In 1944, a coalition of democratic forces overthrew the government of General Jorge Ubico Castañeda, the last of a series of "liberal" dictators who had ruled Guatemala since the 1870s. The October Revolution, and a decade later the Counterrevolution, established the political terrain for the following decades of armed conflict.

Before 1944, university students and faculty enjoyed little intellectual freedom and little space in which to organize independently of the government. Still, since the beginning of the century, student groups have taken up the role of Guatemala's political opposition. In 1899, law students founded the first modern student group, La Sociedad "El Derecho." Within a few months the government of Manuel Estrada Cabrera had imprisoned the outspoken president of the group, Salvador Mendieta, and then forced him into exile (Azmitia Jiménez 1976: 257).

During the 22 years of Estrada Cabrera's tyranny (1898 to 1920) the dictator's inflated sense of self-importance inspired him to rename the University of San Carlos the Universidad Nacional Estrada Cabrera. In 1920 university students led protests against the regime, concealing their organization as a chapter of the Unionist Party, a group pursing Central American integration and one of the few political movements permitted by the dictator. Following violent confrontations with the government, organized students helped bring down the dictator (Melgar y Melgar 1996; Azmitia Jiménez 1976: 260).

On May 22, 1920, inspired by their success, student groups joined together to found the Association of University Students (AEU, in its Spanish acronym). Since then, representing students in the various schools and colleges of the University of San Carlos, the democratically-elected AEU has lead university students in their growing national political presence. As a result, the group's leadership has faced repression from the State on numerous occasions.

After Estrada Cabrera, the liberal oligarchies continued. So did student protest, and relations between the government and the University deteriorated further. In 1923, during student protests, the government closed the San Carlos, the country's sole university at the time. In 1931, General Jorge Ubico took control and managed to pacify the country through an unprecedented concentration of personal power. Given Ubico's efforts to limit freedom of expression, he viewed middle-class intellectuals in the University with suspicion. He outlawed the AEU and personally nominated all the University's authorities, creating a corrupt and incompetent administration that directly owed its power to the General (García Añoveros 1978: 135).

As World War II developed, the United States government encouraged greater democracy in the Americas as part of its fight against fascism. Ubico, after eleven years in power and confident in his personal popularity, agreed to a political opening. He allowed the re-establishment of various student associations, including the AEU. Following years of political repression and educational control, the opening gave life to Guatemala's opposition forces. Ubico's days were numbered.

In 1943 a group of politically active students known as los Escuilaches drew up a plan to overthrow Ubico using the University as a base of opposition. By June 1944 student groups began to publicly call for the establishment of an autonomous status for the University. Autonomy was less the students' ultimate goal than a safe way to express opposition to the dictator. These protests became the spark that would lead to the October Revolution (ibid.).

Members of the Law Students Association drafted a series of petitions that called on Ubico to remove his appointed bureaucrats and to allow free expression in the University. When students held a protest in front of the national palace, Ubico took the bait. He hunted down protest leaders and suspended Guatemala's Constitution, despotic gestures which only helped spread the protests. Organizers then added another demand: Ubico's resignation (op cit.: 136).

Students, schoolteachers and workers took to the streets in a new form of struggle: public demonstrations that depended on mass participation. At this point, before an influx of U.S. aid, Guatemala's security forces did not know how to respond. On June 25, 1944 the army and the national police violently broke up a protest by opposition women, wounding various participants and killing at least one, primary school teacher María Chinchilla. Instead of reducing the disturbances, this only caused greater popular militancy, and it was Ubico who had to retreat. On July 1 the general accepted a formal petition of resignation signed by 44 leading citizens.

With Ubico's crony, General Federico Ponce Valdés, acting as President, University students led further protests, urging Ponce to accede to their demand for university autonomy. Soon many other groups—workers, civic groups, political parties, even industry groups—made their demands known, in a dramatic expression of the birth of Guatemala's civil society after years of dictatorship.

The government tried to shut down the press and arrest opposition leaders. But the protests could not be stopped. Finally, on October 20, 1944, discontented military leaders joined armed workers and students to topple the government. Guatemala's "ten years of spring" had begun.

Box 1: University autonomy In Latin America, the struggle for university autonomy emerged in 1918 at a continent-wide student congress held in Córdoba, Argentina, which had the goal of democratizing the region's system of public higher education. Today, many countries have laws that confer on their national universities some special form of independence from the State of which they form a part. Formally, the University of San Carlos enjoys an organizational autonomy (the freedom to dictate its own rules); a financial autonomy (it is assigned a fixed percentage of the national budget: under the 1985 Constitution of no less than five percent of state's ordinary income); an academic autonomy over its programs of study; and an administrative autonomy that allows the University to elect its own authorities and independently hire and fire its faculty. University autonomy was inscribed in the Constitution of 1945 and, despite serious conflicts between the University and the rest of the State after 1954, this independence was reaffirmed in the Constitutions of 1956, 1965, and 1985 (Melgar y Melgar 1996). Although the law never granted the University of San Carlos any type of extra-territoriality, the administration and students groups have, by tradition, achieved a situation where the state's security forces cannot enter the University, except by resorting to extra-legal incursions (a frequent occurrence since 1970). Explicitly, autonomy was granted for academic reasons, to promote investigation and the circulation of ideas, free from the influence of government, political parties or other pressure groups. But in Guatemala such independence, together with de facto extra-territoriality, has had political importance as well. University autonomy was the fruit of the October Revolution of 1944, and the Revolution was, in part, a product of the university struggle. Autonomy was not conceded for purely academic motives; it was also a recognition of the decisive participation of the University community in the Revolution. Over the next fifty years, autonomy allowed the development of a radical understanding of Guatemala's social situation. This understanding has provided both an intellectual and an organizational base for the country's mass opposition movement, and at certain moments, for the guerrilla movement as well. In the 1970s, for example, members of the outlawed communist party, the PGT, gained control of the University administration, at a time when even the moderate left had trouble surviving in the repressive environment beyond the University campus. In these years the campus was called "liberated territory of Guatemala," and not just by the students. It was the only space beyond the control and jurisdiction of state authorities: a place where social movements could collect funds and distribute literature; where unions and other progressive groups could meet in relative security; and where those persecuted by the State could go for temporary exile. The government, limited in its control over the University, responded by refusing to hand over on time the full budgetary allotment to the administration. And, without the ability to fire unfriendly faculty or expel radical students, the State has exercised its power over the University by means of threat, kidnapping, torture and assassination. The military and the police have frequently violated the physical integrity of the University, sometimes in very symbolic ways. For example, state-sanctioned death squads used to leave the mutilated bodies of their victims in the principal entrances to the university campus: chilling declarations of the limits of autonomy. Still, university autonomy has been an extremely important factor in the ability to maintain a political opposition in Guatemala, even in the worst years of state terror and military control. In the 1990s, the University of San Carlos faces a new attack on its power, this time couched in the neoliberal language of structural adjustment, urging the reduction of the public sector and the national budget, including that of the University. But given its long tradition of militancy and survival, it is unlikely that the University will easily give up its privileges.

One of the revolutionary government's first acts was to concede autonomy to the University of San Carlos (see Box I). According to Decree No. 12, autonomy would convert the University from "a factory for professionals" into a center of free investigation that could confront the nation's problems and propagate a democratic culture (Cazali Avila 1976: 51).

During the next ten years, official policies favored the public educational system, especially when a teacher, Doctor Juan José Arévelo Bermeja, was elected the first President of the Revolution. The government invested an unprecedented amount of resources in the public schools. The goal was to create a more accessible system of education which would provide a basis for capitalist modernization and the development of an internal economy, instead of relying on low wages and social exclusion to promote export agriculture.

In the public high schools the new government abolished the fees established by Ubico in 1932: US$4.50 per month, an amount well beyond the means of most Guatemalans. Between 1944 and 1954, Guatemala's high school student population grew by 600 percent (González Orellana 1970). The effects of increased access to secondary study were soon felt in the University of San Carlos as well.

During the age of the liberal dictators, a university education was a privilege enjoyed only by the wealthy. With the Revolution, the University opened its doors, if not to everyone, then at least to the middle classes and some members of the working poor. In 1943 there had been only 711 students at the University of San Carlos; in 1954 there were 8,000; by 1996 the number enrolled had risen to 82,384 (Cazali Avila 1976: 56; García Añoveros 1978: 174; data from the USAC Registry and Statistics Department).

During the Revolution, the University enjoyed the peak of its influence in the life of the nation. The Constitution of 1945 specifically conferred on the University the right, and the responsibility, to study "national problems" and to propose solutions. Members of the faculty planned the new social security system, the expansion of the country's electricity network, and helped design the controversial land reform of 1952. The Law School helped direct legislative reform, the Medical School helped overhaul the public health system, and the Humanities Faculty worked on changes in the public school system (Carlos González Orellana, interview).

During this period, a significant number of professors and student leaders left the University to work in the public sector. Though a sign of the University's influence, this outflow robbed the University of its more dynamic elements and, according to one analyst, undermined its progressive character (Bauer Paiz 1968: 9).

Nevertheless, by 1950 changes in the University and in the national government began to worry elements of the country's privileged sectors. The throngs of new students were no longer of the same social strata. And while the 1944 Revolution and the new political freedoms enjoyed wide support, when Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was elected to lead the Second Government of the Revolution in 1950, government policy began to favor the interests of workers and peasants at the expense of the economic elite.

For example, in 1952 the Congress approved a radical land reform. Decree No. 900 legalized the expropriation and redistribution of government-held land, rural communities' common lands, and the fallow properties of large landowners. This latter category included the land of powerful U.S. agricultural interests.

Given these radical challenges to the system of property, an ideology of "anticommunism" began to gain strength in Guatemala. Anticommunism was almost a religion to its exponents, what one University observer called "a confusing doctrine that condemned everything contrary to capitalist power" and "Western Christian civilization" (García Añoveros 1976: 137). Far from a homegrown phenomenon, this ideology was actively encouraged by the U.S. government through the covert intervention of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999).

The Arbenz government aspired to a nationalist version of capitalist development, but was accused by political conservatives in Guatemala (and by the U.S. government) of being controlled by a foreign power: the Soviet Union, the new post-war threat to U.S. interests. Guatemala's communist party, the Guatemalan Workers' Party (PGT), founded in 1949, did have a growing influence over Arbenz's politics, but communists were never more than a small minority in his government (Gleisjeses 1991: 182).

In 1952 the University of San Carlos became sharply polarized, like Guatemalan society in general. At the beginning of the year, two powerful new student organizations formed: one in support of the Arbenz government, the other violently opposed.

The Democratic University Front (FUD), was formed by Arbenz supporters who wanted the University to join in workers' and peasants' struggles and support the land reform. The inaugural edition of Nuestra Lucha, the official FUD newspaper, proposed a new role for the University. The following declaration provides a sense of the emerging radical consciousness at the San Carlos:

We do not consider the University a center for professionals who upon graduating should slavishly turn themselves into social parasites that only increase injustice and domination; on the contrary, it should provide a source of prepared youth, dedicated with all their energy and enthusiasm, without personal interest, to crusades for the common good, whether they be in medicine, engineering, education, or any other branch of human knowledge. It is unthinkable that the nation support a university that concedes only tassels and titles, or support those who live in an ivory tower distant from the realities and needs of the people and thus incapable of doing them any good. The state and the people have labored to pay for the University, and the people now need the University—its faculty and students—to labor for them and lead them out of the backward state in which they find themselves.

...Before involving themselves in foreign texts, before dedicating their time to unimportant matters, they should not forget the image of thousands of hungry, dirty, abandoned children who live in the barrios of our cities; or the ignorance, fanaticism, and superstition that keep our people spiritually poor; or the diseases that weaken and kill them for lack of treatment; or the poverty, the misery, everything that causes pain and anguish, that destroys them, and on top of which there will never rise a strong and happy nation disposed to defend its sovereignty, rights, and conquests (Nuestra Lucha, 1; translated from García Añoveros 1978: 156-57).

In the 1950s, the Guatemalan left viewed students and intellectuals as a cultured vanguard, capable of leading the (largely indigenous) majority out of its primitive state. However paternalistic this appeared, this perspective gained adherents among the student body. In September 1953, FUD won control of the AEU, and the student movement began to reestablish a national presence.

But the progressives’ moment in power was about to end. University leftists faced a rise in U.S.-sponsored aggression and had to concentrate on the defense of the Revolution and the nation’s sovereignty. Though the ten years of social democracy had seen few progressive changes in the San Carlos curriculum, a progressive current had been established in the University, one that would have greater impact in the 1970s.

On the other hand, University opponents of Arbenz came together in the Committee of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA). Some members were from the privileged elite directly affected by Arbenz’s policies. Others were students who had participated in the struggle against Ubico, but had failed to personally benefit during the Revolution (for example, by gaining a government post as others had). Right-wing students saw in the PGT communists a convenient scapegoat for the multitude of problems that they saw dragging the country down: the rising public debt, and worse still, the increase in class conflict (García Añoveros 1978: 159).

Both outside and inside Guatemala CEUA students were used by the CIA to create the impression of a widespread opposition to Arbenz and prepare for the 1954 invasion. Similar to later generations of students of a different political orientation, the Arbenz regime’s student opponents painted anti-government slogans on the walls of the capital, distributed flyers in the streets, and handed out fake newspaper articles ghostwritten by CIA agents (Cullather 1994; Doyle 1997).

In 1953 CEUA students were accused of participating in actions against the Arbenz government, including the destruction of an electricity tower in Salamá, Baja Verapaz. The repression they faced would be a precursor of the much more brutal, prolonged violence that would occur against leftist students in the coming years. For example, in 1953 the CEUA bulletin denounced the torture of San Carlos law student Mario Sandoval Alarcón, imprisoned for eight months following the disturbances in Salamá (García Añoveros 1978: 162).2

The case of Sandoval Alarcón and the CEAU shows that the newly autonomous University of San Carlos was not simply a leftist-dominated institution, but a space for the development of radical politics of different persuasions, even those of a reactionary nature. Soon, much of the CEAU leadership went into exile, settling in Honduras from where it would help direct the Counterrevolution of 1954.