In 1980, after years of selective repression in Guatemala City, the State initiated a campaign of indiscriminate mass violence throughout the country. The year began, symbolically, with the arrival in the capital of a delegation of peasants from Quiché demanding a end to state terror in their department. In August and September 1979, nine Indians from the villages of Uspantán had been kidnapped and murdered. For the Lucas government, the mere presence of Indian peasants in the capital demanding respect for their human rights was a subversive act, even more so considering that the protesters were being advised by the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) and university students from the Robin García Revolutionary Student Front (FERG), groups with legal standing but whose leadership was tied to the EGP guerrillas.

First, the delegation attempted to gain an audience in Congress. In response, presumed government assassins killed their adviser, FUR activist and lawyer Abraham Rubén Ixcamparic, in front of the national police headquarters (Guatemala 80: 171). Protesters wanted to call attention to the violence in Quiché, but given the climate of repression, a public march or an occupation was impossible.¹³

CUC and FERG decided it would be more prudent to occupy an embassy, as the concept of diplomatic extra-territoriality would make it more difficult for the government to attack their protest. They chose the Spanish Embassy, less for historical or political reasons than for its location close to various bus routes, and for the building's design which made it easier to occupy. Some of the Quiché peasants agreed to go along during the operation. The result was one of the darkest moments of state terror in Guatemala.¹⁴

On January 31, following the occupation plan, participants left the San Carlos campus (where members of CUC often stayed when they visited the city) and rode city buses to the Embassy in Zone 9. When the protesters entered the building, they locked the door to the street from the inside, trapping security guards outside in the street. Unexpectedly, two ex-functionaries of the Arana military government were visiting the Embassy and were taken hostage along with the staff and the Spanish diplomatic corps. Everything was going according to plan. The Spanish ambassador, Máximo Cajal y López, received the protesters, who asked him to intervene to help form an international commission to verify the repression in Quiché. The occupiers hung banners outside the building and carried a megaphone to the balcony to communicate with the press and security forces.

According to Elías Barahona y Barahona, then Secretary of Public Relations of the Interior Ministry (and an EGP spy), Lucas García met that morning with his interior minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz and police chief German Chupina Barahona in the national palace to discuss a response to the Spanish Embassy protest. Instead of trying to dialogue with protesters, they decided to send hundreds of agents to retake the Embassy (Blanck and Miranda 1998).

Security forces surrounded the Embassy while the occupants took refuge in a room on the second floor. Without warning, police forces broke into the building and began to launch incendiary devices into their hideout which, together with combustible materials carried by the protesters, exploded into a massive fire. Both occupiers and hostages began to choke on the fumes. Instead of rescuing the trapped victims, the police prohibited firefighters from entering the burning building. Outside, the press and bystanders could hear the victims' cries for help, yet their pleas to the police were to no avail. Security forces held their ground. Thirty-seven people died in the inferno: hostages, peasants and four university students (El Gráfico: 1 February 1980).

The tragedy at the Spanish Embassy marked the beginning of a new phase in the political struggle in Guatemala. The government had shown its complete disinterest in the rule of law. It had also sent a message to the opposition about how far it would go to shut down protest. The attack on the diplomatic mission brought Guatemala international isolation. But from the perspective of Lucas García, this was less an embarrassment than a necessary condition for the regime's survival, allowing it to wage an unlimited war on any and all signs of opposition.

In the University, the massacre provoked outrage, as well as debates about the need to search for new methods of struggle. During the massacre, security forces captured documents, including the takeover plan, which provided evidence of student participation in the action. Once again the National University became a central target of government hostility. The only survivor of the inferno (besides the Spanish ambassador, who escaped), Quiché peasant Gregorio Yujá Xoná, was kidnapped by security forces from his bed in a public hospital. A few days later, his body, bearing signs of torture and bullet wounds to the head, was tossed from a moving car in front of the University administration building. For the rest of the decade, this site would serve as a principal dumping ground for victims of government repression.

Tensions with the government continued to escalate. Students in FERG took it upon themselves to bury Yujá Xoná. They decided that rather than bury the body in a public cemetery beyond the University's jurisdiction, it would be safer to do so on campus, in the "Plaza 31 de Enero," recently renamed in honor of the martyrs of the January 31 massacre. The government considered the funeral and the surrounding publicity a "provocation of the authorities," and sent a justice of the peace to exhume the illegally buried body. When the University's secretary general agreed to accompany the judge, angry students barred their way, suggesting that the authorities first exhume the "thousands of peasants" killed and illegally buried by the army in clandestine cemeteries in the countryside. The body of Yujá Xoná stayed where it was (Noticias de Guatemala 37: 8 March 1980; ASIES 1991: 599; interviews).

The University also organized the public funeral of 23 CUC and FERG members who died at the Embassy. On February 2, despite fears of a government attack, 40,000 mourners accompanied the funeral procession. Moments before the caskets left the Paraninfo Universitario (the old Medical School in the city center), a group of students and unionists hiding out nearby in the FASGUA headquarters walked together towards the Paraninfo. They were intercepted by the infamous Comando Seis, the National Police's counterinsurgency squad headed by Pedro García Arredondo. Some of the students were carrying guns, and a shoot-out ensued in which two members of FERG and a police officer died.¹⁵ During the skirmish police officers kidnapped university student Liliana Negreros. Her body was dug up six weeks later from a clandestine cemetery in San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango, along with 24 other state kidnap victims (Prensa Libre: February 4 1980; Amnesty International 1980b: 5; Guatemala 80; AAAS 1986; Payeras 1987: 50; ASIES 1991: 599; interviews).

Instead of neutralizing the opposition, the massacre led to even greater militancy at the University. The presence of "revolutionaries" increased: armed, masked women and men appeared on buses, in classrooms and on the avenues leading into the campus, handing out flyers and holding brief rallies to incite the people to join the struggle to "take power," Though not as effective as a general strike, these "lightning" actions still had a certain impact. Participants could no longer show their faces and instead wore the uniform of the urban guerrilla (sunglasses, handkerchiefs and caps pulled down over their faces), moving back and forth between student life and the underground (Levenson-Estrada 1994: 155-57).

With the increase in state terror, the mass movement ceased to exist. Most of the union movement had gone into hiding, and regime opponents could no longer count on the most minimal security in public, even with their faces covered.

Still, the University of San Carlos continued its criticism of the government, nourished both by its tradition of struggle and its autonomy. But even autonomy had its limits. At the end of February 1980, the Secret Anticommunist Army promised to carry out a "Black March" campaign against the University. Security forces made good on their word: in March 1980 at least 19 members of the San Carlos community were murdered or disappeared. The appendix lists cases of those who died during this month: students, professors, university workers, San Carlos-based labor advisers and a number of high officials in the administration of Saúl Osorio Paz.

Among the latter were the assassinations of Law professor Hugo Rolando Melgar y Melgar, the University's legal representative, and Economics professor Julio Alfonso "Sabanita" Figueroa Gálvez, director of the University's Institute for Economic and Social Investigations (IIES). The deaths of first Melgar y Melgar and then Figueroa Gálvez provide a sense of life in the University at the time. During the wake of Melgar, early the morning of March 25, 1980, his friend Sabanita, trying to make sense of the siege against the University, asked students and colleagues, "Which one of us assholes is going to get it tomorrow?" (¿A quién pisados le toca mañana?).

The next day, Sabanita himself was dead, victim of a death squad killing. On the way to the University his car was intercepted by armed men in several vehicles who sprayed their target with machine-gun fire. Sabanita died instantly while his wife, Psychology professor Margarita Carrillo, was badly wounded.

Both Melgar and Sabanita had been key figures in the development of a Marxist curriculum at the University. Melgar, an important student leader in the early 1960s, was at the time of his death adviser to the University Workers' Union (STUSC) and professor in the Labor Orientation School where he gave classes to union members on Marxist-Leninist theory. Melgar was known for his dedication to revolutionary change and his participation in the PGT was an open secret at the University (interviews).

While colleagues recall Melgar as somber and serious, his good friend Sabanita is remembered as always ready with a joke, though passionate in his conviction to confront state repression. Former students recall how, in 1979, he would begin each class by writing on the blackboard, "Year of the cowardly assassination of Manuel Andrade Roca." But as with many other murdered university leaders, Figueroa did little to protect himself from his government enemies.

Sabanita gave classes both in the Economics School and in the Law School, and he used to chide leftist students for knowing little about the fundamentals of political economy. He was well-read in the theory and methodology of Marxism-Leninism. Unlike other progressive professors who relied on translations of dogmatic Soviet texts, he had carefully studied the Marx's own writings, in particular his major work Das Kapital.

Figueroa founded a reading group of professors and student lecturers that got together every Saturday morning to study Marx. The group met for years. But given the volume of Marx's writings, by the time Figueroa was killed they were still discussing Volume I of Kapital. The group continued to study after the assassination but without the same discipline. State terror deprived the University of many valuable professors, not just Marxists but many of its most dynamic intellectuals. Soon, the academic rigor at the University began to decline (interviews).

Figure 3 shows that even after the government's "Black March," killings at the University continued with the same intensity, peaking in July 1980, when, at minimum, 26 San Carlos students, professors and workers were killed. Many victims were shot dead in the street; others were detained and then tortured before being killed.

Figure 3. Monthly number of university killings and disappearances,
1978 to 1984

In 1980 alone, over 125 students and professors from the University of San Carlos were killed or disappeared. Throughout that year, the Guatemalan State employed sustained terror as a counterinsurgency strategy against the remnants of the union movement and militant high school students as well (see Guatemala 80).

The terror no longer only affected the student leadership and the progressive faculty. Anyone expressing opposition to the government could become a victim, as could anyone who in some way represented the University. For example, one of the victims of the mid-1980 killing spree was Felipe Mendizábal y Mendizábal, director of the University registry and a San Carlos employee for 27 years.

The survivors of this state campaign had to make a choice. Many went underground. Others moved to the countryside to fight in the insurgency (see Box IV). Some went into exile, an option that allowed them to continue working against the government; but life in exile often provoked personal crises and many urban refugees soon returned to Guatemala, despite the dangers. Quite a few militants withdrew from the popular organizations or continued to participate in the movement but in a more discreet manner.

By 1980, the terror had helped blur the distinction between the legal mass movement and the underground guerrillas, facilitating the repression of both.

For example, the union movement was by mid-1980 a pale reflection of what it had been only two years earlier. That year's May Day march and rally to celebrate International Worker's Day was one of the final expressions of the urban mass movement. An impressive number of people braved the possibility of violence to participate, including a large contingent of peasants from the country's interior brought to the city by the Peasant Unity Committee. Speeches and banners openly expressed support for "revolution," and many protesters covered their faces to avoid being identified.

The government responded to this display with all its repressive capacity. Two days before the march, police in civilian dress raided the headquarters of the National Workers' Central (CNT) and detained 20 unionists preparing for the march. Before being set free, captives were beaten and threatened with death if they continued their union activities.

Government forces did not attack during the march itself, but as the rally was breaking up they swept down on the city center. Psychology student and FERG militant Rafael Urcuyo Orozco was the first victim, machine-gunned to death in front of the Military Social Security Institute. As demonstrators dispersed, 31 students and unionists were kidnapped from the streets surrounding the plaza. Days later, the mutilated bodies of 28 were found (Guatemala 80: 191; Siete Días en la USAC: May 5 and 12 1980; ASIES 1991: 618).

The violence increasingly followed a pattern of guerrilla provocation and government reprisal. While insurgents survived by going underground, the University became an easy target for counterinsurgency violence, much as rural communities in western Guatemala would become in the coming years.

On March 22, 1980, for example, an urban guerrilla cadre allegedly ambushed and killed Colonel Máximo Zepeda Martínez, a police official accused of heading the paramilitary New Anticommunist Organization (NOA), one of Guatemala's earliest death squads. Hours later, the Secret Anticommunist Army (ESA) entered the University campus and kidnapped three members of the AEU secretariat: Julio César del Valle, Marco Tulio Periera Vásquez and Iván Alfonso Bravo Soto. The three students had met up just moments before to distribute copies of "No Nos Tientes" (Don't Tempt Us), the satiric publication of the Huelga de Dolores, the comic-political University parade which in 1980 promised to be very contentious. Later that day, their mutilated, bullet-ridden bodies appeared on the outskirts of the capital, together with a note in which the ESA claimed responsibility for the massacre as revenge for the killing of Zepeda. Thus, instead of striking directly at the armed insurgents, government forces opted for attacking unarmed members of the student movement (Siete Días en la USAC: 7 April 1980; Guatemala 80: 188; Amnesty International 1980b: 2; Cáceres 1980: 174; AAAS 1986: 45; interviews).

But government attacks on the University also took place in reaction to popular movement actions. In early 1981, for example, security forces arrived too late to break up a "lightning protest" by the January 31 Popular Front to commemorate the Spanish Embassy massacre the year before. Militants of the Popular Front (which brought together non-armed groups that supported the EGP's revolutionary project, including FERG students and CUC peasants) burned an effigy and blocked traffic in front of the Paraninfo Universitario. When security forces showed up minutes later, they entered the Paraninfo and indiscriminately opened fire on a presentation sponsored by the University Extension Department. For their most tenuous connection to the protest events outside, government troops killed nine people, including two San Carlos administrators and six students (Noticias de Guatemala 60, 15 February 1981).

In the battle between insurgency and counterinsurgency the University itself came under physical attack. During 1980, security forces raided the main University of San Carlos on various occasions. In clear violation of both university autonomy and legal procedures in general, invaders destroyed offices and meeting spaces of those student groups and academic units most identified with the left. In Suchitepéquez, uniformed army soldiers searched the university-owned Finca San Julián on two occasions, painting anticommunist graffiti on the walls and threatening workers. (According to workers, San Julián was the only large farm in the region that at the time was not subject to guerrilla attacks.) (Siete Días en la USAC: 28 April 1980; interviews).

The physical plant of the San Carlos was even more at risk at its second-largest campus, the Centro Universitario de Occidente (CUNOC), or Western University Center, in Quetzaltenango. In December 1979, armed men penetrated the administration building, setting off incendiary bombs and destroying many of the offices. On May 22, 1980, as students celebrated the 60th anniversary of the AEU, another bomb exploded at CUNOC. Two months later, on July 17, a third attack destroyed most of the campus (Siete Días en la USAC: 26 May 1980; Guatemala 80: 207).

Another indiscriminate attack on the San Carlos took place on July 14, 1980, and almost succeeded in closing down the University. The violence began at 7:00 a.m. when Colonel Miguel Natareno Salazar, chief of the National Police's fourth precinct, was gunned down together with three police bodyguards. A group calling itself the Voluntary Defense Front took responsibility for the massacre and blamed Natareno for killing university students Mariela Aguilar Quiñónez and Luis Pulucó Pichillá the previous week. State forces quickly responded with a reprisal at the main university campus. At 8:45 a.m., a red pick-up truck and a white panel van outfitted with high-powered antennas drove onto campus and began circling around the main bus stop in front of the administration building. Their heavily-armed occupants began firing randomly at passersby, killing six students. Thirty minutes later, two students attempting to flee the campus in a car were chased down and executed by men in the panel van. Overall, eight students were killed and forty more injured (Prensa Libre: 18 July 1980; Siete Días en la USAC: 21 July 1980; Guatemala 80: 117; AAAS 1986: 49).

Few of the victims of the July 14 massacre were student leaders or even politically active—it was an attack on the University as a whole. As with many other murders, evidence suggests that the assailants acted on government orders. Interim rector Raúl Molina Mejía charged that at the moment of the shooting, the police had blocked off the Avenida Petapa and the Calzada Aguilar Batres, two principal access routes to the University. These agents did not intervene or even make efforts to investigate the incident (Siete Días en la USAC: 21 July 1980).

Never had President Lucas García's contempt for the University been more evident. He refused to even discuss the campaign of terror with University officials or to negotiate a truce. Unlike previous governments which presented a facade of preoccupation, Lucas refused to speak out against the political violence. His attitude left little doubt that the government was behind the operation of the death squads and other forms of extra-judicial terror.

This official attitude of contempt was not new. In late 1978 AEU representatives attempted to talk with the President about the disappearance of Antonio Ciani, the organization's highest leader after the assassination of Oliverio Castañeda. Lucas refused to meet with them and limited himself to saying that the University was a center of subversion dedicated to overthrowing his government. He then tried to prevent the Ministry of Health from collaborating with the University's Supervised Professional Practice (EPS) system. The government viewed with suspicion this program to send university students into areas of weak government control. Instead of the official support it needed, the EPS program was a target of official repression: twenty student and faculty participants were disappeared or assassinated between 1978 and 1981 (Amnesty International 1979a: 65; Castillo Montalvo 1985: 170-73).

On a near-daily basis high government officials accused the University of supporting the guerrillas, seemingly to justify the terror. In March 1980, referring to the wave of assassinations against members of the academic community, the minister of the interior, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, said that the University de San Carlos and the armed revolutionary organizations were "the same thing." Such declarations, together with physical attacks, constituted a poorly disguised government war on the University (Amnesty International 1980a: 140-41).

Events at the San Carlos gave the government reason to think that the campus had become a center of support for the insurgency, or at the very least, that the administration tolerated the presence of those who wanted to bring the government down through violence. In May 1980, during student elections, the Robin García Revolutionary Student Front declared itself in favor of the overthrow of the Lucas García regime. Although not a position exclusively of FERG (the platform was approved by the popular movement coordinating body CNUS during May Day protests), the student party declared its position on banners and posters, together with photos that identified their candidates. For many student militants, the State was their declared enemy and the revolution a real and immediate possibility (interviews).

But other activists in the University viewed this platform as too radical and FERG as foolhardy. In the 1980 university elections FERG failed to gain control of the AEU (and it never did). Yet FERG continued to count on the support of many in the University, including, for a time, the deans of Psychology, Architecture, Engineering and Social and Juridical Sciences (interviews).

The AEU remained under the control of FRENTE and under the influence of the PGT, a group which continued to push for a political opening, despite the increasing terror. But the vision of many activist students was changing. The Sandinista Revolution and the beginnings of a new guerrilla offensive in Guatemala attracted many in the University to FERG's position: that total armed struggle was inevitable.

The PGT, through FRENTE and other groups, had developed a broad social organization, but its weakness was on the military front. When the violence in the University increased, militants allied with the PGT were trapped in the city, lacking armed fronts in which to integrate. This did not occur to members of the EGP or ORPA who in 1980, anticipating a victory against the government, began a heavy recruitment drive in the capital, especially in the University.

According to one FERG member, joining the front (still a legal group) was easy, and from there, "it was only a small step to incorporate into the EGP." Growing larger, and impatient in its revolutionary project, FERG opened itself up to infiltration by government spies (orejas), enabling military intelligence to identify insurgents in the University and in the public high schools.

At the time, student informants for the government (many of them soldiers who had received secondary degrees through adult education programs) moved freely about the campus. Through their reporting, and through information collected by torturing captured activists, military intelligence managed to detail clandestine activities at the San Carlos, as well as the daily movements of suspected students and even information about where they sat in their classrooms (interviews).

Despite the infiltration of FERG, and despite its position in favor of armed struggle, it was not the first group in the University targeted by military and paramilitary terror. Instead it was the leaders of FRENTE and their allies among the activist faculty.

In the late 1970s and into 1980, the government appeared to fear the power of the mass movement more than that of guerrilla insurgents. Professors killed during 1979 and 1980 illustrate this pattern: the great majority were politically conscious intellectuals who supported worker, peasant or other popular causes, or were progressive administrators and teachers who, according to the government, had turned the University into a breeding ground for the rebels.

On the other hand, FERG avoided this systematic repression until much later. The group was organized for security: it never operated as openly as FRENTE did and its members were more conscious of the need to defend themselves from the State. According to an ex-member, FERG militants never walked alone, they avoided routines, they masked their identities during their paramilitary actions and they always had an emergency plan to avoid capture in case of attack. It was not until 1981 that FERG suffered its greatest blow, when a great number of militants died during a government attack on an EGP safe house. Soon after, the entire EGP national leadership, including student members from FERG, moved to EGP strongholds in southern Quiché (interviews).

Using FERG's example, the AEU began taking protective measures. In April 1980 it formed "committees for the self-defense of university autonomy," an attempt, somewhat late in coming, to try to stop the government terror in the University. As the government's so-called "security forces" were the source of insecurity, students took it upon themselves to control the campus, asking suspect persons for their papers, making it more difficult for state agents dressed as civilians to enter the University (Siete Días en la USAC: April 21 and 28 and June 24 1980; interviews).

Meanwhile, members of other groups, including FERG, began appearing on campus heavily armed. Although the guns were often concealed, students who did not share their political-military goals noticed what was going on. For some, the presence of armed students was less "self-defense" than an intimidating maneuver that represented the control of guerrilla forces at their place of study (interviews).

But for students "compromised" in the political opposition, each assassination increased their frustration. Their anger could explode against anyone who appeared to be part of the State's forces. When the self-defense committees detected a suspected "oreja," they would often strip him naked and lead him around campus before expelling him. On a few occasions, self-defense committees executed those they captured. In June and July of 1980, at the height of violence against the University, the bodies of a number of state agents appeared on or near the university campus, cases which may have been part of a student or guerrilla reaction to government terror (Guatemala 80: 196, 202, 204).

One example occurred on the afternoon of June 10, when three armed men entered the campus and shot and seriously wounded Víctor Manuel Valverth, the Engineering School's elected student representative to the University Governing Board. Moments after the attack, some twenty students wearing hoods over their faces came together to search for those responsible. The first suspect they captured was Baldomero Mendoza, who passed near the group on a motorcycle. The students forced him off his vehicle and upon checking his identification papers discovered that he was carrying a credential signed by a Treasury Police chief, attesting that the bearer was an honorable person in whom the authorities could trust.¹⁶ The students began to beat him, but Mendoza managed to escape.

The next suspect did not have the same luck. As the group of hooded students passed near the rectory, a man parked nearby allegedly pulled out a gun. Students rushed the man, took away his weapon and forced him to present his documents. His name was Adán de Jesús Melgar Solares and, as students had suspected, he was carrying a card identifying him as a confidential agent of the Jutiapa military base.

Melgar Solares may not have been one of those directly responsible for the attack on Valverth. But his captors saw in him one more member of the repressive apparatus. Stripped naked, the military agent was dragged through the halls of various academic units. In one of the University's plazas a leader of the action told gathered students that the man before them was responsible for the shooting of Valverth and asked those present what they should do with him. According to witnesses, many in the crowd called for his death. Melgar Solares asked for a chance to explain who he was, but the students ignored his pleas. They then carried him off of university grounds to the Avenida Petapa where they beat him and pelted him with rocks. Gravely wounded, Melgar Solares lay bleeding and unconscious in the street until students doused him with gasoline and then set him afire. He died later in the hospital.

Many witnesses were disturbed by what they had seen, while others justified the lynching: "If they (security forces) burn us, then we have to burn them too." The next day, a group calling itself the Secret Student Self-Defense Squads took responsibility for the act. In a press communiqué they declared, "we'll do the same to all the orejas we capture in the University" (Prensa Libre: 11 to 13 June 1980; Amnesty International 1981a: 153; interviews).

What two years earlier had been a social movement in opposition to the policies of the government had now become a revolutionary struggle against the State. Since the mass kidnappings at the 1980 May Day rally, the opposition dared not hold public protests. Even clandestine gatherings of the mass movement had become impossibly dangerous: on June 21 state forces raided and kidnapped most of the union leaders attending a CNT meeting; a similar tragedy occurred on August 24 at the Finca Emaús in Escuintla, where, in addition to union leaders, a number of student advisers from the University's Labor Orientation School were disappeared.

Meanwhile military actions against the government increased. For example, on Sunday, September 7, government and right-wing groups organized an "anticommunist" rally in front of the national palace. To counteract this official attempt to show popular support, in the days leading up to the rally guerrillas exploded a series of bombs in the city center, including one that exploded in front of the palace and killed seven persons. Despite the left-wing terror, over 100,000 persons attended the rally, many of them public employees compelled by the government to show up (Prensa Libre: September 6 1980; Central American Report: September 8 1980; interviews).

The violence, especially state terror, affected the mental health of the survivors, not only in rural communities brutalized by the army's all-out "scorched earth" campaigns, but also in Guatemala City where the repression was more selective. It created in the political opposition a culture of death, as death was never too far away. In the words of Julio Alfonso Figueroa Gálvez, nobody knew who was going to get it tomorrow.

Facing this possibility, many members of the student movement reacted with humor. Recalls Rebeca Alonso of FRENTE, "When somebody said something inspired, we used to say, `write that one down, they're going to put it on my gravestone.'" Others, anticipating their death, used it as an opportunity for one final revolutionary message. Hugo Melgar, for example, wrote a letter to be published in case of death, in which he criticized Guatemala's social situation and justified the University's struggle (Siete Días en la USAC: 7 April 1980; interview).

Although street demonstrations were now impossible, burials of movement martyrs remained an opportunity to publicly repudiate the State. Now, however, the police and death squads regularly attacked such funerals, obliging the opposition to hold them on campus grounds.

After the burning of the Spanish Embassy, martyrdom became an important element of the student movement, especially among those in FRENTE and the PGT who lacked adequate security measures or the backing of armed fronts. Similarly, the union movement, facing a systematic campaign of state violence, attempted to find inspiration in the deaths its members suffered, what Deborah Levenson-Estrada calls, "the glorification of death by murder as a means of life" (1994: 159, 170).

Many of the survivors of this period of terror are still traumatized, affected by a psychosis of persecution. One Law professor who helped bury many of his fellow students and teachers recalls, "we saw the face of the justice police in everyone who walked by." Many survivors depended on tranquilizers to keep going, while others sought refuge in alcohol, often using it to gather the courage to go to the University one more day.

All of this was a product of a system of social control based on what sociologist Carlos Figueroa Ibarra calls "the resource of fear." The use of death squads and disappearances, for example, denied the possibility of knowing the truth or of being able to count on the rule of law for protection. Such paramilitary groups were much more than an occasional phenomenon; since 1966 the Guatemalan government and its allies have habitually used them to eliminate supposed enemies of the State or the upper class. Guatemala's 50,000 "disappeared" far outnumber the 15,000 victims of Argentina's "Dirty War" or the number of such deaths in any other Latin America country during the years of repression (Perera 1993: 285; Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999: Tomo I, p. 72-173, para. 212).

By 1981, after years of urban violence, many opposition militants had left the movement or fled the capital. The government had also moved its counterinsurgency forces out of Guatemala City to the western highlands. There, without the existence of human rights groups and with a population culturally distinct from the power elite in the capital, the regime's terror was much more open and indiscriminate. Although the violence had achieved chilling levels in the city, what occurred in the countryside would be far more atrocious.

¹⁴ Much of the information on the occupation of the Spanish Embassy comes from interviews with one of the student participants in the takeover, a surviving FERG militant who coordinated the action from the street.

¹⁵ García Arredondo was shot but survived the incident, as well as numerous guerrilla attempts to eliminate him, and today is the mayor of Nueva Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa. In 1999, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) charged that there were strong indications that García Arredondo had participated in Los Chuchos, a local group dedicated to extortion, kidnapping and eliminating criminals through "social cleansing" operations (MINUGUA 1999: 21).

¹⁶ At the time many Guatemalans, including supporters of the revolutionary movement, carried such a card in case they got stopped by the security forces (interviews).

 

Box IV. Choosing armed struggle San Carlos students politically-active during the social protests of the 1970s and 80s often criticize today's generation of students for their narrow consumerist passions and their lack of interest in national issues. Looking back on the University's role in the armed struggle, what is perhaps most remarkable is just how many young people (and relatively well-off intellectuals) were willing to risk their lives working for political change, including those who supported Guatemala's guerrilla movement. (Even so, never more than a minority of the San Carlos community actively chose armed struggle.) Guatemalans have never lacked grievances to inspire participation in an opposition social movement. A principal factor in explaining the past decades of protest has been the existence of a state system of exclusion and corruption dominated by the military and an intransigent economic elite. At first protesters tended to work through legal, democratic channels. But then the Guatemalan State, with U.S. support, increased its capacity to repress and its willingness to employ it against the mass movement; many surviving militants chose the path of armed struggle. Developments within the University itself also encouraged students to choose revolutionary struggle instead of working through legal and democratic channels. Curriculum reforms during the late 1960s and 1970s introduced Marxist-Leninist theory into the classroom. For many university students, Karl Marx's theories about class conflict provided a clear explanation of the profound inequalities that characterized Guatemalan society and Lenin's theories about the revolutionary vanguard, a possible response by the intellectual community. Regional events also encouraged the attraction of revolution. The 1973 coup in Chile against the democratic government of Salvador Allende was, like Guatemala's 1954 Counterrevolution, sponsored by the CIA and showed leftists in Latin America the difficulty of establishing their politics through pacific, electoral means. At the same time, the resolution of the Vietnam War showed that a mobilization of peasants ("poor, ignorant and starving to death," as one former Guatemalan guerrilla put it) could lead to victory despite the interventions of a superpower like the United States. Later in the decade the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua provided Guatemalans an example closer to home of how armed revolutions could indeed take power. Throughout Guatemala's armed conflict, the country's youth, especially young people in the capital, established an activist tradition of political idealism. Student activism is not surprising, given young people's typical impulse to rebel against society's standards and the unjustness of those standards in militarized, economically-polarized Guatemala. Guatemala's guerrilla groups understood this and drew on students to regenerate their movement at various points during the armed conflict. In the 1970s the different armed groups, often in competition with one another, undertook an aggressive effort to recruit cadres in the University. Many ex-combatants explained in interviews that they were recruited into la organización, not when they arrived at the San Carlos, but earlier, during their secondary education. The PGT communist party, the first underground group to establish a strong presence in the capital, used its youth wing, the Patriotic Workers' Youth (JPT), to form Marxist study groups in the public high schools. When they got to the University they were already well-prepared to continue their clandestine efforts. As in the labor movement, many student activists became involved with the guerrillas without realizing it. Often the only members of a student organization who understood the association between the guerrillas and their movement were certain leaders entrusted to promote this connection. Indeed, the guerrillas often used legal, leftist student groups as a way to more securely recruit their followers. Student leader Rebeca Alonso recalls how in 1977, the day after FRENTE swept university elections, a friend of her older brother's, a Christian Democrat, warned her that the group was tied to the banned PGT. She had had no idea, she says, but responded defiantly, "If I'm with the PGT then I'm with the PGT," and soon increased her participation. In the University the PGT was "the mother of all" guerrilla groups, though it did not always advocate armed struggle. Between 1978 and 1981, with the Lucas government's systematic campaign against the student movement, many student leaders and even more "intermediate cadres" were killed. At this point many politicized students, including FRENTE leaders organized in the JPT, joined groups more directly tied to the armed struggle, such as the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA), and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). While the PGT, FAR and EGP wanted to incorporate large numbers of students, workers and other urban poor into their movement, the experience of ORPA was different. The group formed as an alternative to the PGT in the early 1970s and much of ORPA's leadership came out of the student movement. Still, ORPA never had much of a profile in the University. The group grew through inviting socially-conscious students into reading circles which were less focussed on Marxist content, giving the group an intellectual and "petite bourgeois" reputation. But ORPA militants were also among the most committed on the Guatemalan left, according to a former student close to ORPA in the 1970s. They often moved straight from student life, participating in reading groups, to the clandestine life of the armed combatant. Indeed, well before the moment of crisis that led EGP and PGT militants to flee the city in 1980, many urban ORPA recruits went to "la montaña" to prepare for a rural confrontation with the State. Since the early 1960s the Guatemalan State had shown its willingness to treat its revolutionary opponents with the utmost of contempt. Security forces systematically captured and killed any rebels or rebel sympathizers that they could get their hands on, often after torturing them to draw out information on rebel operations or the popular organizations. It is remarkable that so many students were willing to risk their lives in the guerrillas' political project, especially when one considers the social origins of these militants, many children of the more comfortable barrios of Guatemala City. Organized students could count on the support of their fellow militants. But in their decision to join a struggle identified closely with the interests of the poor, they often had to overcome resistance from their family and immediate social circle. This was especially true when the guerrilla organizations moved the bulk of their operations to the Maya Indian communities of the western highlands. According to one former ORPA militant, the parents of many urban guerrillas objected not only to the personal risks they were taking, but also who they were taking them for. In ethnically-divided Guatemala, many parents wanted to know, "Why are you going off to fight for los indios?" Students were not the only guerrilla recruits in the University. During the worst of the repression, professors, service workers and even high administrators also joined the armed struggle. For example, on September 3, 1980, the dean of the School of Architecture, Gilberto Castañeda Sandoval, attended a meeting of the University Governing Board to request time off. In a long speech to the Board the dean declared that, due to government attacks on the University and despite his class position in the "petite bourgeoisie," he was going underground to work with the EGP. The Governing Board, already under attack by state forces, spent the next few weeks trying to distance itself from the dean's statements. Within a few years the possibility of a rebel military victory had become a distant dream. Despite the constant repression, the guerrilla organizations continued to exist and the University continued to serve as a center of recruitment. Former student leader Víctor Hugo Gudiel points out that in the early 1990s, while the rest of Guatemala viewed the guerrillas with trepidation, in the University, with its autonomy and powerful tradition of struggle, a sector of the student body continued to choose to support the revolutionary movement, though more to aid the guerrillas' negotiating position than with a vision of immediately overthrowing the government (El Gráfico: 5 September 1980; Siete Días en la USAC: 15 September 1980; Aguilera Peralta 1982: 19; interviews).