The Battle For Guatemala

Rebels, Death Squads, And U.s. Power

Susanne Jonas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a contemporary history of Guatemala's thirty-year civil war, evaluating the central protagonists in the turbulent battle for Guatemala—rebels, death squads, and the United States power.

PART 1
Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1944–1970

1
Legacies of the Past: 1524-1944

On October 20, 1944, with the uprising of students, workers, and young army officers, Guatemala began its transformation into a “modern” country. Before analyzing this transformation, I shall briefly summarize the evolution of the “old order” that was overthrown by the October Revolution. Of necessity, this summary will be schematic and overly general; my goal is not to analyze pre-1944 Guatemala as I have done elsewhere (Jonas 1974) and others have done far more completely,¹ but simply to set the stage for the modern and contemporary eras that are the subject of this book.

Contemporary Guatemalan underdevelopment is the product of a 450-year process that began with the Spanish conquest. Pre-Hispanic indigenous Guatemala was by no means “primitive”; what the Spaniards found in 1524 was a complex, stratified proto-class society, torn by multiple social tensions. Further, it was a society in transition; had it not been interrupted by the conquest, it might well have developed, although in a different direction, into a society as sophisticated as Western Europe.

At no time before the conquest did the Indians suffer the systematic material deprivation that has characterized Guatemala since 1524. Malnutrition was not a chronic condition of the Indian population, as it is today. Prior to 1524, Guatemala was a primarily agricultural society in which land was cultivated both individually and communally to produce food and other necessities. Guatemalan society was not integrated on a subordinate basis into a world market that determined its production priorities and systematically channeled its surplus into the pockets of foreign ruling classes. In this sense, underdevelopment as we know it today did not exist in Guatemala prior to 1524, but is the direct outcome of the conquest and the integration of Guatemala into an expanding world capitalist system.

The conquest itself represented the violent clash of two socioeconomic systems and two cultures; the forcible “integration” of the Indians into “Western civilization” was an unmitigated calamity for them of genocidal proportions. The total cost of the conquest in human lives is difficult to determine: Although Bartolomé de Las Casas’s figure of 4-5 million Indian deaths in Guatemala between 1524 and 1540 may be exaggerated, its thrust is accurate. An estimated two-thirds to six-sevenths of the Indian population in Central America and Mexico died between 1519 and 1650, as a consequence not only of the conquest per se but also of subsequent raging disease epidemics.

In the colonial experience, which lasted from 1524 to 1821, lie the seeds of contemporary Guatemalan underdevelopment and dependency. After 1524 economic, social, and political priorities came to be determined by the needs and interests of the dominant classes in Spain. This dependent relation to Spain—which was on the defensive, subordinate to other countries in the international capitalist market, and jealously protecting its colonies from encroachment by other European powers— meant that the fluctuations and depressions in the Spanish economy reverberated sharply in Guatemala. It also established the complementary nature of the Guatemalan economy: production based on Spanish rather than Guatemalan needs and varying with the ups and downs of international market demand. Finally, productive activities were now part of a system that defined wealth not in terms of its direct use to producers or buyers, but in terms of surplus accumulation to enrich the Spanish state, the merchant class in Spain, and its counterpart in the colony. The dominant sector of the merchant class, the urban counterpart of the landed criollo (Spanish settler) elite, monopolized export/import relations with Spain; it constituted the embryo of a dependent bourgeoisie, dominant within Guatemala, yet dependent on the international market.

In addition to maintaining a trading monopoly, Spain imposed strict monetary controls, an elaborate series of taxes on colonial settlers, and tribute on Indian communities. In short, for the dominant classes in Spain, Guatemala was not a colony to be developed but a source of wealth to be extracted for the benefit of the peninsula.

The land remained the primary source of wealth, and one pillar of colonial society was the land tenure system. Colonial relations were defined largely by the Spaniards’ expropriation of land from the indigenous population. The colonial period saw the beginning of a pattern of land concentration in the hands of a small minority, although this was greatly intensified in the nineteenth century. Large privately owned estates, or haciendas, were organized for large-scale cash-crop production for profit. The other pattern that was definitively established was monoexport, the use of large extensions of land to produce one or two exports for the world market. The particular export changed over time (from cacao, to indigo and cochineal dyes for the British textile industry, to coffee and bananas), but the basic structure of the mono-export economy remained constant.

The hacienda system involved vast expanses of unused land, permitting the owners to operate inefficiently. Complementary to the large tracts of good land appropriated by the criollos in key areas of the country were Indian communities—not the natural groupings of the pre-Hispanic era but social units created by and for the benefit of the dominant class. Within these communities, land was parceled out to be worked by Indians in their “time off” from the hacienda (i.e., off-season). Thus was born the latifundia-minifundia system (large underutilized rural estates surrounded by tiny plots used for subsistence), which dominated the Guatemalan political economy for centuries.

The colonial system required only a limited amount of capital; its basic resource was forced Indian labor. This took a number of different forms. Formal slavery was not definitively abolished until after independence, in the 1820s, but it applied principally to blacks imported from Africa to compensate for shortages of Indian labor. The indigenous population was subjected to other forms of forced labor and debt peonage, all of which served the purpose of subjugating the Indians and compelling them to produce an economic surplus.

These methods of organizing the work force were maintained by coercion and terror. Violent abuse of the indigenous population became routine, essential to making the system work. Class exploitation was facilitated in Guatemala because of the racial divide between Indians and criollos. The latter justified their dominance over a captive labor force through the racist ideology of criollo superiority, which denied the humanity of the indigenous population. Justification for the system also came from the Catholic church: While deploring the most flagrant cruelties, the church functioned as a part of the Spanish state apparatus and provided the ideological underpinning for the pacification and cultural subjugation of the Indians (see Chea 1988).

Nevertheless, in some respects the conquest was never consummated. Particularly in the highlands areas, the Indians discovered numerous forms of resistance and self-defense—not only periodic uprisings which had to be put down by military force, but also abandonment of the “communities” into which they had been forcibly concentrated, refusal to work hard, and maintenance of their own religious and cultural traditions.

A final, crucial mainstay of this violent system was the subjugation and exploitation of Indian women, which often took the form of rape. This became, in fact, one source of racial intermixing, from which originated Guatemala’s ladino population. Beyond its definition as Spanish-speaking and culturally Westernized, the ladino identity is one of the most elusive elements of Guatemalan society. The ladinos have sometimes been defined as neither criollo nor Indian. Seeking to enter the elusive world of the criollos, they easily adopted the criollo values (competition, individualism, accumulation of wealth). Their alienation (self-denial) and individualism contrasted markedly with the surviving Indian values of community and communal labor. Economically, the majority of ladinos were neither property owners nor forced laborers, but landless free laborers, initially in a constant struggle for survival, working either on haciendas for a wage or in the colonial towns. From the beginning, the urban ladinos were not a cohesive social class, but constituted the ranks of the urban poor and laborers, small artisans. Finally, there was an upper middle stratum, the embryo of an urban petty bourgeoisie whose economic advance into the criollo elite (landed or merchant) was blocked by the colonial structure.

In summary, by the time of independence, Spanish colonial policy had established the basic patterns of underdevelopment in Guatemala: mono-export, extreme concentration of wealth juxtaposed with extreme poverty, decapitalization (channeling of the economic surplus abroad or to a tiny local minority that was tied to overseas interests), lack of infrastructure, an impoverished state, a polarized class structure, and systematic oppression of the indigenous population.

By the early nineteenth century, severe economic crisis combined with natural disaster to produce discontent at all levels, from Indians to criollos. Moreover, nearly all sectors, each for its own reasons, came to view the colonial relationship to Spain as burdensome and unjust; by 1821, only the church hierarchy and representatives of the Spanish Crown opposed independence. Following the 1820 Indian uprising of Totoni-capán, the criollo elite declared independence in 1821—not only to end the colonial relation to Spain but also to maintain order and preempt social upheaval from below.

Independence brought little change in the old order; the basic economic and social structures of the colonial era and of the mono-export economy were left intact. The most important immediate change in the neocolonial era was a diversification of external contacts and the replacement of Spain with Britain as the dominant external commercial power.

Within Guatemala, power alternated between Liberals and Conservatives from 1821 to 1871. After the initial upheavals of the postin-dependence years, the Liberals consolidated power under Mariano Gálvez from 1831 to 1838, and the Conservatives from 1839 to 1871, during most of that period under the “dictadura criolla” of Rafael Carrera. The Conservatives represented latifundistas, the monopolistic merchant clique, the established church, and some artisan sectors. Conservatism stood for centralization in Central America, state-protected commercial monopolies, and preservation of colonial-era privileges of the church. The Carrera “dictatorship,” ironically, did more than the Liberal governments to protect lower-class indigenous interests (e.g., communal lands, some control over local government).

The Liberals represented a combination of criollo latifundistas, the incipient ladino petty bourgeoisie (including small and medium landowners), intellectuals, and ideological proindependence activists. Liberalism stood for federalism in Central America, free trade and laissez faire, and political reforms, including opposition to the privileged/ established position of the church; the Liberals also favored “developmental” reforms in the colonial structure that benefited the interests of ascendant ladinos but were especially harmful to Indian communities. In the end, despite their differences, both parties were dominated by the criollo elite.

After the long Conservative rule, the Liberals retook power through the 1871 military revolt led by Justo Rufino Barrios. Except for a brief democratic interlude in the early 1920s, the Liberals remained in power until the overthrow of dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. In class terms, their triumph represented the incorporation into the ruling strata of a new class of propertied ladinos (landowners and urban commercial interests) which had been on the rise during previous decades. The stimulus or opportunity for this adjustment in the internal power structure came not only from internal pressures (from the ladino upper middle class) but also from changes in the world market that gave them an economic base: specifically, the shift to a coffee economy. Their ascendance, concretized in the Liberal triumph, did not displace the old criollo elite, but challenged its exclusive power and forced an expansion of the dominant class.

The shift from a mono-export economy based on cochineal (no longer in demand since the invention of chemical dyes in the 1850s) to one based primarily on coffee necessitated basic transformations: (a) land tenure—coffee required far larger expanses of land than previous export crops, and ownership became markedly more concentrated in the hands of a few; (b) much larger concentrations of cheap labor than had been necessary for indigo and cochineal production; (c) expanded infrastructure, particularly transport and port facilities, more credit, and significant state support for private enterprise. The “reforms” carried out to meet these needs significantly modified colonial institutions and class relations, making them more exploitative.

The main sources of land in large concentrations required for coffee were the mass of church holdings, nationalized as part of the Liberal reform, and the lands expropriated from Indian communities and other small holders. Entire Indian communities that had previously survived were destroyed in what McCreery (1976) called this “massive assault upon village lands.” The vast reparceling of the land to new finqueros, owners of fincas, or large farms (some of whom were Guatemalan; some foreign, mainly German), greatly intensified the use of the best land for export crops. To the extent that Guatemala came to depend on coffee for foreign exchange earnings (92 percent by 1880), the entire economy was subjected to fluctuations in world demand and coffee prices. At the same time, by 1900, Guatemala became an importer of basic food staples and suffered periodic food shortages.

The “modernizing” Liberal ideology projected a more active role for the state in protecting and subsidizing (but never regulating or restricting) private enterprise and in encouraging foreign investment. The political expressions of increased and more centralized state power were dictatorship and coercion, particularly in regard to the mobilization of Indian labor to meet the coffee growers’ need for a cheap labor force and to build public works. The government took a much more active role in applying forced labor laws, and debt servitude became much more widespread and systematic, as Indians were forced into debt to guarantee cheap labor to coffee growers. In 1934, debt bondage was abolished, to be replaced by a vagrancy law that required all landless peasants (Indians and poor ladinos), not just those in debt, to work at least 150 days a year for private growers or for the state (for example, in public works construction). These systems of forced labor also brought the beginning of seasonal labor migrations, which kept down finqueros’ labor costs by making them responsible for maintenance of workers only during harvest seasons.

The full power of the state was used to enforce these “reforms,” with the Labor Department in 1934 becoming an adjunct of the National Police. Indians who resisted their “obligations” or left their fincas without permission were jailed. In short, Liberalism subjected the Indians to the institutionalized violence of a police state, and proved more efficient than previous governments at suppressing periodic revolts by highlands villages. As a consequence, as one historian points out, the Guatemalan army, which was fully established under the Liberal state, “came to see rural Guatemala as its particular preserve and reveled in its dominant position there . . . [and regarded as a threat] any attempt to alter that position and organize peasants or rural workers into independent associations” (Handy 1986b, 407). More generally, Liberalism greatly reduced the autonomy of indigenous communities and institutions, including their subsistence economy.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, there were also major changes in the capitalist world economy which affected Guatemala profoundly: the expansion of world capitalism, driven by the consolidation of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, and the monopolistic concentration of wealth in key sectors of the industrial economies, generating capital surpluses that needed outlets in profitable investments abroad. Monopolization resulted in more frequent and more profound crises within these countries, which were more easily resolved through overseas expansion than through domestic reform. Thus, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, monopolistic interests began to export capital as well as commodities and to seek increasing control over raw materials resources throughout the world. For Guatemala this meant a new kind of foreign investment, giving control over important productive sectors of the economy to foreign interests, and producing a new alliance between those interests and the Guatemalan bourgeoisie.

Finally, this same period saw the beginning of the definitive rise of the United States as a world power after the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of industrial capitalism domestically. The expansion of U.S. capital, as well as the influence of the U.S. government, became particularly important in Central America and the Caribbean. In Guatemala, U.S. imperialism took the form of three great monopolistic U.S. investments, invited in and given concessions to operate monopolistically by the Liberal state: The United Fruit Company (UFCo) totally monopolized banana production and became by far the largest landowner in Guatemala; its subsidiary, International Railways of Central America (IRCA), monopolized transport facilities; and Electric Bond and Share (EBS) totally controlled the country’s electrical facilities.

Until the mid-1940s, these three monopolies enjoyed unchallenged privileges in Guatemala: unlimited use (for twenty-five to ninety-nine years) of much of the country’s best land and of all Guatemala’s resources; exemption from taxes, from duties on all imports, and from all but a small export tax; unlimited profit remittances; freedom to construct new infrastructures, or to have the government do it for them; and nonregulation of their activities, including their labor practices. They operated truly as “states within a state,” exerting political power, additionally, to influence government policies decisively, to make and unmake rulers.

The key to the maintenance of this system was the very tight alliance between the Guatemalan oligarchy and U.S. interests. The Liberal regimes and the oligarchy they represented perceived an overwhelming compatibility between their interests and those of the U.S. investors—the same economic structure, the same political “stability” (dictatorship), and so on. In striking contrast to the larger Southern Cone countries of Latin America, Guatemala under the Liberals had no national bourgeoisie, no nationalistic development project, no import-substituting industrialization based on an internal market.

The power arrangements that prevailed in the Liberal order of the early twentieth century culminated in the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, who ran Guatemala from 1931 to 1944. Ubico came to power with overt U.S. support, having begun his career working closely with the Rockefeller Foundation and having attracted the interest of the U.S. State Department as early as 1919. U.S. maneuvering helped secure his election in 1930 against “undesirable” (nationalistic) candidates, and his reelection in 1936; the latter coincided with contract revisions and additional privileges to UFCo and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Foreword, Edelberto Torres Rivas
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1944–1970
• PART 2 Crisis, 1970-1990
• PART 3 Conclusion: An Unlighted Path Toward the Future
• List of Acronyms
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index