In June 1954, mercenaries led by a dissident army colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz and put an end to Guatemala's October Revolution. It was one of the century's most disturbing cases of U.S. intervention. Key to the success of "Operation PBSUCCESS" was the air cover given to the invaders by U.S. military forces, not to mention the CIA's misinformation campaign disseminated by right-wing university students.
During World War II, the United States had opposed the fascist threat by promoting democratic regimes in the Americas. Ten years later, Guatemala's powerful neighbor to the north was trying to contain the Soviet Union and its designs for a socialist bloc. With the war over, the United States was also redoubling its efforts to establish the hegemony of its interests (and the interests of U.S. corporations) throughout the hemisphere. Nationalistic and independent Guatemala, with its growing union movement and its new land reform program, challenged such an hegemony.
That is, for much of this century U.S. foreign policy was a fundamental variable in Guatemala's political development, and since 1954 aided in the development of a terrorist state and the creation of a distinctly violent society. U.S. intervention left as a legacy a system ever more controlled by the Guatemalan military, the effects of which have endured until the present day.
The forces of "Liberation" (a term adopted by the Counterrevolution) immediately tried to destroy the power of the organized left. Peasant and labor confederations were decimated by repressive laws and government terror at the same time that the government helped form a new business alliance, CACIF (the Coordinating Body of Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations) to shift the balance of power in favor of business interests (Sagastume 1983: 35).
The PGT communists suffered the most systematic terror. Article 63 of the 1956 Constitution declared punishable any "individual or associated" communist action, effectively outlawing the PGT. Beginning in 1954, many of its leaders were arrested or assassinated during police round-ups organized by the CIA. Others escaped with their lives, only to be hunted down by paramilitary death squads in 1966 and then again in 1972. Still, the Party did not disappear. Rather it went underground, its small remaining membership taking refuge in the labor unions and in the University of San Carlos. With the defeat of the October Revolution the University once again became a refuge for Guatemala's opposition forces.
In June 1956 university students, in the first mass response to the Counterrevolution, defiantly carried out ceremonies to honor the 1944 protests that sparked the October Revolution. On June 24, the AEU organized a pilgrimage to the city's main cemetery to lay flowers on the tomb of María Chinchilla, the schoolteacher assassinated 12 years earlier. The ceremonies took place in an atmosphere of intimidation. The day before several student leaders had been detained, including the directors of the militant student weekly, El Estudiante. Then when students arrived at the cemetery, they discovered that soldiers and police were inside waiting for them. Protesters retreated to another part of the city, only to have their demonstration violently broken up by the police.
The next day the AEU convened a general assembly in the Medical School. In the evening, the meeting concluded with the signing of a petition demanding that the government lift a State of Alarm, restore constitutional guarantees and cease its violence against students and workers. A large group of students decided to march to the national palace for a public reading of the petition.
At the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street a mass of government troops met the protesters. This time the students did not turn back, but moved forward solemnly singing the national anthem, "armed only with the memory of the Revolution." Looking back after so many years of government repression, the result was not surprising: army soldiers and the police fired on the protesters, injuring thirty students and killing five. Many of the dead were students representatives who had been leading the march (see the appendix). The government arrested another 200 students, and forced 30 more to leave the country (Informador Estudiante: July 1958; Azmitia Jiménez 1976: 265).
Through a calculated display of terror, the government avoided a replay of the mass protests of 1944. It was only the first of various struggles between a Guatemalan military in ascendance versus defenders of the October Revolution.
When the government and the nation's elite showed themselves unwilling to resolve social conflict through consensus or negotiation, popular groups and their middle-class allies in the University used increasingly militant means to make their voices heard. The state grew accustomed to answering dissent with violence, and for a part of the political opposition armed struggle came to appear as the only viable option for achieving change. Nineteen fifty-four marked for Guatemala the beginning of a nation-wide deterioration into forty years of violence and polarization.
