By 1983, military offensives and the imposition of anti-guerrilla "civilian self-defense patrols" (PACs) had managed to separate Guatemala's revolutionary forces from its rural base, a blow from which the guerrillas would never recover. In the city, the government's control over the citizenry made both popular agitation and guerrilla activity nearly impossible. The army had consolidated its rule. For many long years afterward the militarization of society was an unavoidable part of daily life in Guatemala.

In August of 1983, another coup d'etat, again coming from within the military, replaced Ríos Montt with General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores. Due to both regional and national pressures, Mejía Víctores soon reestablished institutional rule and a form of electoral democracy. But this political normalization, part of a process felt throughout Latin America, left the Guatemalan military with considerable control over the civilian government.

After the Mejía Víctores takeover, opposition activists saw the chance to resume their political activity. But the military high command was not willing to cede any space to the organized revolutionary movement nor to the legal opposition. During the thirty months between the coup and the 1985 elections of a civilian president the repression against the University only increased (see the appendix).

After years of functioning semi-clandestinely and with unnamed leaders, the Association of University Students attempted to reestablish its public profile. In May of 1983, students elected a new Executive Committee, headed by representatives of the new UVE-PRAXIS alliance (in reality a continuation of FRENTE). Many of the elected leaders had experience in the union movement and ties to the PGT.

At the time, the University's financial crisis deepened: the student population continued to expand, and the Ríos Montt government allocated to the University only a part of its budget. As a partial solution to the crisis, the San Carlos administration proposed a rise in tuition, to increase revenues and to decrease the number of registered students (in part by discouraging students who routinely repeated courses and never got close to graduation). The AEU's Executive Committee responded with its traditional combativeness, proposing that the military government reduce the defense budget and increase that of the San Carlos (Siete Días en la USAC: 1983).

At the same time, Guatemala City was jolted by a resurgence in guerrilla actions and by an increase in union activity. On September 28, 1983, the PGT exploded a bomb full of leaflets to celebrate its 34th anniversary. Soon after, FAR guerrillas kidnapped close relatives of both Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores in an unsuccessful attempt to force the government to free Yolanda Urízar de Aguilar and other members of its organization. The army responded by destroying several rebel safe houses in the capital (Americas Watch 1984: 158; Velásquez, González and Blanck 1997).

Once again the University became a target in the conflict between the insurgency and the counterinsurgency. On November 24, 1983, Viscount Colville de Culross arrived in Guatemala to investigate the country's human rights situation for the United Nations. The next day, the University was shaken by the assassination of Leonel Carrillo Reeves, the former dean of Pharmacy and Chemical Sciences and acting rector during the worst of the terror. Though he did not share the leftists' vision of social transformation, Carrillo Reeves was one of the University's strongest voices against state violence.

His family accused the guerrillas of responsibility for his death, recalling that Carrillo Reeves was a leading member of the University Governing Board that in 1980 pressured Saúl Osorio Paz to renounce his position when he fled into exile. Journalistic sources confirm the possibility that the PGT, taking advantage of the presence of Viscount Colville in Guatemala, decided to discredit the regime by killing a leading university intellectual, one who had helped weaken the PGT's influence over the San Carlos administration. Members of the PGT give another interpretation, pointing out that since 1979 Carrillo Reeves had been under threat of death from right-wing paramilitary groups. He was also known as a fierce enemy of drug dealers who used his faculty's campus as a distribution center, and had once come to blows with them (Velásquez, González and Blanck 1997; interviews).²⁰

What is certain was that by the end of 1983, the guerrillas had increased their urban activity. At the beginning of 1986, a new armed group emerged, a dissident faction of the PGT called the "6th of January" Movement. While the PGT's Central Committee resided in Mexico City, the front was formed by members of the organization's youth wing, the JPT, who had remained in Guatemala and who did not want to admit defeat in the struggle against the government. Instead, they sought to rebuild the popular movement. Its founders included union activists and members of the AEU's Executive Committee (interviews).

On February 17, 1984, workers at the Coca-Cola Bottling Company again occupied the company's plant. This labor action, which counted on the support of many university students, would last a year. The State, trying to shut down a resurgence in the popular movement, responded with violence. That same day, Santiago López Aguilar, director of the University's Labor Orientation School was kidnapped. For many years this PGT militant had survived state attempts to eliminate him. Now his luck ran out. A few days later his body appeared bearing signs of sustained torture.

The kidnappings continued. On the 18th of February Edgar Fernando García, Engineering student and adviser in the Labor Orientation School, disappeared without a trace. Then on the 19th, two ex-AEU leaders and PGT members, wife and husband Alma Lidia Samayoa Ramírez and Víctor Hugo Quintanilla Ordóñez, also disappeared. Quintanilla and García were both labor organizers. The killings were clearly designed to once again destroy the connections between combative elements in the union movement and the University (Albizures 1985: 96-100; División de Publicidad e Información, USAC; AAAS 1986: 19-20, 29; Amnesty International 1987a: 216).

More than at any other time during the armed conflict, under Mejía Víctores the cruel practice of forced disappearance became the State's preferred method of combating the opposition. Between February and May 1984, 21 San Carlos students and one professor were forcibly disappeared (some of these victims were listed as killed in military archives), while the bodies of three professors, three students and a number of labor activists were found in the capital (see the appendix).

The terror peaked the week of May 15 in the most systematic attack on the student leadership until that time. Seven members of the AEU's Executive Committee were kidnapped, one after the other. Many of the victims were members of the JPT. None of them ever appeared alive.

This wave of urban terror, unlike the violence earlier in the decade, led to a new period of organization against state violence. And as in 1966 and 1971, university students led the resistance. Relatives of the disappeared from different social strata began to become acquainted with each other in their search for their loved ones. United in their anguish and uncertainty, homemakers, workers, peasants and students came together during daily visits to the morgue, checking to see if their family members were among the unidentified corpses that arrived each day (which numbered thirty to forty daily, according to Mario Guerra, the morgue's forensic doctor at the time).

Among those who met at the morgue were Nineth Montenegro, Law student and wife of Edgar Fernando García, and María del Rosario Godoy, Sociology student and wife of Carlos Cuevas Molina, one of the members of the AEU Executive Committee disappeared on May 15. Montenegro and Godoy founded the Group of Mutual Aid for the Appearance Alive of our Relatives (GAM), the first 1980s organization that dared demand that the government investigate the disappearances and the death squads. GAM quickly attracted the attention of members of the foreign press looking for stories about resistance to military dictatorship in Guatemala. On October 12, 1984, GAM organized its first public activity and the first mass public protest since May Day 1980, with a thirty kilometer march into the capital, ending up in front of the national palace.

At first GAM brought together relatives of disappeared unionists and students. But the group recognized the need to involve the great number of peasants and Indians who had lost family members to the army's rural massacres and mass disappearances. At GAM's march on April 13, 1985, indigenous women were the majority, accompanied by hooded university students from the Law Students Association, a group that had fought the state policy of forced disappearances since 1966 (Simon 1987: 159-61, 197-98).

In 1985, at the insistence of GAM, the Mejía Víctores government agreed to form a commission to study the political violence. Nevertheless, disappearances with evidence of official responsibility continued. GAM publicly denounced the government's lack of interest in investigating, much less stopping, the perpetrators of the violence. The official response was more violence, this time against human rights defenders. On March 30 GAM leader Héctor Gómez Calito was kidnapped; his disfigured body appeared soon afterwards. At his funeral, San Carlos student and fellow GAM leader Rosario Godoy gave an emotional eulogy; within days she herself was kidnapped. A week later her mutilated body appeared in a ravine outside Guatemala City, together with that of her brother and her two year old son. The police called the triple death the result of a traffic accident. But like Gómez Calito's death, it was clearly an act of terror aimed at the human rights community: Godoy had bite marks on her breasts and her infant's fingernails had been pulled out (Amnesty International 1987a: 92-93; Amnesty International 1987b: 170-71; Goldman 1995).

The destruction of the "6th of January" Movement signaled a decline in the revolutionary struggle, while the rise of GAM heralded an increase in social organizing. As in the 1970s, this shift did not represent the end of the guerrillas' influence, but a return to struggle by nonviolent means.

In 1985, as in 1978, it was disputes over economic issues that provoked a mass popular mobilization. In the mid-1985 the Guatemalan economy was in recession, in part due to capital flight related to investors' insecurity about armed conflict, and in part due to the military high command's increasing corruption. The government, counting on the weakness of the country's civil society after years of repression, tried to make the country's poor majority shoulder the cost of this crisis. Price controls on basic goods were loosened and subsidies for public services were cut back, much as in 1978. Then in August 1985 the government proposed an increase in the city bus fare from ten to fifteen cents. Once again public transport proved to be a delicate topic, and the fare increase provoked new rounds of protest and repression (Simon 1987: 197).

The opposition wasted no time in organizing. A new umbrella group emerged to coordinate the popular sectors and the student movement, the Unity of Guatemalan Unions and Workers (UNSITRAGUA), which called on member organizations to return to the 1970s tactic of mass protest, beginning with a general strike to halt the fare increase.

At first street protests were peaceful. But as the State reverted to its repressive practices, protesters burned buses, 25 in all, that attempted to charge the higher fare. The government no longer used the National Police to maintain order, as during the 1962 and 1978 protests, but sent army troops into the streets, a reflection of the more open militarization of the Guatemalan State after 1982. As in earlier years, the regime gained control through a campaign of mass arrests and violence, in which twelve youth died. Nevertheless, the protests succeeded in forcing the government to rescind the fare hike (Simon 1987: 197; Jonas 1991: 180).

After the strike, the organized opposition turned to protest the escalating repression.²¹ On September 3, 1985, marchers left the university campus and walked city streets to the national palace. As in earlier struggles, protest organizers demanded the resignation of Mejía Víctores. The military government felt obliged to show protesters who was in control. That night, a battle tank ripped through the main gate of the University of San Carlos. Behind it 500 soldiers flowed onto the campus and occupied it for four days, in what was the gravest violation of university autonomy since 1944. During the invasion, the President's public relations office called the press corps to offer tours of the campus, where leftist graffiti covered the walls, to provide proof of the University's subversive character.

When students and the administration were able to return to the University they found many buildings looted and destroyed, including the administration building, the AEU's headquarters, the STUSC union headquarters and the offices of many of the social science units. In a crude attempt to show their disrespect for the San Carlos, soldiers urinated in the classrooms and painted "Viva el Ejército" on the walls and the blackboards. Upon leaving the University, the army took with it a number of human rights archives (including those of the AEU and the STUSC), as well as a computerized database of information about students, apparently to update the military intelligence archives (Simon 1987: 197-200; Hey 1996: 106; interviews).

The occupation of the University was met with widespread condemnation throughout Central America and in European and North American academic circles. The invasion had occurred while the country was supposedly moving towards democracy, just weeks before general elections to elect a new civilian president. Though the army's actions showed the international community just how superficial Guatemala's transition to democracy really was, the invasion achieved its goal: to make clear to domestic forces that no matter who occupied the presidential palace, the army would continue to hold the real power.

Figure 5. Number of university killings and disappearances,
by campus of university, 1954 to 1996

Note: The San Carlos central campus, where most victims studied or worked, dwarfs all other Guatemalan university campuses in size. In 1980, during the height of state terror against the University, 33,312 students, or 85 percent of the system's total of 39,421, studied at USAC-Guatemala City (data from the USAC Department of Registry and Statistics).

Still, during the drafting of the new constitution the University defended many of its privileges, even though the military and the right-wing considered it a center of subversion. Given the expanding student population, delegates to the constitutional assembly agreed to increase the San Carlos' budget allocation from three to five percent of State's ordinary income.

But the university community paid for its militancy through more extra-judicial violence. On March 2, three students from the San Carlos campus in Quetzaltenango, CUNOC, Joaquín Rodas Andrade, Rafael Galindo and Ricardo Gramajo, were disappeared after participating in protests against a proposal before the assembly to limit the University's autonomy (Amnesty International 1987a: 117).

CUNOC had long maintained a spirit of resistance to military rule, in spite of the brutal army pacification carried out in western Guatemala beginning in 1980. For its militancy, it became the State's second-favorite target in its campaign against the country's intellectuals, as Figure 5 illustrates. Between 1979 and 1985, the CUNOC was raided on repeated occasions and many of its professors and students assassinated, including, in 1982, its director, Raúl Rodríguez Arango (Siete Días en la USAC: 27 September 1982; interviews).

Despite the repression that characterized 1985, that year marked the recovery of the student movement's confidence and its ability effect social change. Indeed, through the September protests the urban left as a whole reestablished its organizational base. During presidential elections, the dictatorship allowed the participation of at least part of the political opposition and the year ended with a sweeping victory for the centrist Christian Democrats.

When Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo assumed the presidency, political repression diminished, though for only a limited time. In his campaign Cerezo had promised to demilitarize the country. However, once in office he did nothing to investigate the disappearances or the massacres, or to dismantle the vast military apparatus, including the civilian self-defense patrols that continued to hold sway in the countryside. A month after his inauguration, Cerezo warned the foreign press that if he undertook change too fast, "you'll be interviewing me in Miami" (Americas Watch 1986: 9-10).

Cerezo still wanted to be the president of peace and reconciliation in Guatemala. In 1986 he traveled to Costa Rica and Mexico to speak with Guatemalan exile communities and invite them to return, giving exiles his personal guarantee of safety. But military hard-liners refused to go along. In March 1987, shortly after returning from exile, Medical School student leader Edgar Arana Castillo was kidnapped, tortured and killed. His was not an isolated death; in 1988 other urban returnees faced violence. University student Débora Carolina Vásquez Velásquez, for example, returned from abroad to face detention and torture before being released by security forces. Another exile, Agronomy student José Albino Grijalva Estévez did not fare as well: the day after his kidnapping, his mutilated body appeared in the department of Santa Rosa (Americas Watch 1988: 28-31).

The death of Grijalva Estévez was part of a series of kidnappings of students, unionists and other members of the opposition movement perpetrated by security forces riding in a Panel Blanca, a white Ford panel van with polarized windows which became infamous for the kidnappings its occupants committed and for the overt impunity with which they operated. Among the victims were various students whose tortured bodies appeared bearing a final tiro de gracia to the head (Amnesty International 1989a: 19, 46).

As the kidnappings continued, public clamor increased for an investigation. Months after the killings began, the director of the National Police, Julio Caballeros Seigné, surprised and captured the Panel Blanca during a stake-out operation. Inside the van, police found six members of the Treasury Police. The director of the Treasury Police, Oscar Díaz Urquizú, claimed that Caballeros and Vinicio Cerezo were plotting against him. Investigators soon found two more white panel vans in Treasury Police parking lots and determined that they belonged to the military's Presidential Joint Chiefs of Staff (formally a security detail for the President, but in reality a layer of military control over the civilian government that had long organized extra-judicial violence against regime opponents). In all, the director of the Treasury Police and 20 of his agents faced trial. The process lasted two years and was plagued by irregularities, including threats against witnesses and even the kidnapping of the judge. In the end, all the accused went free (Blanck and Velásquez 1997).²²

The Panel Blanca killings appeared to be a government attempt to counteract the growth of the popular and student movements at the end of the 1980s. For many years, fear of state violence had discouraged student participation in the opposition; the radical character of the student leadership had also made many students wary of associating with them. But during the new civilian government, the AEU and the other student organizations regained their dynamism. By 1988, San Carlos student politics appeared similar to those of a decade earlier, with various parties pursuing a quota of power.

A similar renewal occurred throughout the popular movement. In December 1987, the Unity for Popular and Syndicalist Action (UASP) emerged to coordinate the activities of the organized left. UASP counted on the very active support of the AEU and was similar to the 1970s coordinating body CNUS. Still the group had a notable "post-war" character. In addition to fighting for bread and butter issues (such as an increase in the minimum wage), UASP called for investigation into the thousands of unresolved cases of forced disappearance, the safe return of refugees from Mexico, the legal recognition of leftist organizations such as the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) and, above all, the demilitarization of Guatemalan society including the abolition of the civil patrols (Gramajo 1995: 351).

In January 1988, UASP organized two mass urban protests to press for a dialogue with the government on their agenda. That same year, students mobilized to support UASP's attempt to block a proposed increase in electrical utility rates. Through press conferences and paid press declarations in the newspapers and on the radio, the AEU began to regain its role as a source of coherent criticism of the regime.

It was a time of great confidence in the student movement, and of carelessness as well. Just as during the 1978 to 1981 period, students paid scant attention to the continued terrorist character of the security forces, allowing, once again, the infiltration of their organizations. Activist students were in danger, especially those who belonged to a clandestine organization—the four revolutionary groups in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) or one of the newer dissident factions, which all had a presence on campus (interviews).

At the time the AEU publicly supported many of the URNG's political positions, including support for a negotiated settlement to the prolonged armed conflict. Though armed struggle was in decline, the army continued to view the student movement as a threat to its power, especially given its for the rebels. For the military command, after years of dominating the Guatemalan State, the new concept of "subversion" included anyone who attempted to take part in the decision of how and when to reopen democratic political spaces.

Political tensions began to rise. In mid-1988, while opposition activity increased, a group of self-proclaimed "Officers of the Mountain" (supposed dissidents from the army command) attempted to topple the civilian government through a military coup. The uprising was stopped, but only through an army occupation of the city center, a show of military force that did little to strengthen the civilian government vis-a-vis the army.

Students and the popular organizations responded with mass protests against the coup. Shortly before the coup attempt, a communiqué signed by the Secret Anticommunist Army appeared, threatening sixty student leaders with death. Two months later, on July 22, twelve men carrying assault rifles similar to those used by the army tried to kidnap Oscar Monterroso, one of the threatened AEU leaders. Though he managed to escape, Adrián Guerra Roca, a fellow member of the AEU Executive Committee, was kidnapped the same day. Five days later, his disfigured corpse appeared near the capital (Americas Watch 1988: 27; Amnesty International 1989: 19).

This 1988 violence was only a preamble of what would occur in 1989. That year, the school year began with the explosion of several propaganda bombs on campus. Flyers signed by two new paramilitary groups, El Jaguar Justiciero and La Dolorosa, threatened student leaders by name, insisting that they cease their "subversive interventions" and abandon the AEU (Amnesty International 1990: 105).

But profile of the student movement continued to increase, and new parties emerged. In late 1988 the Student Unity (UE) party defeated Avanzada for control of the AEU. Both of these groups were openly sympathetic to the guerrilla movement. The UE leadership distinguished itself through its insistent calls for a University-wide reform, criticizing the administration for alleged financial mismanagement and corruption (interviews).

Tensions were on the rise throughout Central America. In El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN) increased its military activity, culminating in November 1989 with its greatest offensive in ten years of insurgency. This forced the government of Alfredo Cristiani to accept a negotiated end to the fighting. In Guatemala, a surge in rebel actions attempted to pressure for the same thing.

Social struggles increased as well. In June, public school teachers began a months-long strike for higher wages. As in 1973, the strike received strong support from University students. In August, during the final days of the strike, the State again met activism with terror. The first killing was that of Danilo Barillas, former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democrats, who had organized the first meetings between the government and the URNG. Days later, the offices of GAM and other human rights organizations became the target of terrorist attacks (Americas Watch 1990: 28).

But the repression hit the student sector hardest. State agents managed to infiltrate the AEU, placing a spy in the group's executive committee: army specialist Edgar William Ligorría Hernández. With Ligorría passing information to military intelligence, a kidnapping campaign began on August 21, 1989 aimed at current and former student leaders. The campaign began with the capture of Silvia María Azurdia Utrera and Víctor Hugo Rodríguez Jaramillo, wife and husband and both active members in the AEU leadership. Over the next 48 hours five more students were kidnapped, all of them members of the AEU executive committee from the UE party (see the appendix). Ivan Ernesto González Fuentes was the university representative to the National Dialogue, a commission convened by the government but without the support of the army. Mario Arturo de León Méndez was president of a commission studying university reform; he was kidnapped moments after leaving a press conference in which he denounced the disappearance of fellow students (División de Publicidad e Información, USAC; Americas Watch 1990: 16-19; El Periódico: September 16 1997).

Weeks passed without word of the seven students' whereabouts. Campus buildings were draped with banners condemning the kidnappings. In spite of this campaign, or perhaps because of it, two more students were kidnapped on September 9: Carlos Leonel Chuta Camey and Carlos Humberto Cabrera Rivera. Cabrera, 48 years old and a long time activist, was a primary school teacher and one of the leaders of the recently-completed teachers' strike. Both were from the Avanzada party and had served on the AEU executive committee the year before. The next day, another former AEU leader, Eduardo Antonio López Palencia, was also kidnapped.

On September 11, city firefighters received an anonymous call. In the weeds near the entrance to the University they found the bodies of four of the student leaders (Azurdia, Jaramillo, Cabrera and Chuta). Silvia Azurdia, who had been detained for nearly 20 days, had cigarette burns all over her body and her arms were perforated with needle marks. Her military interrogators had not stopped there: Azurdia's fingernails were bent backwards and forensic investigators determined that she had been raped repeatedly by different men (El Periódico: 16 September 1997).

The government, in a cynical attempt to shift attention away from its own security forces, suggested that the killings were product of a purge within the student movement. The corpses appeared with a note reading, "For the dignity of the AEU we have found it necessary to take radical measures against those leaders who have stolen our funds and sold out our association to external agents of state violence, dividing our movement and impeding its unity."

But the profile of the victims—all known for their opposition political activity—made it clear that the intent of the massacre was to neutralize the student movement. The assassins appeared to enjoy official protection when committing their crimes: many of the kidnappings took place in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city.

The decade had ended much like it began: with a wave of repression at the University. Once again, the violence was effective. Among surviving members of the AEU Executive Committee, six went into exile and others dropped out of the movement. In the following years the AEU would lose the militant presence that its leadership had built back up since 1983.

William Ligorría, the army's agent within the AEU, resurfaced in 1992 as the chief of the Public Ministry's Institute for Criminal Investigations, where he was protected by a team of bodyguards provided by the military's Presidential Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to sources within the army's intelligence apparatus, this protection was given in exchange for his role in helping to destroy the student movement (ibid.).

²⁰ In May 1999 the National Security Archive, a Washington, DC-based non-governmental organization, made public a secret military dossier that helps clarify who killed Carrillo Reeves. The notebook reveals that in 1984 security forces captured and killed two PGT combatants, Tomás Vargas Boror and Victoriano Balam Yool, who military intelligence believe participated in the dean's execution (Guatemalan Military Archive, 1983-85).

²¹ The participation of public high school students in these protests lead Mejía Víctores to decree the suspension of classes for the rest of the school year as a way to encourage parents to keep their children home and away from the disturbances.

²² In 1996 the case was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Díaz Urquizú has continued to protest his innocence. According to his testimony, his accuser, former police director Caballeros Seigné, was to blame for the wave of killings, stemming from his work organizing the Presidential Chiefs of Staff's military intelligence unit, the "Archivo," infamous for its illegal activities against the unarmed political opposition. In 1998, the Inter-American Court reached an historic decision, finding the Guatemalan State guilty for killings, torture and kidnappings related to the Panel Blanca case. In its decision, the Court noted the slowness of Guatemalan judicial authorities and the impunity with which the State covered up these crimes for over a decade (Blanck and Velásquez 1997).