Spectator's Journal/implantations

...What were they afraid of...

...The account begins in January 1972, with the author and fourteen companions slipping into Guatemala from Mexico by night...

...Jungle Days...

...Peasants were organized into paramilitary units in ten of the country's 21 states or departments and by the end of 1981, with five key departments completely in rebel hands, confidence ran so high that a proclamation was issued announcing a final offensive that would end in the establishment of "New Guatemala...

...To their requests for rice, beans, salt, sugar, he would only repeat, "maca, maca...

...as the moment the War of the People began, the hour the Army of the Poor was born...

...National elections are scheduled for October, and in the capital the campaign is already underway...

...There was no other way...

...Payeras records these "vivas...

...Efram Rios Montt became head of state...

...Mingling with the crowd, one of the intruders moved close and shot him dead...

...To their consternation, "the villagers fled into the jungle as soon as they became aware of our presence...

...Soul searching of this kind discouraged the two Indian youths...

...The workers stood stock still, dumbfounded...

...They decided on a program of terror and targeted the first victim, one Luis Arenas, a notably unpopular coffee grower living three days' march from their base...

...At about the time of the Arenas murder, arms began to come into the country from Cuba through Mexico...

...I know, I was stationed there all during the 1970s...

...Then they heard the voice of one of the terrorists in what passed for their own Indian dialect, shouting that the poor were avenged, that justice had been done, that a new life was beginning for all...

...After all, a gun-toting priest was often killed before he could pull the trigger, as in the sad case of Camilo Torres of Colombia...

...They thank the army, even walking many miles to rally spontaneously in its favor...

...Rene Carballo, comman-dante of Guatemala's 14th Military Zone at Solola...

...Once underway, "complaints over the petty discomforts of the march showed how poor a commitment the boys had to our cause and by the third day, when water ran low, they were completely demoralized...

...Printed in Cuba in 1980, and far from being a political tract, Los Dias de la Selva is written with sensitivity and care for detail...

...In Chiantla, the mayor, whom 1 found supervising volunteer restoration work on a town hall the rebels had gutted, told me he had been astonished the day before to find several thousand farmers converging on the plaza below carrying banners proclaiming that this or that village was "with our army...

...two more wiped it out...

...Payeras calls the little camp "an implantation, the culmination of several years of feverish preparation abroad...

...In Mexico, yes...

...When it was over we were surprised to feel a sense of having matured...

...The majority of the guerrillas fled into Mexico, some to Nicaragua or El Salvador...

...Then in the spring of 1982 Gen...

...Several Communist cells in the capital had not prospered, and in the rich plantations along the coast workers remained indifferent...

...Their passage through the tangled growth was very slow since they dared not hack their way and leave a swath visible from the air...

...I was told about the book by Col...

...A student himself of the writings of Mao Tse-tung, he transformed the campaign by issuing a three-point order: Protect and feed non-combatants, destroy the guerrilas, and bring back into civilian life those peasants who had gotten involved with the rebels...

...It meant utter rejection by those people we had come to teach...

...I finally found it at a leftist bookseller's near the National University of Mexico...

...Before the end of the year what Chairman Mao had warned against happened: The guerrilla fish and the peasant sea had been separated...

...It must be pleasing to the exiles (no doubt Mario Payeras among them) who are biding time in Mexico City, Havana, and Managua to hear from travelers and to read in the newspapers that the professional politicians vying for office, none of whom went through what the Indians went through, and all of whom identify themselves to a greater or lesser degree with democratic liberalism, never discuss Communism or anti-Communism...

...It had taken three years for the implant called the EGP to begin to function...

...Above all, why were they indifferent to our message...

...For one with first-hand knowledge of the way things are in Guatemala, it comes as a jolt to return to Mexico City and its Foreign Press Club to find spread out on the giveaway table bulletins and even magazines published in the name of the EGP, ORPA, and FAR-as though no misfortune had struck and victory was just ahead...

...It is probable, for instance, that they will decide to move their base of operations to Guatemala City...

...At last the peasants had become involved...

...He also notes that by the time army parachutists combed the area, rounding up suspects, he and his little band were far away...

...After setting fire to the two miniature planes and raiding the food and ammunition stores they loaded their booty onto two police launches and set off up the Lacantun River...

...Attempts to implant socialism in eastern Guatemala nearly a decade earlier had come to nothing because no support could be found among the people...

...Action was needed...

...They could obtain food and even labor by force but not cooperation...

...True, there is no Marxist party on the lists, but that is just as well since voters would surely reject it...

...It was conceived not in the city slums or dusty villages of the home country, but in the bars and cafes of Mexico City...

...But as yet there was no war...

...A kind of trial was held and, Payeras says, "reluctantly, a death sentence was passed...

...One old man, too weak to flee, told them the name of the place was Rubelolom...

...When the other asked to be allowed to return to his family, the group became alarmed...

...Around campfires at night the fifteen continued to thrash out the baffling problem of maca...

...But their only brush with human beings came when two hunters passed their camp...

...It was a project the planners referred to unblushingly as an "implantation...

...No one would tell us where the paths led, where other villages were...

...Nearly a million men between 18 and 50 take turns watching village streets and mountain slopes to see that the terrorists don't come back, and they send petitions to the central government imploring that their "civilian auto-defense system" be allowed to continue...

...Finally reaching higher, cooler country they came on an occasional ranch or small village...

...Mainly Europeans, they worked to carry out CELAM's incitement program in the name of a new social order, more often than not ignoring the papal injunction on bearing arms...

...Would a new-born democracy dare tarnish its international media image by taking action to prevent it...

...Asked what they think about it, peasants express relief that the gunfire has stopped and the burden of serving the guerrilla has been lifted...

...You won't find it for sale here," he said...

...If, at the beginning of 1972 when the EGP was launched, no interest in rebellion was evident in any sector of Guatemala's highland regions, interest would have to be aroused...

...One slipped away in the night...

...Not until the spring of 1975, however, when another small band filtered in from Mexico to augment the ranks of Payeras's group, did they agree on what action to take...

...The EGP disappeared and along with it the parallel organizations initialed FAR and ORPA...

...Except for two Indian boys, who, the author says, "never understood why we were going through all this," the guerrillas were city-bred, unused to physical hardships...

...The exiles must read with delight each fresh indication that the military are impatient to get out of government, and they must experience positive thrills at the repeated urgings of the Catholic hierarchy that the civil defense system be abolished...

...That the hungry men raided the abandoned huts must be taken for granted...

...That it happened not through their own rebellion but through imposition of violence they could not control no one knows better than Mario Payeras...

...Upriver by morning they could hear the din of both Mexican and Guatemalan search planes overhead...

...The role of the priest, in what the bishops considered to be an urgently needed transformation of the social order, must be limited, therefore, to arousing the faithful, showing them how they were being exploited, and letting them take it from there...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL IMPLANTATIONS by Mary Ball Martinez A he Guatemalan Army of the Poor, known as the EGP and now happily extinct, was the invention of university-educated young men from well-off families...

...The formula was simple: To arouse the people they must provoke the army...

...Payeras, understandably, does not state the fact, but farmers in Huehuetenango will tell you that is what happened...

...By day they hunted pheasant and armadillo, taking frequent hikes into the steaming jungle in the hope of finding habitations...

...His Dias de la Selva bears out everything the Indian families of Huehuetenango and El Quiche told me when 1 spent a month among them last summer...

...Whichever of the listed parties comes out on top in October, the exiles can look forward to better days...

...But there was something of greater importance to the guerrilla cause than second-hand military hardware: the growing presence in the parishes of central and northwestern Guatemala of Marxist-minded Catholic priests...

...Payeras thought he knew the reason: "An organization created for war does not prosper in peace...

...Meanwhile, although these educated, no longer young men must reflect on the fact that their 20-year attempt to communize their country cost many thousands of lives and ended in failure, I think it safe to say that right now they are in a state of agreeable expectancy...

...Mexico apparently refused to become involved in the traffic, thus forcing Cuba to discontinue shipments...

...The next two years carried it to near triumph...

...When the strangers asked too many questions, the guerrilla band decided it was time to move on...

...Doubling its manpower the army met the rebel challenge, at first with conventional search and destroy methods which only brought tougher resistance...

...As the speaker's eloquence mounted, the workers' state of shock gradually turned into hysterical cheers...

...This time around the guerrillas were determined to give absolute priority to gaining the sympathy of the indigenous farmers of the western mountains...

...We tried to call them, then to run after them and catch them, but soon we found ourselves standing all alone in the middle of the only street...

...Invariably greeted with "maca" they regularly seized food at gunpoint...

...Payeras notes that if any of them had dared at that point to mention taking power and creating a new society, he would have been shouted down with obscenities...

...If the poor-in this case illiterate farmers- were unaware of what hurt them, the educated young men would be there to tell them...

...Before the liberating theologists could move in, however, ground had to be broken by professional revolutionaries, the college-bred terrorists...

...we let them go...

...One of their number, Mario Payeras, a founder of the EGP, has given a lucid account of the process in a little book of memoirs called Los Dias de la Selva Mary Ball Martinez reports frequently from Latin America for The American Spectator...

...Accordingly, they crept back to the frontier under cover of darkness and seized a small airfield belonging to the Mexican border patrol...

...At times they slogged through swamps up to their thighs...

...The men were acutely aware they had not a single contact in Guatemala, and they remembered the warning of Mao Tse-tung: The guerrilla without peasant support is like a fish without water...

...Imposed revolution spread quickly...

...A few of the Marxist leaders, a good many of their Indian trainees, and a number of foreign priests were killed...

...We knew it was useless to try to hold them...

...While an occasional terrorist ambush still occurs in the departments bordering Mexico, army men insist that subversion in Guatemala is finished...

...Payeras makes no mention of the fate of the border guards, who must have been overcome as they slept...

...Our thoughts went back to the defeat and death of Che Guevara in Bolivia where the lone, hunted guerrilla fighter lacked any base among the peasantry...

...In the high mountain village of San Mateo Ixtatan the parish priest, a Maryknoll from Idaho, told me the mayor was suspended by his jawbone for four hours until he agreed to order the villagers to work for the rebels and feed them...

...Put into practice this thesis spread bloodshed and chaos over much of Latin America...

...That this posthumous bravado fools reporters too lazy to travel to Guatemala is evident from the amount of misinformation circulating in Europe and America, and it probably gives comfort to the Guatemalan exiles who dream up the bogus contents as they await real news from their homeland...

...First, however, they felt they should alert their "cell" back in Mexico City with a terrorist act that would reach the media...

...they know the Indians can't be worked over a second time...

...But as members of the international leftist elite, they know that guerrilla warfare is not the only way to subvert a nation...

...The remaining men went on to the finca where they found Arenas handing out wages to several dozen farm hands...

...Food supplies were exhausted when the band finally reached a settlement...

...When Pope John Paul opened the proceedings in Puebla, Mexico by declaring that priests should stay clear of political action, the bishops were quick to agree...

...After a few months the flow stopped abruptly when a 60-ton truck was intercepted and its contents shown mostly to comprise American guns, gathered from the battlefields of Vietnam...

...We had to shoot him and we did it in the forest on a summer morning when all the birds were singing...

...This proposal of revolution from above was virtually the same as that which would emerge a few years later in the final sessions of CELAM, the Latin American Episcopal Conference...

...Other clandestine groups had entered the country, they knew, but there was no encouraging news from any part of Guatemala...

...Such impudence must have energized the armed forces, by then boycotted for four years by Washington and down to a token 10,000 men...

...Penetrating only far enough to be out of range of border patrols, they cleared ground for a small base, storing a modest supply of food and ammunition, cooking by campfire, and listening to radio news from nearby countries...

...We were better warriors now...

...Like an artificial heart, it was to be grafted onto the living flesh of the self-contained society that makes up the Indian half of the Guatemalan people, an operation the educated young men were convinced would do the Indians good...

...The guerrillas persuaded some thirty Indian youths to join them in this "mission to punish Arenas in the name of social justice...

...Their attention is turned now to the other Guatemala, the half that is mestizo and white, Western and modern...

...It tells the real story of how the subversion began in the northwest...

...They knew it was the Mayan word for "there isn't any," but, Payeras says, "it meant a much more terrible thing to us...

...Months came and went, but we could find no way to penetrate the consciousness of these people...

...They disembarked and set off into the jungle to begin what the author calls "the most terrible days" of marching from dawn to dusk, weighted down with provisions, bathed in sweat, and tortured by insects...

...Although their field of operations would be the mountains of Huehuetenango, for greater safety they came in through lowland jungle farther north...

...What would he tell about them...

...The account ends in late 1976, by which time repeated terrorist provocation followed by repeated army reaction had thrown Guatemala into a state of war...

...Not for a resurgence of fighting in the mountains...