genocide, becoming the first former head of state to be tried for that crime by his own country's judicial system. He was found guilty and sentenced to 80 years in prison. A few days later, the country's high court reversed the sentence on procedural grounds. The retrial resumed on the 23rd of July 2015, but the jury had not reached a verdict before Ríos Montt died in custody on the 1st of April 2018.