In 1978 the University of San Carlos became one of the most important political voices in the country, openly expressing its hostility towards the State of which it formed a part. That year, the AEU, the faculty and the University Governing Board united in open opposition to the government. Although the majority of the university community belonged to the middle class, it was guided by an ideology that held that the country's intellectuals should actively join in struggles of peasants and workers (interviews).
With the goal of broadening its contacts with the working poor, the AEU rehabilitated the Casa del Estudiante in the city center, even though the University had moved out to Zone 12. There, students from the different schools offered their services at low cost: in medical and dental clinics and in the AEU's Bufete Popular (the Law School had its own Bufete Popular which also provided legal advice). Students aided relatives of the disappeared as well as politically-active residents of the shanty towns. Others organized less-skilled workers, such as shoe shine boys, newspaper venders and market women. The Casa del Estudiante became known as a place where poor Guatemalans could get help with their problems. But this renown also attracted the attention of the government, which began to monitor activities at the Casa.
These changes did not occur by happenstance. They were, in large part, the result of organizing by a new student party, FRENTE. In 1976, FRENTE swept the student seats in the University's general elections. Under different names, the party would maintain control of the AEU through 1985.
Much of FRENTE's leadership belonged to the Patriotic Workers' Youth (JPT), the youth wing of the underground communist party, the PGT. Unlike the groups that dominated student politics earlier in the 1970s, which professed more radical politics and a confrontational approach towards the authorities, many leaders of FRENTE (and the faction of the PGT dominant in the University) had faith in the electoral path to power and dedicated their energies to building a mass movement with urban popular groups. And they pushed the State to respect the human and democratic rights guaranteed by the Constitution, which other groups considered the aims of a bourgeois struggle (interviews).
In 1978, after its victory in the 1976 and 1977 student elections, FRENTE used its organizational capacity within the student body to help gain control of the University as a whole. Together with faculty allies grouped in Vanguardia Universitaria, FRENTE helped elect various leftist deans and a leftist rector, Economics professor Saúl Osorio Paz. Oliverio Castañeda de León, also from Economics, became secretary general of the AEU. That same year, unionists tied to the PGT and to FRENTE gained control of the University of San Carlos Workers' Union (STUSC).
Grateful for FRENTE's help in the elections, Saúl Osorio's administration gave its full support to the student movement. Instead of conflicts between students and the administration, as typical in the university setting, at the San Carlos these groups allied with the goal of constructing a more active, progressive university.
FRENTE's student opposition came not from the right, but from the more radical left: the Robin García Revolutionary Student Front (FERG). FERG was the ideological heir to the radical student parties, such as PODER (Organized Participation of Revolutionary Students), that had dominated AEU politics in the early 1970s. FERG went public for the first time during the 1978 May Day march. As a front, it brought together radical student groups from various academic units at the San Carlos and from the public high schools. Through FERG the clandestine Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) promoted the coordination of legal organizations. As in the labor and squatters' movements, through FERG active members of the EGP helped develop the student movement as part of their clandestine revolutionary work (interviews).
For FERG, the revolution was fundamental, and in late 1970s Guatemala "revolution" meant the construction of socialism. Although FERG itself was not an armed group, it welcomed confrontation with the State, even violent confrontation, and it was known for using university grounds to fabricate Molotov cocktails. Its members had little interest in working within government-enforced rules, and the group never asked permission before carrying out a protest. "At that time", recalls a former member of FERG, "we told ourselves before every action: `It's not going to be a walk in the park' (La cosa no va a ser suave sino de cachimbazos)" (interview).
During the administration of Saúl Osorio, sectarian differences caused mutual suspicion and even physical confrontations between members of FERG and FRENTE. FRENTE controlled the AEU and used its position to present itself as the "democratic left" and the official voice of the student movement. FRENTE's leaders tried to keep FERG's leaders out of meetings of CNUS (the most important popular movement umbrella group), despite the group's importance. FERG, on the other hand, took to disrupting election activities when it looked like FRENTE would win (Siete Días en la USAC: June 18 1979). Still, both groups shared with the university administration the view that great social change was necessary in Guatemala, while differing mainly in terms of method and the necessary pace of change (interviews).
For a few months the University appeared united in its progressive calling, and moving towards a confrontation with the government. Even the University Governing Board (composed of a dean and a student leader from each school, together with representatives from each of the country's professional associations) used its position and its financial resources to criticize the government and to defend the popular movement through regular press declarations.
At the beginning of his administration, Saúl Osorio founded the university weekly Siete Días en la USAC (Seven Days in the San Carlos). Like any other official organ, it reported on the University's events and achievements. Nevertheless, at the time Siete Días was the only newspaper in Guatemala identified with the opposition, and helped fill a vacuum in the increasingly silenced media. Between 1978 and 1981, Siete Días regularly denounced human rights violations, especially attacks on the political opposition, in addition to publicizing the achievements of Guatemala's labor movement and the revolutionary struggles in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Page after page of Siete Días was filled with a class-based analysis of Guatemala's social, political and cultural situation, criticizing not only government policies and the national elite but the international financial institutions as well.
Beyond the campus, government repression was growing worse. On March 7, 1978 General Fernando Romeo Lucas García, the minister of defense, was elected President of Guatemala in fraudulent elections. With the election of Lucas the government returned to the practices of the Arana Osorio regime, when the State was guided by a counterinsurgency logic, but on a scale never before seen.
As during previous regime changes, in the weeks after the election but before Lucas García's inauguration, security forces unleashed a series of attacks against the opposition.10 On May 29, 1978, in the central square of Panzós, Alta Verapaz, soldiers from the Zacapa military base opened fire on an unarmed crowd gathered to defend their rights to common lands they had long occupied, killing over one hundred peasants. The victims had challenged the interests of investors who planned to exploit the area's mineral wealth, including large nickel and petroleum reserves, an important factor in the use of mass violence against the peasants (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs 1978).
The massacre caused an outcry at the University, and not just because of the great number of victims. FASGUA, the labor federation tied to the PGT and the AEU, had helped advise the peasants. In addition, the struggle had emerged from conflicts over the mining of natural resources by foreign concerns, which had preoccupied progressives in the University since the deadly controversy over the EXMIBAL contract in the early 1970s. More recently, in 1978, Saúl Osorio and other leading university intellectuals received death threats for their public opposition to the construction of an inter-ocean oil pipeline in Guatemala (Siete Días en la USAC: various dates, 1978).
On June 8, 1978, just a few days after the massacre at Panzós and on the first anniversary of the assassination of Mario López Larrave, the AEU and CNUS organized a mass protest in the center of Guatemala City. In newly militant language, speaker after speaker spoke against the government. The sense of impending battle was building.
In July, Lucas García took office and the government's anti-popular posture stiffened. The new president removed price controls on basic consumer goods, provoking limited protest. But in September, when the Guatemala City municipal council attempted to double the price of urban bus passage, the government breached the urban population's patience.
Bus drivers had gone on strike in July for higher wages. To insure that no buses would circulate, they drove their vehicles to the university campus, which, due to its tradition of autonomy, was the only urban locale potentially outside of the State's jurisdiction. At this point, writes historian Deborah Levenson-Estrada, university groups tied to Guatemala's different revolutionary groups could not agree on what to do with respect to the bus drivers. Groups under the influence of the EGP welcomed a show-down with the government and favored parking the buses on the campus. On the other hand, the administration and the AEU, influenced by the PGT, feared that the buses would provoke a raid by security forces. Nevertheless, the rector decided to receive the strikers (Levenson-Estrada 1994: 146).
The San Carlos once again became "liberated territory" for the popular movement. So began three months of interruption to city bus service, with the University ever more closely identified with the opposition to the government.
On August 4, high school and university students, along with other popular movement sectors, organized the first large public protest of the Lucas García period, commemorating the one-year anniversary of the deaths of Robin García and Aníbal Caballeros.11 The new minister of the interior, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, promised to break up any protests lacking government permission (during the previous Laugerud regime, students regularly took to the streets without approval). CNUS refused to ask for permission for the August 4 march, since doing so would constitute a retreat for a movement that had "taken control of the streets" (interviews).
Protesters were met by the police's Pelotón Modelo (Model Platoon). In new anti-riot gear donated by the U.S. government, Platoon agents surrounded marchers and tear-gassed them. Students were forced to retreat and 31, mostly adolescents, were hospitalized. Peaceful protest had become a thing of the past (Amnesty International 1979b: 7; interviews).
The Panzós massacre and the repression of urban protest pushed student leaders in FRENTE and the AEU to adopt a more belligerent attitude. So too did the presence of militants from more radical groups like FERG, which had taken the initiative during the protests. As the urban presence of FERG and other groups allied with the EGP grew, FRENTE also began to support more violent protest tactics (Levenson-Estrada 1994: 132-34; interviews).
Despite the mass mobilization occurring in the city, at the end of September the municipal council approved a rise in the bus fare from five to ten cents to "motivate" the bus companies to increase drivers' salaries. The AEU and the University Governing Board immediately attacked the plan as an attack on the city's poor. On the day the new fare went into effect, Friday, September 30, youth from working-class neighborhoods such as La Carolingia, El Gallito and La Parroquia constructed street barricades, much as their neighbors had done during the 1962 protests against Ydígoras.
The next week, the popular organizations in CNUS declared a general strike. Public sector employees stopped working and occupied their buildings, while students controlled the streets around the downtown public high schools. In the barrios the sense of insurrection increased (Levenson-Estrada 1994: 148-50).
Movement leaders debated whether to increase their actions or retreat in the face of a possible army mobilization. But by this point popular discontent had reached such a level that leaders could no longer control what was happening on the streets. Protesters grew more violent, using rocks and Molotov cocktails to battle the police. To take back the streets, police used tear gas and beat protesters who got left behind (Jonas 1991: 124).
Still, the protests achieved their goal. After a full week of street clashes, on October 7 the municipal council agreed to restore the five-cent fare. Through mass mobilization, protesters had defeated the Lucas government, though at a great human cost: estimates of the death toll run from 40 (Levenson-Estrada 1994) to 106 (Cuevas del Cid 1980).
Despite the tragedy, on October 12, the AEU threw a party to celebrate the victory and the birthday of its secretary general, Oliverio Castañeda, under whose leadership the student group had achieved its greatest national presence in 58 years of existence. As in 1962, during the 1978 transit strike the AEU had directed much of the protest, mobilized student participation, and published a series of hard-hitting declarations in the press, helping to justify opposition to the government (see Coordinadora de organizaciones sindicales y populares 1978).
The importance of the 1978 mobilizations had gone beyond the issue of bus prices. In its slogans and graffiti, protesters advocated revolutionary change, inspired by a sense of popular power achieved during the protests. Government opponents were also encouraged by an insurrection occurring at the same time in Nicaragua, as well as Guatemala's own history of struggle, especially the activities of 1944 and 1962, similarly sparked by urban students and barrio youth.
The Lucas García government was in crisis. Not only did a well-organized and increasingly confident mass opposition exist in the capital, but in the countryside anti-government actions were also occurring in coordination with the urban protests.12 The government was acutely aware of the situation in Nicaragua, where an urban mass movement had united with the rural-based Sandinista guerrillas. The Lucas government feared the possibility of a similar union in Guatemala, where the different rebel armies had begun to increase their rural activities as well as their urban organizing. Even as the State appeared to give in to popular pressure on the bus fare issue, it was planning a campaign of terror to stop the opposition before it grew too powerful.
Until late 1978, the majority of victims of the State's extra-judicial repression had been peasants, workers and the urban poor (as well as alleged criminals). Now the government began to focus on destroying the mass movement by eliminating its leaders, including many middle-class students and intellectuals in the University who represented the potential leadership of a unified opposition (Amnesty International 1979b; Levenson-Estrada 1994: 152-53).
If the government could not neutralize the mass movement through its regular forces, it would leave the task to the other face of state repression: the death squads. A few days after the end of the protests, Law professor and Christian Democrat leader René de León Schlotter narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in which his chauffeur was killed. Then on October 17, Santiago López Aguilar, director of the Labor Orientation School, survived another attack by armed men. Both professors were important connections between the University and the labor movement and, in the case of De Leon Schlotter, with the opposition political parties (Nuevo Diario: October 23 1978).
On October 18, the Secret Anticommunist Army (ESA), a paramilitary group allegedly run out of the office of police chief German Chupina Barahona (Dunkerley 1988: 472), published a list of 38 key movement figures, threatening them with death. Many University progressives appeared on the list, including the rector, various deans and the AEU's secretary general, Oliverio Castañeda (Black 1984: 45; McClintock 1985: 141).
Oliverio Castañeda knew that he was considered among the State's leading enemies, and had moved out of his parents house. Despite the constant threats, on October 20 he appeared in public to present the AEU's statement on the occasion of the 34th anniversary of the 1944 October Revolution. Far from a quiet celebration of a distant popular victory, the rally was an opportunity to condemn the new wave of state terror. Speaking in Guatemala City's central plaza, Oliverio pointed at the national palace and publicly accused the interior minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz of organizing the attack on the movement's leadership. He ended his speech with a slogan that turned out to be tragically visionary: They can kill our leaders, but as long as there is a people, there will be revolution.
According to Rebeca Alonso, a student leader at the time, after the rally a group from the AEU walked to "El Portal," a nearby bar, to have a beer. As the group left the plaza and crossed the street, four vehicles converged on them, firing at Oliverio. Wounded, he tried to escape back up 6th Avenue. Another car, this one with government license plates, caught up with him and its occupants opened fire, striking the student leader and wounding five bystanders. An occupant of the car calmly got out and walked over to the fallen student leader and shot him in the head. Oliverio died in the entryway to the Pasaje Rubio, surrounded by his friends from the AEU (interviews).
Only state security forces could have carried out such an assassination. During the ambush, various police officers watched impassively from the edge of the plaza, doing nothing to stop the killers. According to eyewitnesses, among those present was police chief German Chupina Barahona, who may have been on hand to coordinate the attack. The operation, in broad daylight and in the very center of the city, demonstrated the impunity of the assassins and represented an open government challenge to the popular movement during one of their most hallowed days of protest (Aguilera Peralta 1981: 137; interviews).
In death, Oliverio Castañeda de León came to represent the middle-class students who had risked their lives in what was considered a struggle for the interests of Guatemala's impoverished majority. The son of a well-known doctor and a product of the prestigious Colegio Americano de Guatemala, Oliverio differed from most student leaders who had studied in the public schools. He would not be the last university martyr from comfortable social origins.
Two weeks after the death of Oliverio Castañeda, his replacement as AEU leader, Antonio Ciani García, was disappeared. The government had apparently taken the slogan, "They can kill our leaders..." as a challenge. For its participation in the protests of 1978, the AEU became the first target in a campaign of state terror designed to deprive the mass movement of its leadership.
Over the next year and a half, almost every politically-involved student leader or university professor was threatened, even those working with legal political parties. Often the threat came in a subtle or indirect form, relayed by an acquaintance who had "heard something," while others were openly pressured to leave the country, condemned to death in communiqués distributed throughout the city. More common than extra-judicial assassinations, such threats were an inexpensive, simple method to destroy the opposition. For those who did not heed the warnings and continued their activism there were still the death squads (interviews).
In 1979, the government intensified its campaign against the country's politically-involved middle class. Paramilitary groups killed leading members of the University, the press, activist lawyers and opposition politicians. On January 25, armed men killed Alberto Fuentes Mohr, economist and congressional deputy for the Socialist Democratic Party (PSD). A few hours later, union activist and student leader Ricardo Martínez Solórzano was gunned down. On February 14, Manuel Lisandro Andrade Roca, the University's secretary general and a student leader during the 1962 protests, was slain. Then on March 22, assassins used a helicopter to chase down and murder Manuel Colom Argueta, presidential hopeful and former mayor of Guatemala City (Aguilera Peralta and Romero Imery 1981: 137).
Colom Argueta had been director of University's Center for Urban Regional Studies (CEUR), and a leader of the United Front of the Revolution (FUR). He and Fuentes Mohr were the two most important figures of the legal political opposition, and their deaths closed the political space in Guatemala even further. Killings of FUR and PSD activists continued throughout 1979 and 1980 and destroyed these parties. In the following years centrist Christian Democrats were targets of a similar campaign. The government showed that it would not tolerate any type of organized opposition.
On the left, the terror increased the attraction of armed struggle. Until 1979, the Central Committee of the PGT had considered the FUR a means to its participation in the electoral process. Now the PGT and other clandestine groups increased efforts to take the State by force of arms.
In the University, rector Saúl Osorio Paz faced constant threats and began to sleep in the administration building, protected by student brigades made up of FRENTE partisans. For nearly two years, Osorio Paz directed the University from his hiding place until he was forced to leave the country (Aguilera Peralta 1982: 20).
The AEU meanwhile was decimated by State and paramilitary repression. From the activist secretariat of 1978-79, in addition to the death of Oliverio Castañeda and the disappearance of Antonio Ciani in 1978, leaders such as Medical student Ivan Alfonso Bravo Soto and Law student Julio César Cabrera y Cabrera were threatened and then later killed. Others left the country or hid out in the capital. Despite the terror, the AEU continued its militant opposition to the government. In one gesture towards the security of its members, the AEU restructured itself as a collective and stopped revealing the names of its leaders.
In January of 1979, a new generation of students arrived at the University. Many of them had experience in high school student politics and had participated in the October 1978 protests. As older cohorts were forced to temper their activism, younger students took over the leadership of the AEU, guaranteeing the continuity of the student movement. But it was far more difficult to replace dead or exiled professors.
Instead of retreating, the San Carlos administration continued its anti-government stance. The content of the weekly Siete Días en la USAC represented a constant critique of a government that the University publicly condemned as "anti-popular," "pro-imperialist" and even "fascist." This position was both the effect of the violence against the University and cause of more repression.
The continued unity of the popular movement frightened the government. Moreover, military intelligence was well aware of the presence of guerrilla cadres in the mass movement—in the unions, in poor neighborhoods and in many of the schools and faculties of the University of San Carlos. But the neutralization of the movement would not be easy. Mass protest had become more dangerous, but in 1979 the opposition could still mobilize great numbers of people for protests (now mostly funerals). The existence of this movement, and its achievements in 1977 and 1978, had increased the expectations of the urban population for a change in the country. As the above-ground political space closed, a considerable part of the opposition went underground, to "continue the struggle in a form more adequate to the conditions" (CITGUA 1989: 6).
For many, the decision to join the armed struggle was not made in desperation. In 1979, mass movements throughout Central America were turning towards armed struggle. In Nicaragua, on July 19 the Sandinista Revolution brought down the Somoza dictatorship, an event that proved to many in Guatemala the viability of armed insurrection. For the University, Nicaragua showed the importance of students and intellectuals in a "people's revolution." El Salvador was also on the verge of an all-out armed conflict. For many, the time to act had come.
But the political opposition was not well-prepared to face the State in armed struggle. The guerrillas' military capacity was developing slowly, and the mass organizations lagged behind in terms of self-defense. Still, few militants discerned the government's willingness to annihilate their movement. According to Wilson Romero, then an Economics student and a member of the Patriotic Workers' Youth, "We underestimated the terrorist capacity of the State and we didn't perceive the magnitude of the enemy. Many people got caught up in the moment."
10 The pattern of a decrease in violence before presidential elections and an increase afterwards repeated itself during many of the election cycles during Guatemala's armed conflict (Ball, Kobrak and Spirer 1999: Figure 12.3).
11 Protesters also denounced the recent assassination of Mario Rolando Mujía Córdova, a student leader at the University's regional campus in Huehuetenango. Mujía had directed the local office of the National Workers' Central Committee (CNT), through which he played an important role advising striking miners' from Ixtahuacán the year before. Three Huehuetenango student labor activists involved with the Ixtahuacán miners were killed or kidnapped in 1978, reflecting the government's new resolve to shut down the labor movement, both in the city and the country (see the appendix).
12 During the transit strike, a new organization, the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC), erected barricades on the Pan-American Highway at Los Encuentros, Sololá.
