In 1959 the triumph of the Cuban Revolution altered the political terrain throughout the Americas. To Guatemalans, just five years after the end of their revolution, Cuba was seen as a test of whether it was possible to follow a nationalist (and in this case socialist) path, independent of the desires of the U.S. government. For the U.S.-backed military regime, the example of Cuba represented a grave danger.
In 1957, Presidente Carlos Castillo Armas was assassinated by his own troops. He was replaced by General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes in elections marred by a series of irregularities. By 1961 Ydígoras was helping the United States attempt to invade Cuba, a Guatemalazo much like the CIA-backed invasion from Honduras just seven years before. Without asking permission of the Guatemalan Congress, Ydígoras let the United States train exiled Cuban mercenaries at a South Coast plantation owned by Roberto Alejos. Nevertheless, the attack at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs failed miserably. Cuba, with the increasing aid of the Soviet Union, established itself as an alternative model for Latin America and as a source of support for armed opposition movements throughout the continent.
Guatemala's participation in the aggression against Cuba enraged supporters of the October Revolution; the events of the previous decade had stimulated among them a greater nationalist consciousness. University students were among the first to take to the streets in protest. The evening of April 19, 1961, the Association of Economics Students organized a public protest against the invasion and in favor of the Cuban revolution. A group of well-armed "anticommunist" counter-protesters massed nearby. With little resistance from state security forces, they marched into the central plaza and opened fire on the protesters, killing three and wounding a much greater number (Prensa Libre: 20 January 1961).
The following year the city exploded with far greater protests, again led by students, that nearly brought down the military government.
In December 1961, Ydígoras carried out an evident fraud in midterm congressional elections, endangering the democratic facade. The government declared a state of siege to insure that the new members of Congress could peacefully take their positions. Still, the defrauded opposition political parties did nothing. Into this vacuum stepped the Association of University Students.
On March 1, the day the new Congress was inaugurated, student leaders dressed in black left the old Law School building on 9th Avenue, crossed the street and walked into the vestibule of Congress's chambers. As a sign of mourning they laid a wreath of flowers with a note that read:
Legality, democracy, and liberty are incompatible with dictatorship. We manifest our mourning for the disappearance of an independent legislative power, for the de facto authority that shall prevail from today forward, and for the end of the rule of law in our country—Association of University Students—AEU.
That same day students at the University went on strike, hanging black flags to mourn the death of democracy. With their theatrical manner, the protests had an impact. Over the next few days protest spread throughout, including a series of massive street demonstrations against the regime.3
On March 13 students from the University and the public secondary schools carried out a well-planned general strike. Taking to the streets, they controlled the main roads into the capital and stopped much of the city’s economic activity. They spread tacks on the streets to flatten the tires of buses and automobiles that did not heed their call. When the government cut the telephone lines, students took over radio stations to broadcast their messages and coordinate their actions. The protests spread to the interior of the country, especially to Quetzaltenango, another center of anti-Ydígoras student protest. Meanwhile, in various working class districts residents put up barricades and a type of anti-government insurrection developed.
Participants in these street protests were taking a great risk. These were the first mass demonstrations since the student massacre of 1956. But with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails, students and barrio residents managed to halt the advance of the security forces.
After taking the initiative, the student movement received the backing of labor groups, business groups upset with the corruption of the Ydígoras regime, and many of the previously silent political parties, which apparently wanted to maneuver the protests in order to control their outcome. As the protest coalition grew, the AEU no longer simply demanded the annulment of the fraudulent election results. Taking June 1944 as their model, their demands now included Ydígoras’s resignation and the repeal of the 1956 Constitution and a return to the revolutionary charter of 1945.
For its leadership, the AEU came under attack by government forces. On March 4 a bomb exploded in the AEU’s headquarters, the Casa del Estudiante. When this failed to frighten students into submission, previously unheard-of groups began publishing a series of statements in the press, trying to disparage the student movement through anticommunist name-calling (Prensa Libre: 5 March 1962).
While the AEU provided command and control, public high school students filled the protest ranks and suffered much of the repression. These younger students also had a rich tradition of struggle. Since the defeat of the Revolution in 1954, public schools had lacked any clear pedagogical orientation and under a right-wing government had become centers of anti-government sentiment, both among students and teachers (Levenson-Estrada 1994: 64).
In 1959 radical high school students formed FUEGO (Guatemalan United Organized Student Front) to oppose the arbitrary rule of Julia Quiñónez, Ydígoras’s minister of education. When their efforts forced her resignation, FUEGO became one of most active opposition groups during the Ydígoras era, supporting labor and popular causes, including strikes in 1960 by teachers and employees of IGSS, the Guatemalan Social Security Institute.
In the March 1962 protests, FUEGO took to the streets in force. Unlike the University, secondary education did not have an autonomous status; it was controlled by a minister of education named by the military government. While university buildings remained off-limits to the police during the disturbances, security forces raided a number of downtown public high schools. On March 13 the police laid siege to the Instituto Normal Rafael Aqueche. That same day two students died and many more were injured when police opened fire on student protesters in front of the Commerce High School.
Later that day, the scene of battle shifted to the University’s Medical School. University students had taken the offensive by capturing a member of the judicial police, spiriting him inside their building. The officer was seriously beaten before the Dean of Medicine intervened and had him freed. Police responded with a hail of tear gas canisters and salt bullets. Student leader Marco Antonio Gutiérrez Flores fell dead, the first university martyr of these protests.
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Box II: The first rebels During the protests against Ydígoras, state violence made protesters aware of the difficulties of peaceful, legal struggle against the military regime. At the same time, the example of the Cuban Revolution introduced Guatemalans to the phenomenon of guerrilla insurgency. Beginning during the March 1962 protests, a series of armed rebel factions emerged, part of a first wave of Latin American guerrilla movements in the 1960s. Guatemala’s rebel movement began with the failed military uprising of November 13, 1960. Although the majority of rebel troops accepted an amnesty offered by Ydígoras, 23 did not. Instead, they opted to form a movement to overthrow the government. In 1962, these ex-soldiers and officers formed an alliance with the clandestine PGT, the Guatemalan Workers’ Party, which would provide intellectual leadership for the rebel movement throughout the 1960s. In subsequent attempts at insurrection, many of the participants were young people, often adolescents, with a history of participation in student movements in the University or the public high schools. In March 1962, a number of students left the city with the PGT’s newly formed 20th of October Front, led by Carlos Paz Tejada, a military officer in the Arbenz government. His second in command was Engineering student Julio Rodríguez Aldana, secretary general of the AEU during 1958 and 1959. Without a clear military plan, the front was decimated during a confrontation with the army in Concuá, Baja Verapaz. Among those who died in combat with the army were high school students from FUEGO—Carlos Toledo Hernández, Guillermo Grajeda Zetina and Roberto Heller Playa—and university students Alfonso Jocol and Brasil Hernández. Another university student was captured but released—Rodrigo Asturias, godson of President Ydígoras and son of Guatemala’s first Nobel Prize winner, the writer Miguel Angel Asturias. Asturias would continue in the armed struggle. In the 1980s he became commander in chief of the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA). In February 1963, Guatemala’s first guerrilla army, the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), was formed through an alliance of the April 12 Movement (named in honor of the students killed on that date in 1962 and made up of members of the PGT and its student wing, the Patriotic Workers’ Youth), with the remains of the 20th of October Front and the 13th of November Revolutionary Movement, started by the army officers who rebelled in 1960. The most successful unit in the early FAR was the Edgar Ibarra Guerrilla Front, named for a student leader killed in combat in August 1963. The FAR’s political leadership came from the PGT and included professors from the University of San Carlos. At first, the guerrillas hoped to unite the working class with nationalist elites and achieve a return to a government like the one under Jacobo Arbenz. But as the 1960s progressed, rebel movements in Latin America became increasingly influenced by the development of socialism in Cuba and by Marxist-Leninist theories that proposed the revolutionary restructuring of capitalist societies. In Guatemala, rebel leaders say that this radicalization was also a product of their years of living secretly among the country’s peasants and getting to know their hardships. Guatemala’s 1960s guerrilla movement never managed to take state power. It faced an army with access to the latest counterinsurgency techniques, the result of sustained military aid provided by the U.S. government, which viewed Guatemala as a test case in its battle to stop the spread of socialism in Latin America. In 1966, the Guatemalan army, advised by the Green Berets, began to attack the unarmed rebel supporters in the eastern region of the country. The guerrillas retreated to the capital and made Guatemala City the principal scene of conflict in the 1970s (Alvarado 1975; Black 1984; Jonas 1991; interviews). |
The opposition sensed an imminent victory. In coordination with urban protests, the banned Guatemalan Workers’ Party launched its first attempt at guerrilla war, the “20th of October Front,” composed of high school and university student leaders together with young military officers who had unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the government in November 1960. Hastily improvised, the group made it no further than Concuá, Baja Verapaz where it ran into an army patrol and was annihilated. Eight guerrilla fighters died, most of them students (see Box II)(Torriello Garrido 1979: 47; Aguilera Peralta 1981: 108).
Still, the government was far more threatened by the unarmed mass movement developing in the capital. Ydígoras, losing control, took desperate measures. When his army hesitated to take to the streets to defend the regime, the General brought “anticommunist peasants” to the city to intimidate the local population (Prensa Libre: 16 March 1962).
Despite the increasing protests, Ydígoras did not give in. Instead, the brutality of security forces increased and the violence escalated. On March 16, five more civilians died during street protests. The following day, in the city’s main cemetery, the funeral procession of protesters crossed paths with a group burying a slain policeman. A brawl broke out and escalated into a massacre when police reinforcements arrived. Nine people died, none of them members of the security forces.
The government also employed the media to discredit the protesters. The March 1962 protests took place in a tense international environment, during U.S.-Soviet disputes over nuclear testing. Government communiqués took advantage of the Cold War ambience and told of a University plan to create the “Second Socialist Republic in the Americas.” The smear campaign was effective, especially among more conservative sectors in the capital that had considered joining the opposition.
But the key to the regime’s survival was the changing attitude of the national army. At the beginning of the protests, the army, also discontented with Ydígoras, stayed in their barracks. As insurrection spread, the army high command made direct contact with the students to plan a post-Ydígoras transition (Lemus 1977). The government was on the verge of collapse, and the students and their allies were on the verge of taking power. Then Ydígoras reached an agreement with the army. Within a few weeks he would dismiss his various civilian ministers and replace them with an all-military cabinet. The city was pacified, the military strengthened its position, and Ydígoras stayed in the national palace, at least for the time being (Sagastume 1983: 35).
But within weeks, anti-government protest returned to the streets, and now students had to face the army’s repressive capacity as well. On April 12, 1962, students prepared for the “Huelga de Dolores,” a Guatemalan tradition where hooded university students march in the streets, shout bawdy chants and ridicule the powers that be. Due to the recent protests, the 1962 Huelga promised to be more intense than ever. At six o’clock in the evening, students concentrated in front of the Law School under a banner that read, “This is liberated territory of Guatemala.”
Redirecting traffic, students took over the avenue in front of the building. Minutes later an army transport truck with nine military police on board ignored the students’ roadblock and came speeding down the street. According to press accounts, the truck first ran down Law student Armando Funes, who had his backed turned to the traffic, killing him instantly. Instead of stopping, the truck continued on. When it passed in front of the Law School’s main entrance, soldiers opened fire. Two more students fell dead, Noel López and Jorge Gálvez Galindo (Prensa Libre: 13 April 1962).
The government denied that the massacre was premeditated, and that evening Ydígoras gave a press conference regretting the events. His official version claimed that the troop transport had come down the avenue at the usual hour in order to change the military police guard at the Congress across the avenue. The shooting began, Ydígoras claimed, when students tried to rush the truck and disarm the soldiers (ibid.).4
Other events that evening cast doubt on the official story and showed that the government intended all along to repress militant students. An hour after the initial bloodshed, military police arrived at the Commerce High School, located around the corner from the Law School, to break up a strike that students had declared upon hearing of the killings at the Law School. While students threw rocks, government troops responded with bullets. A large number of protesters were injured, and one, Felipe Gutiérrez Lacán, was killed.
Far from pacifying the city, the deaths of the four students provoked a new wave of protests. Ten thousand mourners accompanied the funeral procession and the University Governing Board (Consejo Superior Universitario) formally demanded the President’s resignation.
Over the next few days the newspapers were filled with paid declarations by groups that had rejoined the anti-Ydígoras movement, including professional organizations, women’s groups, business alliances, labor unions and a market sellers’ association. Eighteen years after the October Revolution, all hoped for another “Ubicazo”: both their rhetoric and the state’s reaction were strikingly similar to those 1944 (Prensa Libre: April 1962).
The government was again on the verge of collapse. The President’s children and grandchildren flew to Miami, as did deputies from the ruling party. Ydígoras could only count on the public support of the landowners, the agro-industrialists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, all groups that feared a return to social democracy and an end to the privileges they enjoyed under the military.
The pro-Ydígoras forces only had two resources at their disposal: the rhetoric of anticommunism and the State’s repressive capacity. Over the next few weeks the government employed both. It declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees and detaining hundreds who had spoken out against the regime. Then the pro-government alliance flooded the newspapers with communiqués that painted the anti-government movement as totalitarian, atheistic (versus the government’s professed democratic and Christian nature), and directed by Moscow and Havana (ibid.).
The dictatorship had saved itself once more. Security forces detained over two thousand persons and left a total of, at the very least, four university students dead, eleven more from the public high schools, and a much larger number of young victims from the city’s poor and working-class barrios. A participant in the protests estimates that nationwide the total number of dead was greater than 70 (Azmitia Jiménez 1976: 270). Though they represent a terrible loss, these numbers would be dwarfed during later campaigns of state violence in Guatemala.
Although they did not succeed in toppling the dictatorship in 1962, students from the University of San Carlos did develop a tradition of anti-government struggle. At the organizational level, the various student associations, and above all the AEU, now constituted an institutional base for a social movement, not just for internal University matters but also on the national level, as student activists had established relationships with various working-class groups. And with its action in favor of the rule of law and the electoral process, the University of San Carlos reestablished its presence among Guatemala’s democratic forces, legitimating its autonomy in the popular conscience.
In the coming years the Guatemalan state would be threatened by the University’s increasing ability to organize protest. Conscious of the its leadership in the civic struggles of March and April 1962, governments looked for ways to neutralize the San Carlos, from financial strangulation and smear campaigns, to the all too frequent use of state terror against its professors and students.
Note that in March 1962 the security forces still operated more or less within institutional guidelines. However, the rule of law would soon cease to have much meaning in Guatemala. To deal with its opponents, the state would opt for the mass use of violence committed by agents in civilian dress: Guatemala’s infamous death squads. The University of San Carlos would be one of their principal targets.
3 Much of this section is based on information contained in the special 1977 issue of Voz Universitaria Informativa, “Jornadas patrióticas del marzo y abril: 15 años después”, especially the articles by Manuel Andrade Roca, Bernardo Lemus, Hugo Melgar y Melgar and Factor Méndez (see bibliography).
4 Throughout the armed conflict, security forces used this excuse to justify massacres committed against unarmed civilians. The latest example occurred on October 5, 1995, when members of an army patrol killed eleven unarmed returned refugees in Xamán, Chisec, Alta Verapaz.
