Since 1676, the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC) has served as the center of public higher learning in Guatemala. After the rise of military rule following the 1954 U.S. intervention, it has also served as the "democratic conscience" of the country, courageously if at times imprudently. For over forty years the University was the center of political opposition to the government: a source of criticism of the country's economic and social inequality, and a place where leftist intellectuals have formulated alternatives to this reality.

The University of San Carlos, though a State institution, has been brutally attacked by the State, both by regular forces and by terrorist paramilitary groups that it controlled or sanctioned. Due to this repression, and due to the University's constitutional autonomy, the San Carlos became a principal site of revolutionary ideology and practice. Some University members tried to bring down the government by means of a non-violent mass movement; others have advocated armed struggle.

By 1978, at the beginning of the worst wave of government repression in Guatemala's history, the military government publicly denounced the University as a "center of subversion." Student rhetoric, meanwhile, declared the campus "liberated territory." Building walls were enlivened with revolutionary slogans and classrooms served as meeting places for opposition groups from throughout the country (both legal and clandestine, but all fearful of state repression). For many years afterward, a good part of the University community was dedicated more to political matters than strictly academic pursuits.

In 1980, state forces unleashed a wave of violence against the University, in a poorly-disguised attempt to neutralize what had become the center of opposition organizing. That year alone, at least 127 members of the San Carlos community were killed or disappeared. In response, activists fled the University or were driven underground.

Over the next few years the scene of battle shifted to western Guatemala. University militants helped bring the revolutionary movement to indigenous and peasant communities in the countryside. Faced with growing insurrection and the possibility of its own defeat, the military government responded even more brutally than in the past. To try to dissuade any contact with the political opposition, entire villages were destroyed throughout the guerrillas' rural zones of operations. Back in the city, the government undertook a systematic campaign to eliminate or exile any person who continued to participate in the opposition, including hundreds of students and professors from the University of San Carlos.

Figure 1. Number of university killings and disappearances,
by year, 1954 to 1996

By the middle of the decade the guerrillas were in retreat. Still, despite the military's expanding coercive powers, the opposition continued to count on the support of new generations of students. The government, meanwhile, continued to kill or disappear its opponents. As Figure 1 shows, the level of violence at the University remained disturbingly high through the end of the 1980s. The history of organizing and repression at the San Carlos continued up until December 1996, when a peace treaty was signed between the government and the rebels of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG).

The report documents the cases of 492 university students and intellectuals who were assassinated or disappeared in Guatemala over the last half-century.¹ Of these known victims, 59 were women and 433 men. Though the majority were militant students, state forces also killed or disappeared over a hundred professors and university administrators, including thirty professors from the San Carlos Law School alone. State terror not only decimated people's lives; it also undermined the rule of law and debilitated a once strong public university.

The following chapters relate the principal moments of protest and struggle from 1944 to 1996 in which the University of San Carlos took a leading role. It considers why the State chose to eliminate entire generations of student leaders, and why so many members of the university community chose the path of armed struggle.

The repression in Guatemala was not simply a response to revolution. It was part of a project by various military governments and their allies in the country's oligarchy (and in the United States) to try to rule the country without acceding to any kind of social consensus. For forty years, the University played a central role in the resistance to this process, even during the worst years of state terror. This resistance explains, more than any other factor, the high levels of violence against the University and profile of the victims.

Not only participants in the armed struggle were hunted down. The entire political opposition was attacked—organized peasants, intellectuals in the University, labor activists, centrist and leftist politicians—anyone who might challenge those in power through elections or a mass mobilization. Other victims had little to do with politics but were assassinated or tortured as part of an indiscriminate campaign to eliminate potential support for the insurgency. In Guatemala, terror was systematically employed to block discontent from growing into organized opposition.

The guerrillas, it must be mentioned, also killed a number of civilians who opposed their struggle, including at least two University of San Carlos administrators. But selective rebel violence never reached a scale comparable to that of the State's widespread repression. And though the military State and its adversaries developed together, they should not be treated as equals, neither in the methods they employed during the conflict nor in the legitimacy of their respective causes.
Neither should the University of San Carlos of the last forty years be remembered as a "subversive" or anti-patriotic institution. In no way did the students and professors who resisted the government, either in the mass movement or the armed struggle, deserve the torture and death inflicted on them by government agents.

The goal of this investigation is to document the State's violence against the university community, from 1954 to 1996, almost always extra-judicial and in opposition to the rule of law, a part of the Guatemalan tragedy.