This report has presented a history of the violence against Guatemala's University of San Carlos since 1954. Locating the violence in a socio-political context, the purpose has been not just to denounce the State's brutality but also to try and understand how the conflict, in both its armed and social expressions, came to take to lives of so many Guatemalans, in this case from the country's academic and intellectual life.
Guatemala's ongoing process of historical clarification will never fully satisfy those who demand a full accounting of "Who did what to whom?" Terror developed in the shadowy recesses of the State. Much of the violence, especially the urban terror, was carefully planned to prevent identification of the perpetrators. The State regularly employed illegal methods against its citizens, from death squad killings to indiscriminate massacres that they tried to blame on guerrilla forces. These techniques allowed the State to maintain the appearance of institutional order while different regimes carried out a truly "dirty war."
After the negotiated end of the armed conflict, the government and the army resisted cooperating with the Commission for Historical Clarification, mandated in the peace accords. They refused to hand over archives or to answer the Commission's questions pertaining to state violence. But it will be difficult to cover up details of the terror forever. For example, in May 1999, the secret archive of a unit apparently controlled by Guatemala's military intelligence surfaced in the United States. Dating from the Mejía Víctores military regime (1983 to 1985), the notebook, dubbed the "Guatemalan Death Squad Diary," provided details of the deaths and disappearances of 182 guerrilla militants, including over twenty San Carlos students and professors. It confirmed what human rights groups and survivors have known for years: that state forces were behind the violence against the political opposition.23
Since then, victims of state terror have begun to come forward to accuse military heads of state and their functionaries for their involvement in some of these crimes. At the time of this writing, Mejía Víctores and two high functionaries in the Lucas García government, German Chupina Barahona and Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, have been summoned to give testimony before the Public Ministry. The process of terror that for so long made confronting the violence so difficult may finally be giving way to Guatemalans' desire for a clarification of the death squads and the forced disappearances. Still, given the weak, corrupt state of Guatemala's legal system, there is little guarantee that the terror's victims will receive justice any time soon.
This report has attempted to document the extent of the state violence against the University. Information is far from complete. There are many cases of students and professors killed or disappeared which still have not appeared in the historical record. Oftentimes their families, out of fear, resisted denouncing the deaths of their loved ones. Since 1954, the University itself has been one of the main depositories for denunciations of human rights violations; tragically much of the archived information was destroyed during government raids on the San Carlos campus.
Despite the partial nature of the data, a few conclusions about the dynamic of organizing and repression are possible. The facts make clear that during the past decades the Guatemalan State has employed massive terrorist violence against the University of San Carlos. At certain points the violence has been determined by a counterinsurgency logic. Nevertheless, the State has routinely attacked other forms of opposition to its authority, including pacifist and democratic movements.
Nineteen fifty-six marked the beginning of a series of attacks on activist members of the University of San Carlos. But it was not until over two decades later, with the June 1977 murder of professor and labor adviser Mario López Larrave, that the State began a systematic campaign of violence against the University. The terror against the university community continued until the return to civilian rule in 1986. However, even with a civilian in the National Palace the student movement continued to suffer a series of extra-judicial killings, notably the massacre of most of the AEU leadership in 1989.
This sustained state violence can be understood as a response to the strength of independent political organizing in the University of San Carlos. Though the revolutionary movement had many supporters in the University, those hardest hit were unarmed militants who participated in social struggles and lacked adequate means of self-defense. The violence in the San Carlos peaked between 1978 and 1981 when the University helped lead a widespread opposition to the military government. With the repression of this legal movement, many survivors opted to participate in the insurgency.
Figure
6. Number of university killings and disappearances
by presidential regime, 1954 to 1996
The attitude of the government in power helps explain the patterns of violence. For example, during his entire administration Romeo Lucas García maintained an antagonistic attitude towards the University; under his government over 200 students and intellectuals died, far more than under any other President. Still, every government from 1954 to 1996 showed itself willing to extra-judicially attack, or permit its security forces to attack, opponents in the University. As Figure 6 shows, more university members died during both the military regime of Oscar Mejía Víctores and the civilian government of Vinicio Cerezo, than during the 17-month de facto rule of Efraín Ríos Montt, who led security forces during the height of state terror. For the country as a whole the Ríos Montt government was responsible for more killings than any other (Ball, Kobrak and Spirer 1999: Figure 6.1).
Facing the coercive capacity of the State has been the capacity of the organized opposition to try and halt the violence. University students often led efforts to condemn the state terror. At times, in 1971 and perhaps in 1985, this show of organizational force helped limit the State's ability to terrorize at will. On other occasions, the University was punished precisely because of its active role in human rights defense. The level of opposition organization has influenced the level of repression throughout the conflict, either as a limit to the violence or as a provocation of more violence. Looked at from the other side, a rise in repression has either provoked more intense organizing or has succeeded in dismantling the opposition.
Outside influences also contributed to the repression, especially the interventions of the United States and the role of the Cold War in Central America. Since its beginnings, Guatemala's revolutionary movement has been influenced by the example, and the assistance, of the Soviet-dominated socialist bloc. At the same time, the country's sharply skewed distribution of economic power contributed to social polarization. In response, Guatemala's State and small elite employed an uncompromising version of anticommunism, exported to Latin America from the United States, with which they justified repressive and anti-democratic measures against the people, including techniques that would never have been tolerated in the U.S. itself. At times, any and all forms of opposition in Guatemala were officially interpreted as "subversive" and opponents viewed as deserving of death.
The U.S. government took a leading role in constructing Guatemala's repressive apparatus, offering training, equipment and ideological orientation to the country's security forces. The United States has participated both directly and indirectly in the repression of the University of San Carlos community: from the CIA-sponsored invasion in 1954, to the construction of the police's anti-riot Pelotón Modelo in the late 1970s. Even during the withdrawal of direct U.S. military aid between 1978 and 1982, the United States and its allies faithfully continued to provide support to Guatemala's military governments.
To explain the political environment that permitted such unchecked official violence, one should also note the criminal and immoral silence of Guatemala's economic elite. Believing that they would materially benefit from the repression of the opposition, most of the country's business class failed to condemn or oppose the wide use of state terror, even against middle-class students. This they did at the cost of destroying the sense of national unity and any semblance of democratic rule.
23 The Guatemala Death Squad Diary is available on the internet at
