In June 1954, US planes bombed Guatemalan cities while US-funded mercenaries invaded from Honduras and the CIA bribed the Guatemalan army to turn against the democratically elected government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. Thus ended an unprecedented ten-year period of democracy and social reforms that began with the previous elected President Juan Jose Arevalo in 1945. HELEN BURNES reports.
The CIA coup was a response to legislation by Arbenz to expropriate the uncultivated land of the powerful US multinational the United Fruit Company (La Frutera – the predecessor of today’s Del Monte corporation) and redistribute it to landless peasants. The coup, codenamed Operation Diabolo (Devil), was ordered in January 1954 by US President Eisenhower. It was organised by CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State. The Dulles brothers both had shares in La Frutera.
Arbenz had played a key role in the civilian-military uprisings in summer and autumn of 1944 to bring down the dictator General Jorge Ubico. In December 1944 professor Arevalo won Guatemala’s first ever free election. Describing his government as ‘spiritual socialism’, he began to democratise the political system, introduce moderate legislation to redistribute uncultivated land and double the number of teachers and schools, whilst carefully distancing himself from Guatemalan communists. After his election, Arbenz took over in March 1951. He deepened and extended the reforms, recognising the Marxist Guatemalan Workers Party, which infuriated a US regime already set into the frenzied anti-communism of the McCarthy era.
At this time, 2% of the population controlled 74% of arable land. Arbenz’s modest redistribution plan aimed to develop a small farmer capitalist agricultural sector. In June 1952, 918,000 acres were expropriated and distributed to 88,000 families in two years. Only 15% of the 650,000 acres owned by La Frutera were subject to expropriation. The government offered $627,527 in compensation, calculated in line with the company’s 1950 tax declaration. La Frutera’s counter claim to the US government was $15.8m – clearly well over the value of land declared for tax purposes! Arbenz ignored the call to arm the people until 25 June, but by then the army had betrayed him and refused to carry out the order. He resigned on 27 June. In the bloodbath which followed 21,000 people died. Thousands were thrown into jails and torture chambers. Trade unions and peasant organisations were banned again and 72,000 people were registered as communists or sympathisers and lined up for elimination. In 1960 a military revolt of Arbenz supporters was crushed, but its leaders re-formed to start a guerrilla campaign in 1962, adopting the strategy of the Cuban Rebel Army. In 1963 the Pentagon and the CIA launched counter-insurgency operations in Guatemala. In 1977, when the US Carter administration cut off military aid after a fallout with the Guatemalan government over what it called ‘gross human rights violations’, Israel stepped in to become Guatemala’s principle arms supplier and primary source of counter- insurgency advice.
The violence of the counterinsurgency programme pushed thousands into the revolutionary guerrilla movement, which based itself on the most dispossessed and marginalised section of society, the rural indigenous people. Three guerrilla groups consolidated forces in 1980 as the United National Revolutionaries of Guatemala (UNRG). In the cities too, students were targeted, workers leaders, religious spokespersons, anyone who dared to criticise the iron grip of government control.
During the 36-year civil war, 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, 1 million made homeless, 100,000 fled to Mexico and tens of thousands ‘disappeared’. Indigenous or Mayan people, who make up 50-60% of the total population, were around four-fifths of the victims, subject to scorched earth policies, land clearances, collective punishment and mass killings. Mass graves, sometimes containing several hundred skeletons are still being uncovered throughout rural Guatemala, particularly in the northwest highlands, with a high concentration of indigenous people. The worst years were the early 1980s, under President Romero Lucas, an indigenous man, followed by the racist dictator General Rios Montt, proud of his pure Spanish blood. They developed ‘model villages’ based on the strategic hamlet campaign developed in Vietnam. Indigenous peasants scattered throughout the mountains were forced to move into concentrated areas where they were under constant surveillance and control, prevented from subsistence farming and from supporting the guerrillas.
Civilians were also forced to join the Civilian Self-defence Patrols, and given arms to fight against the guerrillas, or ordered to execute those captured by the army. If they refused they were accused of being guerrillas, or sympathisers, and jailed and tortured or killed.
The Peace Accords signed in 1996 embraced demands which if met, would have alleviated the racist discrimination against the indigenous Guatemalans. However, once the arms were laid down the machinations of the rich ruling class began. They manipulated a national referendum to prevent the agreements of the Peace Accords from being endorsed in the Constitution. They remain
on the statue book, to be enacted piecemeal according to the political whims of whichever government is in power.
Thirty six years of sacrifice and bloodshed, five years of congressional debate, and the Guatemalan people are still enslaved, exploited and impoverished. In 1998, the poorest 10% of Guatemalans possessed 1.6% of the national income or consumption. The richest 10% possessed 46%; a ratio of 29:1 (Human Development Index 2003).
Indeed, the depth of pessimism in Guatemala is such that the victory of presidential candidate Oscar Berger at the end of 2003, heading a moderate right-wing coalition, the Gran Alianza Nacional, was received with relief by many. Berger’s victory kept out General Rios Montt, dictator between 1982-3 and founder of the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), a man responsible for the genocide of indigenous people. The Guatemalan constitution prohibits any ex-dictator from standing in an election, but Montt instigated a riot in Guatemala City on 23 and 24 June 2003 to force acceptance of his candidacy. A journalist was killed by Montt’s mob of ex-army officers. Since the CIA coup, the politics of brute force has been rewarded. A Montt victory would have meant a second consecutive term for the FRG, whose President Portillo was elected in 1999. Since Berger began his presidency in January this year, the daily newspapers have hounded and condemned the outgoing FRG administration for corruption, involvement in drug trafficking, money laundering and stealing millions in public money which was siphoned off into secret bank accounts.
The amounts are astonishing, particularly for a country whose people suffer such obscene poverty, marginalisation and deprivation. In early March 2004, the national newspaper Prensa Libre listed the amount of public money stolen by the previous FRG government, the source of the funds, and the names of those involved. It amounted to over Q890 million (Quetzales), approximately $111.25m. This could have paid for all of the following: food for 1.3 million children for 15 days, training of 10,000 teachers, purchase of 200 ambulances, 2,000 police cars and 8,000 school computers at Q10,000 each, and Q450 million investment in the national hospital network.
The information is in the public domain, so where are the criminal charges? On 9 February, Marco Tulio Abadio, the ex-Superintendente, escaped to Miami days before being accused of stealing Q53 million from SAT, the public finance office. Three days later, his son escaped to Los Angeles. And one week later ex-president Portillo left for Mexico. There is now a warrant out for his arrest, as well as for several others from his government. On 3 March, ex-Contralor General de Cuentas de la Nacion (accounting inspector) Oscar Dubon Palma, was caught in Nicaragua escaping after being accused of corruption by Congress. Ex-dictator Rios Montt was temporarily placed under house arrest for instigating the riots last summer (but not for carrying out genocide over twenty years ago).
Portillo and Montt are safe however, because of the immunity granted to ex-Presidents and Vice-Presidents by the Central American Parliament (CAP). When the Guatemalan Supreme Court removed their immunity, the CAP overruled it.
The apparent witch-hunt against the FRG must be understood in terms of the power struggle between two factions of the ruling class. On the one side is CACIF (committee of commercial, agricultural, industrial and financial associations) and on the other side is the army elite. Between them they represent the Guatemalan oligarchy who, along with the interests of foreign capital, control economic and political power in Guatemala. The scattering of new parties with new slogans is a charade. In 1980, a legal change allowed retiring army generals the power to accumulate a lot of wealth and power. As the owners of huge fincas (plantations), they emerged as a section of the ruling class, challenging the traditional control of CACIF, which does not serve their interests.
The current preoccupation with the FRG witch-hunt helps President Berger to: 1) reduce the power of the military elite relative to CACIF; 2) distance himself and his coalition from the corruption of the previous government, in order to please voters and remain in power and 3) use the previous government’s outrageous robbery of national resources as an excuse for failure to carry out election pledges and social investment.
The UNRG have lost a great deal of political influence in their transformation into an electoral party. They have just four representatives out of the 158 delegates to the Congress. Delegates receive a monthly salary of Q30,000, while the average rural wage for working from 6am-4pm in a finca is Q600 a month for men, and as little as half for women. By the end of this year, Guatemala’s public debt will be more than Q1 billion. This sum does not include any new social investments promised by Berger which are desperately needed in the country. Funds donated by external countries and NGOs towards rebuilding Guatemala after the Peace Accords, were stolen by the FRG. The need for employment, for housing and for medical care is urgent. Violent crime is increasing and official statistics state that 72% of women suffer domestic violence. Only deep structural change to democratise the political system and redistribute the national wealth, along with social investment in education and healthcare, can pull the majority of Guatemalan people out of the misery and marginalisation which they suffer daily. This is precisely the process of transformation which Arevalo and Arbenz began in the 1940s and which the CIA organised to destroy half a century ago. As Arbenz said at his moment of defeat ‘some day the dark forces that oppress the downtrodden colonial world will be beaten’.
Che Guevara in Guatemala
Che Guevara arrived in Guatemala in December 1953, commenting on the ‘real atmosphere of democracy’. He became a revolutionary. In February 1954 he wrote ‘I have thrown my lot in with the Guatemalan government and, along with it, the PGT, which is communist.’ His experience of the CIA coup taught Che valuable lessons which contributed towards the formation of his revolutionary strategy:
1. That the US government will tolerate nothing that challenges the interests of US capital.
2. The extent that they will go to in order to get rid of any challenge.
3. The potentially treacherous role played by the standing army.
4. The need to empower and arm the people to defend their revolution.
FRFI 179 June / July 2004
