Guatemalan Civil War | |||||||
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Part of Cold War | |||||||
Cemetery in Rabinal | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
Guerrilla Army of the Poor Revolutionary Organization of Armed People Rebel Armed Forces Guatemalan Labor Party (1960-1982) Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (1982-1996) | Guatemala | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Rolando Morán |
The Guatemalan Civil War, the longest civil war in Latin American history, ran from 1960 to 1996, and had a profound impact on Guatemala.
Origins and background
One reason for the civil war was the economic and social discrimination against Guatemala's indigenous peoples. Many of them descendants of the Mayan Indians. They make up more than half of Guatemala's total population. Many of the insurgents came from this group. European descended wealthy landowners controlled most the land.[1]
In 1944, a group known as the "October Revolutionaries" instituted liberal reforms, strengthening urban workers and the peasantry. Comprised of left-leaning students, professionals and liberal-democratic coalitions, they were led by Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951–1954). Right-wing Col. Carlos Castillo Armas led the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, backed by the CIA, who allegedly suspected a Communist takeover. Armas began to dismantle a decade of reform, outlawing labor unions and leftist political parties. This radicalized the left.[2]
The Polity data series, a widely used ranking of the degree of democracy,[1] ranks the degree of democracy as abruptly worsening after the 1954 coup, improving in the later half of the 60s to be slightly better than before the coup, gradually worsening in the 70s, reaching its lowest point during the military dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982-83, improving thereafter and reaching a high level after the end of the war. The worst part of the civil war is seen as ethnic warfare/genocide or politicide.[2][3]
The Truth Commission writes that Guatemalan military influence over the government passed through different stages during the years of the armed confrontation. It began during the 1960s and 70s with the Army’s domination of the structures of the executive branch. The Army subsequently assumed almost absolute power for half a decade during the 1980s, by penetrating all of the country’s institutions, as well as its political, social and ideological spheres; in the later final stage of the confrontation, it developed a parallel, semi-visible, low profile, but high impact, control of national life. In the military itself, the Guatemalan military intelligence system became the driving force, to control the population, the society, the State and the Army itself.[3]
Four principal left-wing guerrilla groups — the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People (ORPA), the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and the Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT) — conducted economic sabotage and targeted government installations and members of government security forces in armed attacks. These organizations combined to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in 1982.
At the same time, extreme right-wing groups of self-appointed vigilantes, including the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA) and the White Hand (La Mano Blanca), tortured and murdered students, professionals, and peasants suspected of involvement in leftist activities. The elusiveness of the enemy frustrated the military. As a result, they began staging increasingly brutal assaults on civilian populations, swelling the death toll.
The Catholic Church was before the 1960s conservative and opposed what it perceived as a world-wide expansion of atheistic communism. In the 1960s parts of it were influenced by liberation theology. The guerrillas saw this a common ground on which to extend its social base, seeking to gain the sympathy of its followers. Counterinsurgency forces began to see some Catholics as allies of the guerrillas.[4]
The United States supported the government and Cuba and other Communist states the insurgents. Marxist ideology advocating a violent proletarian revolution instead of the limited opportunities for legal participation that were available also contributed to the conflict.[5]
Early years of conflict
In response to the increasingly autocratic rule of General Ydigoras Fuentes, who took power in 1958 following the murder of Colonel Castillo Armas, a group of junior military officers revolted in 1960. When they failed, several went into hiding and established close ties with Cuba. This group became the nucleus of the forces that were in armed insurrection against the government for the next 36 years.[6]
Shortly after President Julio César Méndez Montenegro took office in 1966, the army launched a major counterinsurgency campaign that largely broke up the guerrilla movement in the countryside. The guerrillas then concentrated their attacks in Guatemala City, where they assassinated many leading figures, including United States Ambassador John Gordon Mein in 1968.
Ríos Montt
On 22 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by General Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked candidate of outgoing President and General Romeo Lucas García. They denounced Guevara's electoral victory as fraudulent. The coup leaders asked retired General Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of Lucas and Guevara. Ríos Montt had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential elections and was widely regarded as having been denied his own victory through fraud.
Ríos Montt was by this time a lay pastor in the evangelical protestant Church of the Word. In his inaugural address, he stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God. He was widely perceived as having strong backing from the Reagan administration in the United States. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress, suspended political parties and cancelled the electoral law. After a few months, Ríos Montt dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the de facto title of "President of the Republic".
Guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt sought to defeat the guerrillas with military actions and economic reforms; in his words, "rifles and beans". In May 1982, the Conference of Catholic Bishops accused Ríos Montt of responsibility for growing militarization of the country and for continuing military massacres of civilians. An army officer was quoted in the New York Times of 18 July 1982 as telling an audience of indigenous Guatemalans in Cunén that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you."[4] The Plan de Sánchez massacre occurred on the same day.
The government began to form local civilian defense patrols (PACs). Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many people, especially in the rural northwest, had no choice but to join either the PACs or the guerrillas. Ríos Montt's conscript army and PACs recaptured essentially all guerrilla territory — guerrilla activity lessened and was largely limited to hit-and-run operations. However, Ríos Montt won this partial victory only at an enormous cost in civilian deaths.
Ríos Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in thousands of deaths of mostly unarmed indigenous civilians. Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of noncombatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the military and the PACs they controlled.
Resumption of democracy
On 8 August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his own Minister of Defense, General Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, who succeeded him as de facto president. Mejía justified his coup, saying that "religious fanatics" were abusing their positions in the government and also because of "official corruption". Seven people were killed in the coup, although Ríos Montt survived to found a political party (the Guatemalan Republican Front) and to be elected President of Congress in 1995 and 2000.
Awareness in the United States of the conflict in Guatemala, and its ethnic dimension, increased with the 1983 publication of the "testimonial" account I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala; the author was later awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in favor of broader social justice. In 1998 a book by U.S. anthropologist David Stoll challenged some of the details in Menchú's book, creating an international controversy.
General Mejía allowed a managed return to democracy in Guatemala, starting with a 1 July 1984 election for a Constituent Assembly to draft a democratic constitution. On 30 May 1985, after nine months of debate, the Constituent Assembly finished drafting a new constitution, which took effect immediately. Vinicio Cerezo, a civilian politician and the presidential candidate of the Guatemalan Christian Democracy, won the first election held under the new constitution with almost 70% of the vote, and took office on 14 January 1986. It took, however, another 10 years of conflict, before there was an end to the violence.
Historian of Guatemala, Susanne Jonas writes that while "the Reagan State Department cheerfully proclaimed Guatemala a "consolidated"/"post-transitional" democracy after nothing more than the 1985 election. More sober academic analysts attempting to include Guatemala in the "democratic family" had to resort to inventing new categories of democracy (restricted, pseudo-, "tutelada," "facade," "democradura," etc.). When it becomes necessary to add all those qualifiers...the definition of democracy is being stretched beyond acceptable limits." Jonas writes that "for the most part from 1986 through 1995, civilian presidents allowed the army to rule from behind the scenes." [5]
Upon its inauguration in January 1986, President Cerezo's civilian government announced that its top priorities would be to end the political violence and establish the rule of law. Reforms included new laws of habeas corpus and amparo (court-ordered protection), the creation of a legislative human rights committee, and the establishment in 1987 of the Office of Human Rights Ombudsman. The Supreme Court also embarked on a series of reforms to fight corruption and improve legal system efficiency.
With Cerezo's election, the military moved away from governing and returned to the more traditional role of providing internal security, specifically by fighting armed insurgents. The first two years of Cerezo's administration were characterized by a stable economy and a marked decrease in political violence. Dissatisfied military personnel made two coup attempts in May 1988 and May 1989, but military leadership supported the constitutional order. The government was heavily criticized for its unwillingness to investigate or prosecute cases of human rights violations.
The final two years of Cerezo's government also were marked by a failing economy, strikes, protest marches, and allegations of widespread corruption. The government's inability to deal with many of the nation's problems — such as infant mortality, illiteracy, deficient health and social services, and rising levels of violence — contributed to popular discontent.
Presidential and congressional elections were held on November 11, 1990. After a runoff ballot, Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías was inaugurated on January 14, 1991, thus completing the first transition from one democratically elected civilian government to another. Because his Movement of Solidarity Action (MAS) Party gained only 18 of 116 seats in Congress, Serrano entered into a tenuous alliance with the Christian Democrats and the National Union of the Center (UCN).
The Serrano administration's record was mixed. It had some success in consolidating civilian control over the army, replacing a number of senior officers and persuading the military to participate in peace talks with the URNG. He took the politically unpopular step of recognizing the sovereignty of Belize, which until then had been officially, though fruitlessly, claimed by Guatemala as a province. The Serrano government reversed the economic slide it inherited, reducing inflation and boosting real growth.
On May 25, 1993, Serrano illegally dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and tried to restrict civil freedoms, allegedly to fight corruption. The autogolpe (or autocoup) failed due to unified, strong protests by most elements of Guatemalan society, international pressure, and the army's enforcement of the decisions of the Court of Constitutionality, which ruled against the attempted takeover. In the face of this pressure, Serrano fled the country. An Intelligence Oversight Board report states that CIA helped in stopping this autocoup.[6]
On June 5, 1993, Congress, pursuant to the 1985 constitution, elected the Human Rights Ombudsman, Ramiro de León Carpio, to complete Serrano's presidential term. De León was not a member of any political party; lacking a political base but with strong popular support, he launched an ambitious anticorruption campaign to "purify" Congress and the Supreme Court, demanding the resignations of all members of the two bodies.
Despite considerable congressional resistance, presidential and popular pressure led to a November 1993 agreement brokered by the Catholic Church between the administration and Congress. This package of constitutional reforms was approved by popular referendum on January 30, 1994. In August 1994, a new Congress was elected to complete the unexpired term. Controlled by the anti-corruption parties — the populist Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) headed by Ríos Montt, and the center-right National Advancement Party (PAN) — the new Congress began to move away from the corruption that characterized its predecessors.
Under de León, the peace process, now brokered by the United Nations, took on new life. The government and the URNG signed agreements on human rights (March 1994), resettlement of displaced persons (June 1994), historical clarification (June 1994), and indigenous rights (March 1995). They also made significant progress on a socioeconomic and agrarian agreement.
National elections for president, Congress, and municipal offices were held in November 1995. With almost 20 parties competing in the first round, the presidential election came down to a January 7, 1996 runoff in which PAN candidate Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen defeated Alfonso Portillo Cabrera of the FRG by just over 2% of the vote. Arzú won because of his strength in Guatemala City, where he had previously served as mayor, and in the surrounding urban area. Portillo won all of the rural departments except Petén.
Under the Arzú administration, peace negotiations were concluded, and the government and the guerrilla umbrella organization URNG, which become a legal party, signed peace accords ending the 36-year internal conflict in December 1996. The General Secretary of the URNG, Comandante Rolando Morán and President Álvaro Arzú jointly received the UNESCO Peace Prize for their efforts to end the civil war and attaining the peace agreement.
Costs
By the end of the war, 200,000 people had been killed.[7]
The internal conflict is described in the report of the Archbishop's Office for Human Rights (ODHAG). ODHAG estimated that government forces were responsible for 80% of the human rights violations.
In a later report in 1999, the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) stated that the state was responsible for 93% of the human rights violations committed during the war, the guerrillas for 3%.[8] They peaked in 1982. 83% of the victims were Maya indians.[9] Both sides used terror as a deliberate policy.[10]
The CEH stated that at no time during the internal armed confrontation did the guerrilla groups have the military potential necessary to pose an imminent threat to the State. The number of insurgent combatants was too small to be able to compete in the military arena with the Guatemalan Army, which had more troops and superior weaponry, as well as better training and co-ordination. The State and the Army were well aware that the insurgents’ military capacity did not represent a real threat to Guatemala’s political order. The CEH concludes that the State deliberately magnified the military threat of the insurgency, a practise justified by the concept of the internal enemy. The inclusion of all opponents under one banner, democratic or otherwise, pacifist or guerrilla, legal or illegal, communist or non-communist, served to justify numerous and serious crimes. Faced with widespread political, socio-economic and cultural opposition, the State resorted to military operations directed towards the physical annihilation or absolute intimidation of this opposition, through a plan of repression carried out mainly by the Army and national security forces. On this basis the CEH explains why the vast majority of the victims of the acts committed by the State were not combatants in guerrilla groups, but civilians.[11]
President Clinton apologized for U.S. "support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report".[12] Professor of History Niall Ferguson argues that the US is incorrectly blamed for all human rights violations in nations they have supported. For example, the US cannot credibly be blamed for all the deaths, as high as 200,000, during the long war. Most of the violence happened long after the 1954 coup, when the regime was far from being under the CIA's control.[7] Guatemalan specialist Susanne Jonas has argued that U.S. Special Forces set up a secret military training base in 1962, and that the program became massive after Julio César Méndez Montenegro signed a pact with the army in July 1966. Accordingly, "although it was categorically denied by official U.S. sources, the presence of U.S. Green Berets (estimates ranged from several hundred to 1,000) was documented by careful observers and even acknowledged by a high Guatemalan police official." Jonas claims that the ratio of military advisers to local military officials in Guatemala was the highest of any Latin American country in the late 1960's and 70's, and moreover that "there is substantial evidence of the direct role of U.S. military advisers in the formation of death squads: U.S. Embassy personnel were allegedly involved in writing an August 1966 memorandum outlining the creation of paramilitary groups, and the U.S. military attach during this period publicly claimed credit for instigating their formation as part of "counterterror" operations." [8] At the later stages of this conflict the CIA tried with some success to lessen the human rights violations and in 1993 stopped a coup and helped restore the democratic government.[9]
Notes
- ^ Casper, Gretchen, and Claudiu Tufis. 2003. “Correlation Versus Interchangeability: the Limited Robustness of Empirical Finding on Democracy Using Highly Correlated Data Sets.” Political Analysis 11: 196-203.
- ^ Polity IV Data Sets
- ^ Polity IV Country Reports 2003:Guatemala
- ^ "Guatemala Enlists Religion in Battle", Raymond Bonner, New York Times, 18 July 1982. For a number of years, the U.S. State Department, in its background notes on Guatemala, attributed this quotation to Gen. Ríos Montt himself. See: Background Note: Guatemala, April 2001 via the Internet Archive.
- ^ Jonas, Susanne. Democratization through Peace: The Difficult Case of Guatemala. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 42, No. 4, Special Issue: Globalization and Democratization in Guatemala (Winter, 2000)
- ^ Report on the Guatemala Review Intelligence Oversight Board. June 28, 1996.
- ^ Do the sums, then compare US and Communist crimes from the Cold War Telegraph, 11/12/2005, Niall Ferguson
- ^ The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power. Contributors: Susanne Jonas - author. Publisher: Westview Press. Place of Publication: Boulder, CO. Publication Year: 1991. Page Number: 70.
- ^ Report on the Guatemala Review Intelligence Oversight Board. June 28, 1996.
See also
- List of civil wars
- MINUGUA: United Nations verification/peacekeeping mission in Guatemala, 1994-2004
External links
- Key texts and agreements in the Guatemalan peace process
- Guatemala Memory of Silence report by the Historical Clarification Commission (Truth Commission)