Chapter 2: The 1960s

The armed conflict officially began November 13, 1960, when discontented army officers, many of them trained in the United States, attempted a coup d’état against the corrupt and unpopular government of General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes (Moss 1972: 175). The incident led to the formation of Guatemala’s modern revolutionary movement, and, in response, the creation of a counterinsurgency state.

The start of Guatemala’s modern political drama can also be dated earlier, to 1954. That year, a mercenary invasion nominally led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) overthrew the most democratic and populist government in the nation’s history. The so-called "Liberation" returned Guatemala’s military to a leading role in shaping the nation’s politics.

Figure 2.1. Number of killings and disappearances by year, 1960-1969

In the aftermath of the invasion, the government set about destroying the country’s former social democratic and communist leadership and their organizations. Hundreds of peasant and labor activists and intellectuals faced detention, torture and sometimes death. Fear forced others into exile or withdrawal from political life.

Anti-communism became an obsessive guiding principle for both the military and for Guatemala’s economic elite. The government both banned and vilified the communist party, the Guatemalan Worker’s Party (PGT, in its Spanish acronym). Soon any expression of opposition was condemned as communist-inspired and foreign-born. However, for years to come, the memory of the 1944 to 1954 social democracy inspired the country’s political opposition, both communist and non-communist (Toriello Garrido 1979).

In 1959, revolution in Cuba heightened the intensity of political conflict throughout Latin America. In Guatemala, the installation of an independent socialist government in Cuba gave hope to the nationalist opposition defeated in 1954. At the same time, these events worried Guatemala’s upper classes and the regime’s U.S. sponsors. Worried about a return of an independent and populist government, the U.S. made Guatemala a pilot program for both military and covert political intervention in the Caribbean basin. The single-minded insistence of "no more Cubas" would soon destroy Guatemala’s political system (Jonas 1981).

As Figure 2.1 suggests, political violence in Guatemala increased from 1960 through 1968. At first state violence consisted of police repression of occasional expressions of political protest. By 1966, the military was involved in a widespread attack on an armed guerrilla movement and its civilian supporters.

After the November 1960 coup attempt, resistance and repression started on a small scale. In April 1961 on the streets of Guatemala City, students and members of the outlawed communist party protested the government’s participation in training Cuban exile mercenaries for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Security forces opened fire on the gathering, killing three (CIIDH interview).

The next year, students took to the capital’s streets in the largest public demonstration since 1954. Protesters at first meant to shake up public complacency following fraudulent congressional elections. But the March 1962 protests grew as labor and middle-class groups joined the strikes and demanded that President Ydígoras step down.

At this point, the government lacked the capacity or the freedom to simply terrorize its opponents. It began by attacking protesters through the press. Then Ydígoras made a deal with the army to gain their support (he would soon replace his cabinet ministers with military officers) and both demonstrations and the government reaction grew more violent. Scores were killed during March 1962 in clashes with the police, mostly working-class youth from insurrectionary urban neighborhoods. Then in April 1962, after the street fighting had calmed, army soldiers opened fire on a gathering of law students, killing four (Voz Universitaria Informativa: 1977; CIIDH and GAM 1999).

For many, the government’s violent response showed the futility of mass protest. In 1963, on the verge of national elections, an army coup (again encouraged by the U.S. government) further undermined faith in democratic alternatives. The high command installed former Minister of Defense Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia as President. He canceled the elections and strengthened the military’s control over the different government ministries.

A series of attempts to create a guerrilla uprising emerged, following the model established in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. The first of these, the 20th of October Front made up of students and ex-army officers, was annihilated during the March 1962 protests when it ran into an army patrol in Concúa, Baja Verapaz, not far from the capital. That same year, army officers involved in the 1960 coup attempt established an alliance with the outlawed PGT. By 1963, various guerrilla fronts had merged into the Armed Rebel Forces (FAR), under the political influence of the PGT.

On March 6, 1966, Guatemalans elected as President lawyer and university professor Julio César Méndez Montenegro. For a moment, open political competition again appeared possible. Méndez received the support of the PGT and other opposition parties, and the military respected the results.

The election of the civilian Méndez Montenegro regime did not represent the triumph of democracy or the rule of law, but rather the triumph of military rule. As the new President prepared to take office, he was forced to sign a pact with the military command allowing it to fight the guerrillas on its own terms, without interference from the civilian government and without having to work through the justice system.

The week of the election, security forces detained at least 28 members of the PGT and other underground groups who had let down their guard. They were never arrested, nor tried, nor freed, nor did their bodies ever turn up. They were simply "disappeared." When law students at the University of San Carlos used legal measures to try to force the government to present the detainees, some of them in turn were disappeared. It would be only the first of many reprisals against those who defended the human rights of government opponents (McClintock 1985: 82-83; CIIDH and GAM 1998).

For its first few years, the armed conflict was considered a "Gentleman’s War," limited in scope and fought largely between members of the urban middle classes. The State’s response to the guerrilla movement in the early 1960s was quite different from how it would react over the next two decades. The CIIDH database includes many cases from this period in which rebel combatants were captured and then released.

The mass disappearances of March 1966 signaled a new government resolve to fight the opposition by any means necessary. Rebels, too, increased their resolve. After 1966 they no longer targeted only their Guatemalan military foes, but also civilian opponents, foreign diplomats and U.S. military advisers who had come to Guatemala to direct the counterinsurgency.

In a program designed by these advisers, the Guatemala army in 1966 began to bomb villages in the area of guerrilla operations in the eastern departments of Zacapa and Izabal, a largely Ladino (non-Indian) region of the country. Government forces killed or disappeared thousands of civilians during its escalation of counterinsurgency between 1966 and 1968. Observers estimate that between 2,800 (Melville and Melville 1971) and 8,000 (Jonas 1991) Guatemalans were killed during this period. (The CIIDH database includes relatively few cases from the 1960s and Figure 2.1 does not reflect this early wave of violence).

With U.S. guidance, Guatemalan society had become subject to an increasingly powerful military apparatus without any responsibility to civilian authority. The government established a wide-reaching network of counterinsurgency surveillance that it would employ for the next 30 years not only to battle the guerrilla organizations but to also exercise control over the civilian population. Fresh from the conflict in Vietnam, U.S. advisers had the army authorize thousands more military commissioners who became privileged local representatives of the counterinsurgency (see Chapter 18).

Perhaps the most troubling characteristic of Guatemala’s first period of counterinsurgency was the "poisonous flowering" of clandestine terror groups like "Eye for an Eye" and the "New Anticommunist Organization." Most of these paramilitary "death squads" were security forces personnel dressed as civilians; others represented more or less independent interests on the far right of the political spectrum. They converted murder into political theater, often announcing their actions through death lists or decorating their victims’ bodies with notes denouncing communism or common criminality. Their secret nature not only provoked terror in the population, it also allowed the army and police to deny responsibility for a systematic campaign of extra-judicial killing (Aguilera and Imery 1981; Black 1984: 46).

As Figure 2.1 illustrates, the level of political violence abated towards the end of the 1960s. The guerrillas were militarily defeated and had retreated to the capital to regroup. But the decline in the armed conflict was not accompanied by a decline in military control. Instead, in 1970 the army presented as their official presidential candidate the architect of the counterinsurgency terror in Zacapa, Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio. Military rule continued to consolidate.