Guatemala's New Regime
KILLINGSWORTH, MARK R.
WALKING A TIGHTROPE Guatemala's New Regime By Mark R. Killingsworth Guatemala City "Mr. President," Wayne Morse told the Senate during this summer's debate on the foreign aid bill,...
...only about one high-school-age-child in five is enrolled in secondary school...
...Mark R. Killingsworth, editor of the Michigan Daily, has returned from an extended visit in Guatemala...
...But the overall outlook for the country is not as dreary as the severity of its immediate problems make it appear...
...and in contrast to the debacle in Santo Domingo, where our Embassy maintained only sporadic contact with the Left, the Embassy here under Ambassador John Gordon Mein kept in close touch with Mendez and other PR leaders...
...Although he is receptive to aid, Mendez has emphasized that "we will start by working with public opinion in our own country to solve our own problems...
...This spring, Rebel Armed Forces (RAF) leader Luis Augusto Turcios had rejected a government offer of amnesty for the two guerrilla groups (RAF and the 13th of November movement), predicted that Guatemalan Army leaders would overthrow Mendez, and vowed to seize power himself...
...With prices remaining low on coffee and cotton, Guatemala's major exports, and with rising imports and production costs, he resolved to place a flat ban on some luxury imports and a stiff tax on others, despite protests from local merchants...
...But the Right's failure to accommodate the Communists in the spring may yet be redeemed...
...aid alone can accomplish here in the long run...
...We don't think all our problems will be solved in four years," Mendez recently told me...
...Tax reforms proposed by the Bank of Guatemala were rejected in a meeting of Peralta's Cabinet, where one minister could veto any proposal...
...Two government agencies, for example, are assigned to help the Indians, but instead spend most of their time jockeying for bureaucratic advantage with each other...
...Morse quoted an article implying that the country's recent elections would do little to solve the problems evaded by the dictatorship of Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia: "'Growing hopelessness' and 'an apathetic and disillusioned people,' " said the Oregon Senator, "these are the results of the roughly $15 million a year in aid we have been extending to the Peralta junta...
...Last week Deleon and Morales, held since May 4, were released in exchange for a guerrilla leader, as Mendez de la Riva had been exchanged earlier...
...doing something for as opposed to doing something with a country...
...He didn't want economic aid, and we couldn't pull out our military aid because of the Communist guerrilla threat...
...Perhaps 75 per cent of the country's 4.2 million people are illiterate (about 90 per cent among the Indians, who comprise 60 per cent of the population...
...Only half the country's primary-school-age children can be accommodated in present school facilities...
...Official statistics indicate a studentteacher ratio of about 30-1, but the actual figure is said to be more like 80-1 because the government's statistics count the "bicycle" teachers once for each of the several schools they serve daily...
...While their purely economic role was tolerated under Peralta, the unions suffered continued harrassment for political activities, real or imagined...
...Unlike the Peralta dictatorship, which could rule by decree, Mendez is going to have to steer his program through the new national Congress...
...Although the United States did give the Guatemalans almost $ 180 million between 1954-61, our aid has since been reduced to less than $10 million yearly...
...Then a member of Castillo Armas' own palace guard shot him, and, after a period of confusion and intrigue, Colonel Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes eventually took over in 1957 and ushered in a period of further deterioration...
...While apprehensive at first about the dangers and uncertainties of Guatemalan politics and reluctant to leave San Carlos, Mendez soon began "acting like a Presidential candidate," as one Guatemalan put it...
...Only the ministers of labor and interior are PR members, and the defense minister is a highly-respected professional military man who served in the Peralta regime...
...The most urgent problem is a $40 million deficit in its balance of payments that forced Mendez to seek a $15 million standby commitment from the International Monetary Fund and to impose unpopular austerity measures...
...Peralta ended some of the corruption and embarked on an austerity program, but his most important accomplishment was the election of a constituent assembly, which wrote a new constitution and provided for Presidential elections last March...
...Dean of the University of San Carlos law school where he had taught since a short and unhappy stint with the government in 1949, Mendez was enjoying the academic life when his brother Mario, the PR's leader, was found dead, an apparent suicide...
...The income tax exempts agricultural enterprises altogether, and personal and industrial deductions are generous...
...The Institutional Democratic Party, formed to back Peralta's Presidential candidate, has been working more or less in coalition with the PR and has gotten the chairmanships of three Congressional committees...
...Administration officials in Washington also told Richard Eder of the New York Times that they favored Mendez' election...
...State Department decided conclusively against him...
...He'd promised free elections and he was going to have them.' The U.S...
...To further complicate matters, the government always encounters trouble imposing or collecting taxes...
...An American observer admits wryly: "Frankly, Peralta is the man to thank for the elections...
...After decades as a United Fruit Company feif, Guatemala in 1944 began electing a succession of vaguely Leftist Presidents, culminating in the 1950 election of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, whose government was increasingly dominated by Communists...
...All in all, even with an export tax on items like coffee and cotton, the government tax burden is only 8 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP...
...official, "even the Guatemalans had to laugh...
...Peralta was able to prevent a group of military dissidents from blocking Mendez' election only because they lacked support from units in the city...
...The Communists were demoralized by the failure of the Right to live up to their expectations and by Mendez' offer of another amnesty immediately on assuming office...
...His budget, to be promulgated in November, will give the first detailed indication of the program he will submit to a skeptical Congress...
...The economy, partly out of its doldrums of the 1950s and early '60s, is at present growing at an annual rate of above 5 per cent...
...couldn't have gotten anything out of him by itself...
...And overshadowing its economic and social problems is the country's pandemonic political situation, which Mendez must improve if his Administration is to survive...
...Accordingly, though he is doing some hand-holding with anxious conservatives in his own party and out, Mendez plans to promote his programs vigorously in Congress in order to pacify PR Leftists and the country's restive Indian rural proletariat...
...Mendez is Guatemala's first opposition Presidential candidate actually to assume office...
...In addition to the immediate economic squeeze, Mendez faces the generic problems of underdevelopment...
...One report indicates that between 1959-64 Guatemala signed agreements for $52 million in development money and actually used only $34 million...
...It is a distinction rarely made, but is often the difference between welfare colonialism and development...
...The reductions came not because of American stinginess or democratic scruples but because of Peralta's unwillingness to accept or incapacity to use anything more on our terms...
...The conservative establishment will be difficult to deal with, particularly on taxes, and the obsessively "antiCommunist" Army poses a Damoclean danger for the Mendez regime...
...Embassy however did stress the importance of free elections and encouraged the presence of the scores of newsmen who came in March to cover them...
...Mendez is thus assailed from all sides by domestic difficulties...
...Ydigoras is said to have sold his U.S...
...Reflecting his difficulties within the PR, Mendez' Cabinet is largely made up of apolitical technicians...
...Though he failed to gain an absolute majority against the two other candidates, both of them colonels and one the official candidate of the Peralta government, Mendez was finally elected in May by the Congress, where his PR has 30 of the 55 seats...
...President," Wayne Morse told the Senate during this summer's debate on the foreign aid bill, "Guatemala is another example of the futility of the American 'aid the dictators' policy in Latin America we have not only befriended them, we hasten to bestow millions of dollars of American financial and military support on them...
...Morse's observations about the Tennessee-sized Central American country, however, are more ironic than revealing...
...But this necessary program will not necessarily be enacted...
...Sinecures abound, procurement is chaotic, and while the $155 million national budget is ostensibly a "program budget," one economist says it is actually a "pot for the government to dip into," (as it did last December for an unplanned, unbudgeted $2 million Christmas bonus for its employes...
...The absence of any planned, coordinated, intelligent leadership is the problem, not some excess of action," one observer comments...
...Arbenz put the country back five years, and the 'liberation' put it back another five," comments one Guatemalan liberal...
...A U.S...
...If someone really took charge here things would begin to improve dramatically...
...In 1963 the Armed Forces intervened again, toppling Ydigoras and putting Peralta in his place...
...his Revolutionary Party (PR) is the only Guatemalan political group with a relevant conception of how to treat the country's problems...
...He stresses the difference between the U.S...
...Another problem contributing to the dearth of skilled workers is the impotence of the labor unions, which were destroyed or pushed underground during the 1957-63 dictatorship of Colonel Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes...
...machine guns, bought less expensive Czech models, and pocketed the difference...
...Two months after his taking office the situation in the country is still precarious...
...Later that year a group of soldiers of fortune led by Colonel Carlo Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA invaded Guatemala from Honduras and toppled Arbenz...
...This, development experts contend, is much too low to increase public investment, which itself has slid from about 6.5 per cent of the GNP in 1957 to about 3 per cent today...
...The new Administration's success, of course, will largely depend on Mendez himself, who though effective so far remains an unknown political quantity...
...Indeed, teacher training is the most serious educational deficiency...
...Besides increasing political unrest and worsening economic conditions (Guatemala's economic growth rate per capita from 1958-63 was actually negative), Ydigoras was noted for corruption so blatant that in the words of one U.S...
...Since 1946, less than 50 teachers have graduated from San Carlos, the country's university...
...Local legend also has it that he and his cronies bought PT boats so decrepit most of them sank before they reached Guatemala...
...The situation worsened early in 1954 when the Guatemalan government began receiving arms from Poland...
...Unemployment and underemployment are severe, and with two-thirds of the jobs still in agriculture only about 150,000 workers in the 1.5 million labor force are protected by the country's minimum wage laws...
...The main obstacle to use of the aid, according to one official, is "an administrative complex so long and involved and damned incompetent it staggers you...
...The U.S...
...Ironically, as the figures on Guatemala's aid usage suggest, there is relatively little that U.S...
...aid expert here has suggested, moreover, that "we might well close down half the primary and secondary schools in the country-because the number who finally graduate is so small-and focus on higher education instead...
...For the time being, he is confident that the Army will oppose coups either from the Left or from its own ranks...
...An official confessed sadly, "We have problems everywhere, but nothing as bad as this...
...The guerrillas clearly had been counting on Peralta to nullify or prevent Mendez' election and thus precipitate political chaos in which they could seize power in a lightening-fast golpe or coup...
...Labor leaders attending a United States Embassy-sponsored seminar were later hunted down and arrested for participating in a "Communist cell meeting...
...In 1953, when the Arbenz regime expropriated most of United Fruit's holdings, the U.S...
...Mendez now appears to have reached a private understanding with the military leaders, gaining their support in return for kind consideration of their numerous perquisites (over half the officers are colonels, the highest rank and pay level...
...But we hope to work on them so that in four years the next President will be able to continue what we started.' If Mendez can achieve this modest goal, it will be a milestone in Guatemala's history...
...It was just a point of honor with the old man...
...Over the last six months they have kidnapped several high government officials, including Hector Mendez de la Riva, a Congressional Vice President, Baltasar Morales de la Cruz, a press secretary, and Romeo Augusto Deleon, the former President of the Supreme Court...
...The extreme Left, small in number but highly organized and ruthlessly efficient, will make progress very difficult and sometimes sanguinary...
...Many of Guatemala's difficulties have been caused not by mistaken government policies but by the lack of government policy...
...Most economists are confident that with its favorable position in the fast developing Central American Common Market, Guatemala ultimately could shoulder more longterm debt...
...As Morse's speech suggests, generalizations about Guatemala are often misleading-except one: It is in crisis...
...While the Embassy had to put out a hurried denial when the story appeared, "We got the reputation of being Mendez supporters," one Embassy official admitted cheerily later...
...And while the Administration of Julio Cesar Mendez-Montenegro inaugurated on July 1 faces a fiercely difficult future, the aftermath of the election gives grounds for hope...
...Hence Mendez' path is a tightrope between Army and democrat, liberal and conservative, bureaucracy and innovation, caution and reform, disillusion and hope...
...Even making USE of foreign aid poses difficulties...
...The Communists have made bombs, grenades, gunfire and roadblocks common through much of the country, particularly in the capital...
...Another recent report notes that Guatemala probably has the lowest rate of aid "drawdown" (actual use of aid agreements signed) in the world...
Vol. 49 • September 1966 • No. 18
