Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

History of Guatemala

An Account of Guatemala’s History: Mayan Empire-Present Day

By Aimee Haag

Whether walking around Guatemala City, driving through the mountains, or visiting quaint Antigua, the faces of Guatemala’s people, the walls of old buildings, and the mountainsides in the highlands show signs of Spanish conquest and influence as well as years of political repression and instability. The foothills blanketed in a patchwork of small family plots demonstrate the importance of land and nature to Guatemala’s indigenous and rural populations. Political graffiti still dots the hillsides and highways, much of it painted over by white, peace signs, gang symbols, or other opposing political parties. Everywhere you look, there is a sign of long-lasting struggle but also vibrant colors and a strong hope for change among Guatemala’s people.

Despite the resources and economic potential of the country, Guatemalans have become accustomed to inherent inequality, clandestine groups that threaten security, poor land reform and preservation policies, as well as a social, political, and economic hierarchy that has perpetuated conflict and poverty for far too many Guatemalans.

Attracted to the area for its precious metals, mainly gold and silver, the Spanish arrived unaware of the powerful Maya and strong resistance. The Spanish Conquest of the Yucatán brought an end to the Mayan Empire that had ruled the region for much longer than 1000 years before the Spanish arrival in the early 16 th century. Pedro de Alvarado, a Spanish conquistador, made Guatemala a colony in 1523.1

The influence of Spanish colonization can still be traced across the country today. From architecture to politics, some of their systems still flourish. The Spanish brought religion and disease and left their footprints on the structure of how politics, economics, and culture is revered in Guatemala. “Many factors,” according to Latin America Geography Magazine, “warfare, culture shock, ruthless exploitation, slavery, forced migration, and resettlement were responsible for the Maya demise and worked together in horrific, fatal unison.” From 1520-1770 the Maya population dropped from 2 million to 220,500 as a result of the Spanish approach in Guatemala.2 The ideas of indigenous inferiority and the premonitions of ethnic and social cleansing perhaps had their roots in these systems of Spanish dominance across the region. Beginning with the conquest and continuing through the duration of the civil war, members of rural society were victims of political violence.

In 1821, Guatemala declared its independence from Spain. The nation gave its new independence up quickly and joined the Mexican Empire and soon formed the United Provinces of Central America, also known as the Federal Republic of Central America. An internal conflict between what are now the nations of Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala brought an end to the Republic.

Enough was enough. In 1871 there was a Liberal Revolution taking place in Guatemala led by Justo Rufino Barrios. Under his watch, Guatemala modernized its economic sector by supporting more trade, beginning to manufacture goods, and introducing the coffee plant. He was killed in battle in the fight to reunite Central America in 1885.3

President Jorge Ubico was democratically elected in 1931, but his power position quickly became a dictatorship. As an agricultural country with ties to the United States, the Great Depression hit Guatemala intensely. Nonetheless, Ubico’s government pushed on and stimulated coffee growth and exports while providing the necessary infrastructure to recover. He is credited for advancing the nation’s finances, but his economic development policies only made the rich richer and the poor poorer, assisting the upper and land owning classes of Guatemala.4 It was Ubico’s presidency that transformed the United Fruit Company from a strong foreign investor to Guatemala’s most important enterprise.

A military junta carried out a coup against President Ubico resulting in a democratic election. In 1944, Juan José Arévalo Bermejo won the election with a sweeping 85% of the popular vote and became the first freely elected president of Guatemala to complete his full term in office. Social progress had brought Guatemala closer to a welfare state supporting the universality of freedom and change stressing literacy, education, and unions.5

As the Cold War developed after World War II, tension grew not only between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also with the developing world, including Guatemala. With the United States’ eyes focused on Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was freely elected in 1951. He continued the reforms of the former President and took them to another level, nationalizing more privately owned industries and enacting policies that redistributed the land of large landowners to Guatemalans so that they could provide for their families and make a living off the land. One of these plantations was the United Fruit Company, which had several ties to the CIA and members of the Senate and executive branch.6 Three years after Arbenz was elected President, he was overthrown by a CIA sponsored coup in 1954. With communism spreading west, the United States feared an established base in the western hemisphere and deemed it necessary to remove the Arbenz government. The United States began supporting Guatemala’s military with training and supplies shortly thereafter.7

Carlos Castillo Armas replaced Arbenz in 1954, allowing for deeper penetration of the CIA in covert operations concerning the Guatemalan people including the operation code named PBSUCCESS.8 Despite Guatemala’s previously functioning democracy, Armas halted the country’s social progress through his dedication to his alliance with the United States. As a nation, the people were quickly sliding down the slippery slope to civil war. Armas “cancelled” previous laws that called for land reform and established the National Committee of Defense Against Communism (NCDAC), Latin America’s first modern-day death squad, under direction of the CIA. Death squads such as the NCDAC and secret police killed left-wingers, citizens affiliated with labor or trade unions, communist suspects, and banned opposing political parties a well as peasant organizations. Armas was assassinated by a member of his own guard in 1958.9

Understandably, Guatemalans had lost sight of the once emerging welfare state and were aggravated, angry, and confused. The 1960s were characterized by the uprising of guerrilla groups and frequent political coups subjecting Guatemalans to heightened political violence and instability. The people were plagued by fear and armed opposition boomed across the countryside. In 1966, Julio César Méndez Montenegro was elected from the center left as the new President of Guatemala. It was during his rule, however, that the presence of death squads became more serious and disappearances increased.10 In response, the Green Berets, or Special Forces of the United States military, then came to Guatemala to train its military in counterinsurgency tactics making it the most sophisticated armed forces of the time in Central America.

The fraudulent elections, coups, and instability of the 1960s continued into the following decade. The guerilla movement was born in the 1970s, as the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA) began to stand up against the military and many civilians supporting the military. As guerrilla violence increased, so did that of the military. Violence was widespread. Economic disparity increased as villages were burned and land stolen. Thousands had disappeared and even more had fled. President Jimmy Carter ended all military aid to Guatemala due to its growing reputation of human rights abuse in 1977.11

The civil war had a snowball affect that only the people of Guatemala can perceive. Each overthrow, each election, each transition brought more hardship and negative change to the table while perpetuating the systematic abuse and neglect of its people. The 1980s became the apex of conflict as the torture and rural violence quickly escalated. In 1980, a group of Quiché Maya protested the massacres in rural Guatemala by occupying the Spanish Embassy. In what the Guatemala government claimed to be the result of the Quiché occupation, all protesters were killed and burned by the fire at the Embassy. The Spanish ambassador who survived the attack testified that it was indeed the military responsible for the murder and setting the Embassy ablaze to hide its actions. The case is still in contention today, over 25 years later.

As the war reached its bloodiest moments, the government was overthrown in 1982 and Efraín Ríos Montt was named president of the military junta in control. Former military general and President Efraín Ríos Montt was a School of the Americas graduate and right-wing Christian evangelist. He was responsible for the implementation of the “scorched earth” policies, or slash-and-burn, leaving villages and fields destroyed. According to Oxfam America, the violence in 1982 was dismantling indigenous society and the agrarian ways of life forcing so many of the Maya to seek other methods of survival.12 The statistics gathered by the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG) show the period of 1980-1983, a period dominated by the Ríos Montt government, to be the worst years for human rights violations with 41,187, including almost 20,000 deaths. In 1982 the total number of reported massacres was 192, almost two times as many as the previous year (102) and ten times as many as the following year (23).13 Because of the need for great guerrilla force, the Guatemala National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) was formed as a coalition of other guerilla groups, namely EGP, ORPA, the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and the Guatemalan Workers Party (PGT), to combat Ríos Montt. At that point, 45,000 had fled into Mexico seeking refuge in nearby Chiapas.14

Despite the murderous and bloody reputation of Ríos Montt, the United States continued its support throughout his presidency as it had and continued to do so afterward despite Jimmy Carter’s withdrawal of military funding. The United States offered support by means from the CIA and military members on base in Guatemala to the School of the Americas to support in presidential elections for anti-communist candidates.15 In 1981, Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Jr., suspected Guatemala was the next country after El Salvador to be pursued into communism by the Soviets. The United States invested $221 million, twice the amount invested in El Salvador, to combat communist threats.16 In 1983, President Reagan promoted Ríos Montt’s success regarding his “advances” in controlling the situation on the ground in Guatemala. Reagan said he was “a man of great personal integrity” who was “totally dedicated to democracy,” according to Human Rights Watch.17 Meanwhile, the international community was pressing to bring charges of genocide against him, a case also still in contention.

General Óscar Humberto MejíaVictores, who declared amnesty for the guerilla fighters, ousted Montt in another military junta. A new constitution was established under a constitutional assembly bringing about yet another election. Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo was democratically elected in 1986. There was a failed attempt to overthrow him in 1989.

The 1990s began with another authoritarian President, Jorge Serrano Elias, elected in 1991. His rule brought protests and a seemingly usual overthrow in 1993. In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a woman from the Quiché tribe of the Maya who had spent much of the civil war organizing communities to rise up against the military while border hopping from Mexico to Guatemala, frequently for her own security, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.18 Peace talks, which had begun during the 1980s, continued throughout the 1990s. After years of negotiation and compromise, the two groups signed the 1996 Peace Accords under President Álvaro Arzú and supervision of the United Nations. 19 Approximately 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared from 1960-1996.20

After the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, some might say that the struggle had just begun. After 36 years of repression and instability, Guatemalans were eager for the truth and cried out for answers. The Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala began collecting testimonies from victims of the internal armed conflict, gradually bringing more stories to their study. The result, in 1999, became known as Guatemala Never Again! The Recovery of Historical Memory Project also known as the REMHI Report. Monseñor Juan Gerardi referred to the report as an effort to open the Guatemalan people up again, “Peace is possible—a peace that is born from the truth that comes from each one of us. It is a painful truth, full of memories of the country’s deep and bloody wounds. It is a liberating and humanizing truth…”21

Today, despite social cleansing efforts throughout the civil war, the indigenous population still comprises about 50% of the total population in Guatemala, a task not easily achieved by most of the world’s indigenous populations.22 However, the indigenous people still face challenges as the respect for land rights continues to plummet.

Indeed, some wounds were healed and the truth about many human rights abuses came forward. However, thousands remain unaccounted for, as do the stories of so many people. Speaking out against the civil war was still difficult and feared because many of the military officers and politicians remained the same after the end of the war. Implementation of the Peace Accords has been less than perfect in regards to indigenous protection, militarization, agrarian issues, and respect for human rights. The road to recovery has been long and hard.

Today, the same issues from the late-1990s dominate concerns in Guatemala. Guatemala’s membership in the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) was announced in June 2006 despite activists’ disapproval. Rural development has failed forcing many families off their land through evictions.

Despite hope for development and advancement, Guatemala remains far from a successful state to international eyes and the standards laid out by the 1996 Peace Accords. This year it landed a spot on the “failed states” list of Foreign Policy’s “Failed States Index 2007.”23 The National Civil Police (PNC) has failed to answer the commands of society. The PNC remains small and incapable of controlling the state, landing it the sixth spot in most deadly countries outside of war in the world.24 Likewise, gang violence shows a 327% increase from 1992-2005.25 Political threats and killings are still commonplace. Most recently, lynching has become a means to bring justice to civilians as the population loses trust in the PNC. Guatemala is the worst in the world in terms of forest depletion, losing 120,000 or more acres a year putting the incredible biodiversity of the nation at severe risk.26

The nation has returned within the last three or four years to a state where human rights defenders should and do fear for their lives, a place where the people have unfortunately taken justice into their own hands. The Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA will continue to educate the international community about human right violations within the country, encourage action to support those who have been violated, and ultimately foster respect for human rights in Guatemala. The hopes and dreams of so many rest on our willingness to work for the greater good.

1 Thomas T. Veblen. “Native Population Decline in Totonicapan, Guatemala.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 67 No. 4. Association of American Geographers, 1977: 488.

2 George W. Lovell & Christopher H. Lutz. “A Dark Obverse: Maya Survival in Guatemala, 1520-1994.” Latin American Geography. Vol. 86 No. 3. American Geographical Society, 1996: 398-407.

3 BBC News. Timeline: Guatemala. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1215811.stm.

4Frank E. Smitha. “Guatemala into the 1950s.” MacroHistroy. http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch24guat5.html.

5 Jean-Marie Simon. Guatemala: Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny. W.W.Norton & Company, NY, 1987: p.20-21.

6Ibid.

7 Richard H. Immerman. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. University of Texas Press, 1982: 68-70

8 Stephen M. Streeter. “Interpreting the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: Realist, Revisionist, and Postrevisionist Perspectives.” Society for the History of Education, Vol. 34, No.1. November 2000: 61-74.

9 Michael Stohl, David Carleton, Steven E. Johnson. Human Rights and U. S. Foreign Assistance from Nixon to Carter.” Journal of Peace Research. Vol. 21 No. 3. Sage Publications Ltd,’ 1983: 218.

10 Jean-Marie Simon. Guatemala: Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny. W.W.Norton & Company NY, 1987: p. 24.

11Manoj K. Joshi. “The Human Rights Phase of Foreign Policy.” Social Scientist Magazine. Vol. 10 No. 6, June 1982: 38-50.

12 Shelton H. Davis and Julie Hodson. Witness to Political Violence in Guatemala. Oxfam America, p.19-20. Oxfam America: 1982

13Guatemala Never Again!Recovery of Historical Memory Project. Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999: 302-303.

14Gil Loescher. “Humanitarianism and Politics in Central America.” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 103 Vol. 2. The Academy of Political Science, Summer 1988: 298-299.

15 “A Killing Field in the Americas: US Foreign Policy in Guatemala.” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.html.

16 Marlis Simons. “Guatemala: The Coming Danger.” Foreign Policy Magazine. Summer, 1981. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981: 93-103.

17 Daniel Wilkinson. “Party to Mass Murder?” Human Rights Watch. 8 November 2003. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/11/08/grenad12953.htm.

18 Rigoberta Menchú Tum. The Nobel Foundation, 1992. Irwin Abrams, World Scientific Publishing Co. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1992/tum-bio.html.

19 Guatemala Commission for Historical Clarification. Guatemala Memory of Silence:Peace Reconciliation. http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html.

20 Ginger Thompson. “U.S. Will End Ban on Military Aid to Guatemala.” International Herald Tribune, 25 March 2005. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/25/news/guate.php.

21Guatemala Never Again!Recovery of Historical Memory Project. Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999: xxv.

22 BBC News. Country Profile: Guatemala. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/

23 “Failed States Index 2007.” Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3865&page=7

24 “Violent Deaths.” http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map291_ver5.pdf.

25 Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA (GHRC). Guatemala Human Rights UPDATE, Vol.17 No.14. July 29, 2005- August 15, 2005.

26 Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA (GHRC). Guatemala Human Rights UPDATE, Vol.17 No. 23. December 15, 2005- January 3, 2006.

 

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