All Change, No Change
"Do you know why I am a true political leader? Because I am here without your votes." Rios Montt, broadcast to the nation, May 24, 1982. Guatemala City's National Police headquar- ters is a...
...Modeled on Franco's Falange and Chile's fascist shock-force, Patria y Libertad, the MLN offers few policies beyond a war of extermination...
...Human rights monitors call his concentration of power, "despotic and totalitarian...overtly abandoning the rule of law...
...A Different Kind of Solution Guevara won the March 7 election, but no one knows who won the count...
...Benedicto Lucas Garcifa...
...Rios Montt calls it Guatemalidad...
...Import controls are "absurd...
...Latin America Weekly Report, July 30, 1982...
...4 3 Side by side with the sweeping appeal of his born-again evangelism goes an exhortation to nationalismwithout regard to social class--and lip-service to the country's Mayan identity...
...In military-ruled Guatemala, tiger eats tiger...
...Though drawn from intermediate ranks, this crest of the young officers' movement held many of the strings of power...
...Jos6 Efrain Rios Montt, defrauded of electoral victory in 1974 at the head of a Christian Democrat-backed coalition, had sunk into obscurity...
...see also Die Tageszeitung (Berlin-Frankfurt), June 3, 1982...
...With the centralization of power came a new legal framework, drastically suppressing political freedoms, even those of the subservient right-wing media...
...In return, under the watchful eye of Army patrols, Indian forced labor gangs hack out new access roads and carry out reforestation schemes...
...Inforpress, October 7, 1982...
...Its candidate and leader, Mario Sandoval Alarc6n, was viewed as the likeliest winner of a clean election...
...With God on Our Side In the ornate National Palace, there is a new look...
...Cyr military academy, and had seen it put to good effect in Algeria...
...shielding the regular troops from the line of fire, their casualties vaunted as civilian victims of communist terror...
...The military had still not offered a government program, but it did put out a comprehensive Plan of National Security, a more vigorous version of the recent innovations of Gen...
...Inforpress, November 11, 1982...
...diplomats were forbidden to venture further west than Antigua, 28 miles from the capital...
...The others boycotted the Council to form their own "Multi-Party Constitutional Front," demanding the "free and clean" elections which the young officers had appeared to promise back in March...
...Corporatism Are these short or long-term measures...
...Control of the press would allow the Army to cordon off the war, imposing an image of military selfconfidence...
...The inept conduct of the armed forces provided a major campaign thrust for the opposition candidates...
...we are simply three citizens walking on the street carrying, peacefully and unarmed, a request for the nullification of the elections...
...The version offered by Rios Montt-no matter how colorful or arcane-is the response of an authoritarian regime in deep crisis...
...Embassy figures show that private investment dropped off by 13% in 1981...
...Others favor restoring the rituals of electoral democracy, after an emergency period has cleansed the body politic of the ''cancer of communism" and eviscerated effective opposition...
...Panama City ACAN in Spanish, 2146 GMT, March 23, 1982, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), March 26, 1982...
...In 10 years, their strength has quadrupled...
...Washington Post, March 24, 1982...
...Anyone who refuses to surrender will be shot.' 2 6 The military announced that it was extending its rule by 30 months to January 1985...
...Some are waiting out the trauma in neighboring countries...
...Though it retains some support among young officers, it has been marginalized from state power since the 1974-78 Laugerud Administration...
...CACIF has dug its heels in with some success...
...New sources of income must be created for those whose starvation has become a threat to the state...
...Each would wage its own The March 1982 Election Line-Up Popular Democratic Front (FDP) The official government coalition backed by the armed forces, its members were the military's own Democratic Institutional Party (PID), the Revolutionary Party (PR), and the tiny National Unity Front (FUN...
...4 In the sweeping modernization of the rural economy, too, the sects find rich raw material for conversion...
...The search has led the armed forces into the novel terrain of ideology and morality...
...These attempts to slough their losses onto the 400,000 peasants who depend on the coffee trade for their livelihood only exacerbated class animosity...
...Candidate Guevara spoke in his electoral campaign of a sweeping remodeling of the highlands: "We will attack forcefully with social and economic action the causes that can push a man into entering the guerrilla ranks...
...Two decades ago, Venezuela eradicated a guerrilla movement and then launched an ambitious program of corrective social action...
...Electoral Competition vs...
...4 " Much of the current military strategy is borrowed from U.S...
...1 m In 1974, when Rios Montt took his place in the long line of electoral fraud victims, his allegiance to reformist military rule on the Peruvian pattern was noted...
...The Civil Service Patrols serve as cannon fodder...
...Others, in more prosperous areas, may be willing accomplices of the military...
...The Lucas fraction had certainly proven dysfunctional in every sense...
...2 8 The new, supposedly interim, Council of State, introduced after the June palace coup, indeed has the early earmarks of a corporatist entity...
...By June 9, Rios Montt had had enough...
...Prensa Libre, June 21, 1982...
...The week after the June palace coup, his Sunday broadcast brought a new message...
...A major package of proposals in October was presented not to CACIF or to any of its chambers, but to a grouping of prominent individual capitalists-the so-called "Honorable 14"-whose identity is a closely guarded secret...
...5 0 Bishops accused the military of creating a six-mile-wide free-fire zone along the Mexican border...
...The Council began its ineffectual deliberations on September 15 with the right-wing split of the tiny social democratic FUR the only party to have named its representative...
...There are Lucas supporters in key positions, and other traditionalists, disquieted by Rios Montt's evangelical fervor, command support in key Army barracks...
...The Reagan Administration was obliged to keep its channels open to the likely future government...
...spare parts for the Huey choppers so crucial to their aerial counterinsurgency war...
...Ministry of Finance memoradum, "Situaci6n actual de Guatemala y urgencia de actuar concertadamente," October 11, 1982...
...NACLA interview, Santa Cruz del QuichM military base, August 24, 1982...
...But what new program could rally the battered Right...
...Americas Watch, "Human Rights in Guatemala-No Neutrals Allowed"' November 1982, p. 3. 23...
...A wide array of international actors have a stake in the outcome, from the United States and Israel to Mexico and the international banking community...
...Pentagon sources spoke of a pact between the new defense minister and outgoing Lucas sympathizers under which "no Army officer would be arrested or brought to trial as a consequence of the coup.' 15 The promised purge of those involved in the scandalous corruption of the Lucas years ran aground on these power-brokering realities...
...El Dia (Mexico City), March 24 and 29, 1982...
...Faced with threat, the Indian population will choose to survive, as it has historically, by adopting the protective coloring of the chameleon...
...Concentration of state power in military hands has been even more exaggerated than under Lucas...
...See the report of a National Council of Churches delegation to Guatemala, in Christianity and Crisis, December 27, 1982...
...Piles of cheap mass-produced Bibles fill bureaucrats' shelves...
...But there is more to the rise of these sects than the changes within the Catholic Church and the scars of counterinsurgency...
...It would not be a force to reckon with, in Rios Montt's vision, in any restructuring of the political order...
...5, May 7, 1982...
...Business LatinAmerica, July 7,1982...
...Army losses ran unacceptably high, with 57 officers, mainly captains and lieutenants, killed in combat during 1981.'0 In a political and military quagmire, internationally isolated, senior officers began to mutter despondently of inevitable defeat within three years...
...Informal polls on election day had him running third out of four...
...Article 4 of the State of Siege provides for the militarization of public transport and education, and Interior Minister M6ndez Rufz speaks longingly of doing the same with local government...
...Cleaning up the cities was a priority for Rios Montt, to create the reassuring impression that the Army was in control...
...Agrarian reform was explicitly denied in the new economic plans conveyed to the private sector in October 1982...
...suggestions of a $60 million private sector contribution to fight the counterinsurgency war are "harebrained...
...A graduate of U.S...
...Latin America, November 2, 1973...
...and one each the five legally registered parties not expressly excluded for their Lucas taint...
...interest section in Cuba, October 1982...
...Guarding the entrances to the green villages are files of nervous men with sticks and machetes...
...A coalescence of Christian Democrat-military interests a la Salvador's Duarte-Garcia duo was not in the cards...
...Maize, flour, oil and milk from the United Nations' World Food Program (administered locally by regional military commanders) keep the rural poor alive...
...2 " The audacious show of authority was a calculated risk, and though it placed absolute executive power in his hands, it was not a clean sweep...
...One more log on the fires of revolution...
...many are starving on leaves and grub worms higher in the mountains...
...While CACIF has influence in important ministries, it is often sidestepped in the formation of economic policy...
...The General has been impressed by talk of an "equicracy," in which the business of government would be conducted by a non-elected Council of State made up of the military, private enterprise and professional bodies...
...Towards a New Political Model Every Sunday evening, President Rfos Montt speaks to the nation on television...
...Pentecostals lead the way...
...Already, the first steps have been taken in that direction: in July, Rfos Montt named all local mayors by decree, with the threat of legal sanctions against any who refused their designated posts...
...Pablo Nufla, will reach 300,000.49 But can the patrols be trusted...
...James D. Sexton, ed., Son of Tecdn Umdn (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), pp...
...But now, 10,000 inhabitants of the red villages are dead, their huts charred hulls...
...9 In mute testimony, only one priest in the whole department-a conservative-has kept his church doors open...
...4 5 Throughout the altiplano, vast stretches have been occupied and militarized...
...As a by-product, it offers landowners enhanced productivity from a submissive workforce...
...Guatemalans, he declared, "are going to stop talking about political divisions, political ideas, political parties.' 25 The press is free to report such tidbits...
...2. Inforpress, March 11, 1982...
...Arnson and Montealegre, IPS Resource Update...
...See Inforpress, August 19, 1982...
...a hand-lettered sign on the doorman's desk tells visitors that "Jesus loves you...
...Three blocks up lies a symbol of its contemporary fairy tale: the transnational neon blur of fancy shopping centers...
...Carlos Arana Osorio, the CAN's main support derives from sections of urban-based Industrial capital, importers and financiers, especially those with ties to foreign capital...
...Favoring a devaluation of the currency, and a let-'er-rip unbridling of international trade, the free marketeers of CACIF have condemned military planners in the most strident terms...
...The business federation, CACIF (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations), holds the key ministries of Economy and Agriculture, while former Army Bank president Leonardo Figueroa Villate is Minister of Finance...
...Independent observers put it as low as 35% . While voters showed mainly contempt, the campaign did bring into sharp focus the now gaping rifts among political competitors...
...No mere whim of a quixotic leader, the new nationalism is a clearly elaborated strategy of the Army high command...
...For four days after the opposition leaders' arrest, Guatemala City seethed with tension...
...2': It projected itself above all to the urban middle class, many of whom-panicked by Lucas' urban terror-had begun to gravitate leftward...
...The strongest fractions within CACIF are the Chamber of Commerce and the modernized agroindustrialists...
...But they could not stop the advance...
...Latin America Weekly Report, April 2, 1982...
...Dressed in camouflage fatigues, gesticulating wildly to the cameras, a halfremembered Army general treated his audience to a 13-minute diatribe, littered with invocations to God, "my Lord and King...
...Guatemala Cadena de Emisoras Unidas, 0023 GMT, March 25, 1982, in FBIS, March 29, 1982...
...See for example the comments of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliot Abrams, on the "McNeil-Lehrer Report:' (PBS), January 11, 1983...
...The three opponents offered distinct proposals for rescuing Guatemala from economic collapse and "communist subversion," and all rejected linkage with the last six years...
...If some observers had smelled the impending coup, few predicted the identity of Guatemala's new leader...
...Only large sums of cashin the high nine figures-will allow Rios Montt to carry his plans to fruition...
...In the moral wasteland of the Army's making, everything becomes its opposite, and neutrality is not permissible...
...9. Inforpress, November 26, 1981...
...When Lucas replied by raising coffee export taxes, the growers moved into open revolt...
...In return, they receive favors such as free passage through Army roadblocks...
...In the name of love and nationalism, Indian is pitted against ladino...
...To "betray Next generation of the Guatemalan Army trains at the Adolfo Hall academy...
...E 17NACLA Report c oo E (n For the Guatemala City elite, life has returned to normal...
...While limitations are neither surprising nor unrealistic in a state of war, this surpassed all "[Rios Montt is] a man of great personal integrity, totally committed to restoring democracy...
...May 8, 1982...
...We make no distinction," declared the colonel in charge of operations in El Quich6, "between the Catholics and the communist subversives...
...What could be touted as a greater advance from the "Two F' s-fusilesyfrijoles" than the "Three T's-techo, trabajo y tortillas...
...But the analogy stops there...
...This coalition looked the most attractive political option, the most responsive to the need for some economic reforms, but the military would never allow it to take power...
...The strategic hamlets are no temporary holding operation until the scorched-earth phase is over, those killed who must be (Sandoval Alarc6n would estimate half a million), and the displaced thousands decanted back into their home villages...
...The "new" Rios Montt approach was prefigured in the dying months of the Lucas regime, when brother Benedicto took over military command...
...Something Old, Something New The first clues were dizzying...
...Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S...
...Blocking devaluation as well as resisting the clamor for a moratorium on debt repayments, GonzAlez del Valle instead offered the agroexporters a $50 million credit line to roll over their obligations with the Central Bank...
...Rallies in December 1982 to mark the 100th anniversary of evangelism in Guatemala were attended by half a million.37 The armed forces' romance with evangelism is nothing new...
...With the collapse of cotton, coffee and tourism, together with the unexpected closure of the Exmibal nickel plant, Guatemala's trade deficit widened from $30 million to more than $200 million over the course of 1981...
...As in much of Central America, it is rooted in the inherent inflexibility of its cash-crop growth model...
...The mind hurls out insults like a weapons factory, instead of saving 'I love you.' "" The rottenness has a name: communism, the antichrist, and all means must be used to defeat it...
...In a year of Rios Montt's iron rule, the green pins-safe villages -have sprouted like trees in a graveyard...
...All major constitutional guarantees were suspended...
...As Arana's Chief of Staff in 1973, he commanded the massacre of peasants involved in a land takeover at Sansirisay...
...Joining them, even turning them to the advantage of the Left, is another survival technique...
...Throughout the new strategic hamlets, the temples may be overflowing, but there is no guarantee of the depth of conversion...
...you have to establish a permanent presence...
...also NACLA interviews in Guatemala City, June 1982...
...Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1982...
...Many left to join the guerrillas...
...counterinsurgency training, versed in civic action and psychological warfare, he knows that hearts and minds matter as much as cadavers...
...139-141...
...Some argue for establishing full-fledged corporatism, with the permanent suspension of elections and political parties...
...But by the end of the day, it was clear that Rfos Montt was on top...
...National Liberation Movement (MLN) Formed right after the 1954 coup, the MLN is Guatemala's largest party...
...4 0 As violence escalates, the escape of passivity beckons harder...
...General Benny had learned his tradecraft at France's famous St...
...The revolutionary organizations can neither feed nor protect the survivors...
...A small procession of enraged opposition candidates, flanked by the world's press, made its way up Sixth Avenue...
...In exchange, Guatemala was to reduce its social expenditures (already the lowest per capita in Central America), rechanneling the savings to the private sector...
...Guerrilla columns intercepted traffic on the Pan American and Atlantic highways with relative impunity, ran free in much of the new development area known as the Franja and controlled long stretches of the Mexican border...
...See box...
...As repression in the cities waned, their selective conscience calmed...
...Rios Montt's Brave New World By November 1982, some human rights groups were reporting nearly 10,000 dead in rural massacres...
...Gordillo, even closer to the Lucas camp, had been an energetic director of counterinsurgency operations in El Quich6 and Chimaltenango...
...Public debate on Rfos Montt's Guatemala "The [Guatemalan] government's atrocities make the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut pale by com- parison...
...Will the Real Rioa Montt...
...Capital in the Violation of Human Rights in Guatemala'' paper prepared for the Tribunal Permanente de Los Pueblos, Madrid, Spain, January 1983, p. 15...
...scarce capital feeds mechanization, not more salaries...
...By September 1982, the military boasted that it had recruited 40,000 patrol members...
...For him, the cardinal error of the 1944-54 democratic revolution was its assault on private estates, above all those of the United Fruit Company...
...Military leaders such as Defense Minister Mejfa Victores are even more explicit: "We must do away with the words 'indigenous' and 'Indian...
...The Guatemalan economy cannot guarantee work for the majority of the rural population...
...Integral Development of Rural Communities" was a watchword of Lucas' Third National Development Plan (1979-82) which had proposed 118 model settlements in the insurgency zones.5 The difference is that Rios Montt has brought more efficient planning and improved Army morale...
...On the 13th, Congress hastily ratified Guevara as president...
...The founding declaration of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) on January 25, and that of the Guatemalan Committee of Patriotic Unity (CGUP) two weeks later, sharpened the crisis...
...A few have old shotguns...
...The U.S...
...Given the state of war, they are also not too perturbed by a 62% leap in defense spending, to $142 million...
...Rfos Montt certainly sounded different than the others...
...Pastors can pass on to their congregations the promise of protection against repression...
...The second-called "pre-development"-is to put these survivors to work...
...The old equation of survival-nine months on the family plot, three on the plantations-is collapsing...
...Diario de Centroamirica (Guatemala City), March 26, 1982...
...PNR candidate Maldonado Aguirre was designated intermediary between the triumvirate and the parties, while the Christian Democrats' secretary general sped off to Washington to lobby support for the new regime...
...But Donaldo was already safe in Miami.' 6 True to the pact, not a single officer stood trial...
...Latin America Weekly Report, April 2, 1982...
...Finally, and inevitably, the Lucas government called in the International Monetary Fund...
...3 For an Army which has butchered a dozen priests, not to mention countless catechists and grassroots organizers, the opportunity is heaven-sent...
...But by 1982, the economic situation was moving out of control, and the masses had gone beyond the point of easy repressibility...
...The guerrillas swiftly denounced the amnesty as a smokescreen for rehabilitating Army criminals: any soldier accused of rape, murder or other crimes against the civilian population would be pardoned if his acts were committed "while fulfilling duties in anti-subversive actions...
...Flanking him in the three-man junta was Gen...
...In October 1981, the Army-now under the command of the President's brother, Gen...
...Some 100 companies have been driven into liquidation since 1980, and the industry is now three-quarters paralyzed.' The U.S...
...Slowly, TV viewers put a name and a memory to the face...
...Severe repression, the dismantling of the cooperative movement and acrimonious debates within the party over participation in the electoral process left it split and badly weakened...
...In a surprise move, he ousted his two partners in a swift palace coup, buying off their protests with checks for $50,000...
...The vested interests left intact by the coup, and Rios Montt's need for unity in the armed forces, dictated this fragile compromise with the old guard...
...from ''"bullets and beans" to "roof, work and bread...
...While partly hostage to the wishes of the officer class, Rios Montt is nobody's puppet...
...For the industrialists, it got foreign exchange controls on capital goods imports relaxed for spare parts, tools and pharmaceutical inputs...
...Suddenly, five weeks before elections, the Left threw the regime yet another curve...
...Guatemala's growth rate had gone from 7.8% in 1977 to 1.8% in 1981, with worst predictions for 1982 at minus 5%.' From a high of $1.3 billion in 1978, currency reserves had fallen to $450 million by the end of 1980, and the slide showed no sign of abating...
...As to the Left, Rios Montt made clear the underlying rationale of the amnesty offer in his address to a business convention: "The amnesty gives us the juridical framework for killing...
...Outgoing president Lucas . . President-designate Guevara . .and MLN coup leader Leonel Sisniega...
...Hundreds of thousands more escaped and are who knows where...
...This hardline monetarism made Anzueto an Embassy favorite, but the party's power base was too narrow, enmity between it and the current military high command too deep-rooted for it to have a chance at victory...
...In November 1981, the IMF agreed to provide $110 million to stabilize currency reserves...
...President, signifies "Do not steal...
...and Prensa Libre, June 10, 1981...
...has centered on the body count, and the responsibility of the security forces for the carnage...
...Radio Televisi6n Guatemala, 0400 GMT, September 2, 1982, in FBIS, September 7, 1982...
...Miami Herald, December 4, 1981...
...Rios Montt foresees a three-phase program, to be coordinated between the Army, the private sector and the evangelical churches, the regime's staunchest liaison with the emerging structures of local military control...
...Nationalist Authentic Central (CAN) Founded in 1969 as the personal platform of Gen...
...2 ' Yet, while he remains in power, Rfos Montt has drawn a noose around all political activity...
...Evangelical sects now reckon that they have brought more than 1.6 million Guatemalans to the Lord-a full 22% of the population...
...Rios Montt learned his at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and saw it work in Guatemala in the brutal successes of the late 1960s.f Just Pins on a Map Where the situation has slipped so badly that the Army sees no distinction between the guerrilleros and their supporters, then whole Indian villages are erased from the map...
...Much of the middle class sighed with relief...
...The sympathies each had within the dominant classes did not translate into significant campaign funding...
...Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1982...
...in part they will channel dollars to Guatemala's authoritarian exterminism under the guise of humanitarianism...
...Unity among the other right-wing parties proved equally hopeless...
...There were a few minor arraignments, with the full glare of publicity, but the real culprits went unmolested...
...The disparity between lowered demand for exports and higher import costs-above all for petroleumrelated products-was especially acute...
...8. ANACAFE report, El Grdfico (Guatemala City), June 16, 1981...
...The watchword is transformation without reforms...
...An already impressive list of militarily controlled institutions has now swelled to 18Mar/Apr 1983 embrace the Social Security Institute, immigration authorities and the National Cooperative Institute...
...Unomdsuno, June 25, 1982...
...Said one observer, "Women cried that what had happened was a prophecy foretold in the Bible...
...State Department officials, keen to justify a resumption of military sales, eagerly picked up the cry that Guatemala's indigenous majority has finally found its voice...
...2 7 His Cabinet already shows signs of this balance...
...Pins of four colors classify the villages of the Indian highlands...
...also This Week in Central America and Panama, December 13, 1982...
...Exiled to Spain as military attach after the 1974 elections, he left the country a rich man, with large estates in Alta Verapiz and El Pet6n...
...These two phases are already well underway...
...Inevitably, it was not the politicians but the military which defused the crisis...
...and Cor Bronson, "Guatemala's Coup-A Protestant Perspective,' in Washington Office on Latin America, Guatemala Update, No...
...8 Many resorted to highly conflictive land rental schemes in lieu of payment for peasant labor...
...But while physical displacement of entire populations does part of the job of breaking down community cohesion, the Army also drives every possible wedge into existing local conflicts...
...The political message was implicit...
...Some have identified with the forces of social change, and have paid the price in death-squad killings and harassment...
...Concentrate on the beans here, less on the bullets...
...Internal resources alone cannot underwrite the development plan...
...From Boom to Bust Underlying the ruling class divisions is Guatemala's economic slump...
...The political crisis and the economic had become one, and the outlook for Guatemala's dominant classes was grim...
...The party traditionally represents large and small coffee planters, as well as some newer cotton and sugar exporters...
...But it is free to do little else...
...Inforpress, August 19, 1982...
...The coup, he said, was designed "to put an end to corruption, guarantee human rights and revitalize our institutions...
...The contrast between Rios Montt's Guatemala and "reformist" El Salvador became clear: in Guatemala, the armed forces, openly and alone, would dictate the terms of the new political process...
...State Department issued a "Travel Advisory" in 1980, urging U.S...
...Large stretches of El Quich6, Huehuetenango and San Marcos turned into no-go areas for the Army, and U.S...
...Inforpress, November 18, 1982...
...3 0 Much the same applies to the Council's token trade union representatives, designated directly by Rfos Montt after not a single union proved willing to nominate a representative...
...It was soon obvious that the strictures ostensibly imposed to protect national security would also permit the Army, unencumbered, to embark on a sweeping restructuring of Guatemalan politics...
...10, 101-102...
...evangelical against Catholic...
...and since Lucas was likely to overturn any result he disapproved...
...Most vital perhaps is the international selling of the program...
...Latin America Regional Report, July 9, 1982...
...The first finger, he explained to the enraptured U.S...
...For months, it had pressed Lucas for clean elections-the best hope for remedying Guatemala's pariah status and breaking the Congressional boycott on military funding-but he ignored the signals...
...Two months earlier, long-simmering resentment of Lucas had matured into a near-unanimous decision by the 900-strong officer class to remove him...
...Again, there is both continuity and rupture between Lucas and Rios Montt...
...1 Battles with the Private Sector If Rfos Montt has not endeared himself to the political parties on grounds of exclusion, he has done little better with the economic sectors they represent, and for the same reason...
...Today, Washington policymakers attempt to refurbish that democratic image...
...Soldiers raided the house of the former interior minister, Donaldo Alvarez Rufz, uncovering a printing press (used to forge election ballots), underground jail cells, 50 stolen vehicles and a safe deposit box full of gold graduation rings, wrenched from the fingers of victims of police torture...
...The indicators were certainly alarming enough...
...They are in basic agreement, for example, with Rfos Montt's Reaganesque plan to revive production and ease the foreign exchange crisis by placing the burden of austerity on the poor...
...Not only aggravating the immediate economic situation, such sabotage also contributes to investment decline...
...Palace Coup-A Guatemalan Pinochet...
...For the first time field commanders glimpsed what they were up against, socially and militarily...
...It would also offer a way out of the intolerable levels of class conflict...
...Social repercussions from previous ebbs of the international market had always been met with repression rather than adjustment...
...Though National Liberation Movement chief Mario Sandoval Alarc6n warned repeatedly of the dangers of splitting the anti-communist vote, there were too many points of friction between his MLN and the Nationalist Authentic Central (CAN) for the rumored "Great Anticommunist Alliance" to take shape...
...NACLA ReportMar/Apr 1983 separate campaign...
...For them, the essential crisis was political...
...In May 1982, CUC activists seized the Brazilian Embassy in Guatemala City to spotlight continuing massacres in the countryside...
...NACLA interviews with Guatemalan Army officers, August 1982...
...Its coalition partner, the PNR, embraces the more dynamic sectors of urban industrial capital, favoring limited reforms within a capitalist framework...
...Most are government employees, hand-picked by the Army-run Reconstruction Committee for "security reasons...
...For a full discussion of the counterinsurgency state in Latin America, see Ruy Mauro Marini, "The Question of the State in the Latin American Class Struggle:' Contemporary Marxism (San Francisco) No...
...Both alternatives have their devotees in the ruling elite, but it is the corporatists who seem to have the ear of Rfos Montt...
...They have also supported Rfos Montt's vigorous campaign to promote fresh foreign investment, including a revised petroleum code easing many drilling rights restrictions...
...5 1 For the first time, the counterinsurgency state is systematically confronting economic realities...
...Even the powerful planters felt the lash of Lucas' death frenzy...
...Rios Montt, weekly broadcast to the nation, in El Grdjico, June 17, 1982...
...Anibal Guevara, hand-picked successor of Gen...
...3 "He who resists authority is resisting that which has been established by God...
...Evangelicals offered apocalyptic reasons for the disaster and warned that a further year of earthquakes would follow if Catholics did not separate themselves from social action programs...
...19NACLA Report Some Army officers display signs of panic at the regime's fragile social base, and the fissures in the government's search for corporatist dialogue brought about by CACIF's stridency...
...any such initiative would have been suicidal.2 But the landowners had no need to fret...
...taking this on trust, the parties of the Anti-Fraud Front rallied in support...
...Civil Defense Patrol against guerrilla sympathizer...
...While nothing is yet firmly defined, there are signs that allow for more than random speculation...
...These disputes should not obscure the fact that CACIF and its allies share many of the goals of the current regime...
...4 CACIF was not satisfied, and eventually the pressure told...
...it cannot absorb the labor force...
...But it is necessary to look beyond moral outrage and beyond explanations about winning back military territory...
...7. Latin America Weekly Report, August 20, 1982...
...16Mar/Apr 1983 But this optimism turned sour as Rios Montt replaced the junta with one-man rule, and election talk with informal, token parleys in the National Palace...
...Economic devastation, natural and human violence all provide fertile terrain for talk of the Second Coming...
...the second, "Do not lie...
...It was groping not only for a broader electoral base, but also for a way to avoid post-election scrutiny of the Lucas era abuses and corruption...
...Unomesuno, June 24, 1982...
...Their social base was restricted to high-ranking military officers and state functionaries, with the parties operating mainly as vehicles to personal enrichment and government patronage...
...5 Industrial stagnation was accompanied by rising inflation, and rising external debt by capital flight...
...This Week in CentralAmerica and Panama, September 20, 1982...
...9 " But few Indians in the highlands would recognize the names of their "representatives," since they had no role in choosing them...
...The colonels in charge show off their plans with pride-ambitious architectural scale models of new rural settlements, with concrete houses, water supply, a market place, an evangelical church and, central to the design, a military post...
...A massacre in a predominantly Protestant village provoked wild responses about impending apocalypse...
...Health, education and public works will be the worst casualties of an 11% budget cut...
...Ronald Reagan, after meeting with Rios Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, December 1982...
...Equally important, landowners with declining labor needs may accept social action programs-and even cooperatives-in the altiplano more readily than they did five years ago, especially if the experiment takes place under the guarantee of tight military surveillance...
...New York Times, March 14, 1982...
...A new alliance is necessary to confront the military and its habits of power," fumed'PNR leader Maldonado, "so that sovereign powers can be returned to the people...
...Romeo Lucas Garcfa, with an implausible 35% of the vote...
...More important, he vowed "to change the image of Guatemala...especially with the United States...
...Three Blue Fingers of Virtue Meeting with Ronald Reagan in Honduras, Rios Montt held up three fingers to explain his divine mission...
...The loudest rumblings of discontent came from the Air Force, anxious to reopen channels to U.S...
...There was little incentive since, without reliable military backing, none was a viable option...
...We are neither Russians nor North Americans," Rios Montt is fond of saying...
...National Catholic Reporter May 21, 1982...
...The Catholic Church is riven between the community activism of Liberation Theology and a largely conservative hierarchy which supports the Rios Montt dictatorship...
...and some have been forced down 'into the towns to "surrender" to the Army...
...In part they will resort to subterfuge...
...see also New York Times, September 12, 1982...
...Lucas, caught off guard, offered no resistance, and apart from a brief skirmish with Army loyalists in Quezaltenango the operation was smooth and bloodless...
...The 1976 earthquake was a vital turning point...
...In the absence of even the illusion of pluralism, new forms of legitimation must be found...
...For neither of them is the determination to win social bases in the war incompatible with mass murder...
...The reward is food and partial deliverance from Army repression...
...Behind the junta stood a seven-man advisory council...
...1 7 The officer corps respects his long rise through the ranks, from private to chief of staff, commander of the country's most powerful garrison and principal of the military Polytechnic School.' 8 This model professional career has not left Rios Montt with clean hands...
...Evangelism is a color the military can never fully trust...
...but like Rios Montt's, their authoritarian political agenda is quite different...
...The money must be found elsewhere...
...Like many top PNR officials, presidential candidate Alejandro Maldonado Aguirre pulled out of the MLN to form this new party in 1977...
...Today, its main support Is among the urban middle classes...
...Fernando Gordillo...
...But it is murder with a scientific purpose, not carnage for its own sake...
...National Opposition Union (UNO) This was a coalition of the Christian Democratic Party (PDCG) and the business-dominated National Renovation Party (PNR), formed after the PDCG abandoned the notion of a broad front with the military...
...Inforpress, December 16, 1982...
...It was two days after the presidential elections, and official figures showed Defense Minister Gen...
...The Police has been put under the control of the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of the Interior will likely become the jurisdiction of the military...
...Maldonado Schaad, whose name was linked 15NACLA Report often to the death squads, had been commander of Lucas' Guard of Honor regiment...
...While agreeing that monetary stabilization is the key short-term objective, their solution is diametrically opposed to the state-interventionist policy Rfos Montt is pursuing...
...and the third, "Do not cheat...
...On March 23, helicopters, troops and armored vehicles sealed off the presidential palace...
...Since June, at least four coup attempts have been dismantled...
...June 1982...
...A changing cast-list of MLN leaders, provisional juntas and young officers made the events of March 23 hard to follow...
...Powerful agroexporters have pushed devaluation not only because it would make their thus-cheapened products more attractive on the international market...
...While everyone acknowledged economic difficulties-and each candidate offered his own remedies-all thought the problems were shortterm: the imported effects of global recession, the ravages of war, the Lucas clique's gangsterlike methods and inept government strategies, all with a consequent loss of business confidence...
...village against village...
...Eventual membership, says Army public relations chief Col...
...Guatemala's private sector did not object since it has no serious conflicts of interest with these runaway shops...
...The losers, setting their differences to one side, banded together in 14Mar/Apr 1983 Tear gas awaited demonstrators on March 9. an Anti-Fraud Front, but to no avail...
...This time, the military coalition's declared aim had been to field one candidate on a joint sixparty ticket...
...All three offered policies of continuity with the Lucas Garcia regime...
...Under its born-again Christian president, Jorge Serrano Elias, the Council of State has made great play of its Indian members...
...inauspicious if effective beginnings for a new moral order...
...On December 23, Gonzilez del Valle resigned, and Rfos Montt forfeited one of the few people respected for both his professional talents and his centrist political views...
...Changing from fatigues to a smart lounge suit, he delivers a moral homily from an idyllic tropical garden, filled with bird-song and canned marimba music...
...Who will argue with that...
...Alejandro Maldonado, candidate of the center-right coalition, turned to a reporter: "This is not a demonstration...
...But those tendencies-never prominent-have now been expunged from the Guatemalan military...
...Posters in their temples equate Catholicism with "communist subversion...
...But Guatemala's problem goes much deeper...
...6. Business Latin America, November 10, 1981...
...A police bus screeched to the curb and hauled the three away for interrogation...
...No, once the communities of those who survive are militarized, there must be long-range resettlement and new development plans for the areas of conflict...
...The dapper young officers in pressed fatigues who staff the capital city's public relations offices may breathe an elusive hint of that Peruvian era...
...Government and U.S...
...But those who seek to aid his stalwart anticommunism, above all in the Reagan Administration, must overcome human rights opponents and congressional restraints...
...West of the capital, in the area code-named "Vietnam," the Left's roots among the population were solid...
...some are dead...
...Rather, conflict springs from "the rottenness of mankind...
...Only an optimist would predict that the world market again will demand Guatemalan coffee, cotton and sugar in the old quantities, at the old high prices...
...previous controls, and was directed almost as much at the Right as at the Left...
...ALL CHANGE, NO CHANGE 1. Washington Post, March 10, 1982...
...Latin America Regional Report, September 24, 1982...
...Rios Montt offered an amnesty to Left and Right, but on terms he knew the Left would not take seriously...
...2 Initially the right-wing and centrist parties welcomed Rfos Montt...
...0 z 1112 Theater of the Absurd Though voting is compulsory, and Lucas raged on TV that "to abstain is to collaborate with the enemies of Guatemala," by the Army's own figure less than 46% voted...
...For the agrarian oligarchy, there has been a guarantee that the land tenure pattern of 1954 will remain untouched...
...These groups called Amnesty's figure of 2600 dead by July 1982 "responsible and conservative" See for example, Americas Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala, pp...
...He represents a modernized, technologically-minded trend within the Guatemalan Army...
...Not all the sects are conservative, to be sure...
...1 (Spring 1980), pp...
...Their letter was never delivered...
...Protestantism offers the appeal of sobriety, individual self-worth, answers in Christ...
...The emergent vision of the National Reconstruction Committee planners is of militarized model hamlets, where tamed Indian communities-no longer a political threat-will generate new income for themselves and the tottering national economy by farming new cash crops, cardamom, perhaps, or citrus fruits...
...Guatemalan press reports, August 1982...
...Guatemala City's National Police headquar- ters is a turreted castle on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, Disneyland reminder of former colonial grandeur...
...Latin America Weekly Report, April 2, 1982...
...General "Benny" might have stopped short of Rfos Montt's "Bullets and Beans" epithet, but probably would have agreed with his military philosophy that "if you don't take food into people's homes, what you take there is subversion...
...the penalty for refusal is to be considered a subversive...
...His strident evangelism is one unique asset, but most important, he is a disciplined career soldier, an authoritarian with dependable anticommunist credentials...
...the nation [or to] act against the integrity of the state" became an arbitrarily defined offense subject to capital punishment...
...Some, in fact, are the old death squads with a new name, organized by ex-soldiers and conservative small property owners...
...recommendations of the mid1970s, formalized in a Program of Pacification and Eradication of Communism...
...The National Plan of Security and Development calls for "building 21NACLA Report up nationalism as a doctrine opposed to international communism...
...El Grdfico, June 21, 1982...
...Prensa Libre, September 17, 1981...
...This day, March 9, 1982, the streets were empty...
...ALAI, March 26, 1982...
...Unomdsuno, March 26, 1982: Panama City ACAN in Spanish, 0216 GMT, March 26, 1982, in FBIS, March 29, 1982...
...Elsewhere, the evangelical sects mop up the debris...
...In the shape of a blue poster, the slogan will cover Guatemala during 1983, emblematic of the "new morality" of the regime...
...Benedicto Lucas Garcifa-launched a fourmonth-long scorched-earth campaign...
...They groped for a fantasy "third way," enthralled by Rios Montt's unfamiliar moral fervor...
...CACIF has begun to win some concessions for its other members as well...
...Ibid...
...Scientific Counterinsurgency Guatemalan field commanders take on a smug look when asked how their "Plan Victoria 82" compares with counterinsurgency doctrine in El Salvador...
...Embassy, too, was between a rock and a hard place...
...Spearheaded by two special presidential advisers, evangelism is sweeping the palace...
...pitifully armed advance detachments 22Mar/Apr 1983 Refugees at Choatalum...
...The same tactic has devastated the interior of El Quich6, Sololi and Chimaltenango, severing guerrilla supply lines and removing the local population...
...As in El Salvador, a prime tactic of the Left has been to hit key infrastructural targets-in Guatemala's case the oilfields, burn the farms of right-wing landowners and destroy stockpiles of cotton and coffee...
...see also Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1982...
...While such militarization renders any discussion of the state's political profile somewhat moot, there are two options under discussion...
...Of its 34 members, four represent the various economic sectors (finance, agriculture, commerce and industry...
...Where the influence is more ambiguous, terror and threats may force sympathizers into submission, exposing and isolating the "hard core" revolutionary cadre, who are then picked off clinically...
...See, This Week in Central America and Panama, September 6 and December 6, 1982...
...Guatemala may be the most dangerous powder keg in the region...
...Governmental allocations to the Assistance Plan to Conflict Areas (PAAC) have been a scant $1 million, enough to serve only 500 hamlets out of the total 50,000 affected by the war...
...The Christian Democrats, closely linked to the agrarian bourgeoisie, had conservative and anti-communist origins in the 1950s, but active involvement in rural peasant leagues and cooperatives during the 1960s led the party to adopt more progressive positions...
...More than just the words, counterinsurgency in the guise of nationalism actually does away with the Indian communities themselves, scattering their people and their cultural traditions...
...Interviewed afterwards in Mexico City, one of the group revealed that he had been a Civil Defense Patrol member in his native Indian village...
...When market prices for its products collapse, as they did in 1981, there is no alternative economic activity to fall back on...
...Presenting him was Yiye Avila, the Puerto Rican preacher who 20Mar/Apr 1983 claims the honor of evangelizing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet...
...Censorship was accompanied by a harsh and indefinite State of Siege...
...This virtual slave labor has created 60,000 "new jobs" building a new highland infrastructure, and will cost the impoverished regime scarcely a penny...
...Rios Montt's hold on power has often seemed tenuous, his first months marked by barely disguised conflicts with his fellow junta members...
...since the raging war outside of Guatemala meant that only the military candidate dared venture out...
...Rfos Montt himself regards reforms as superfluous, not to say dangerous...
...The armed forces' monopoly of politics was to be absolute...
...NACLA interview with Rios Montt, Guatemala City, August 23, 1982...
...El Grifico, December 29, 1975...
...Whenever the onerous duties of state permit, "Brother Efrafn" drives out to an elegant suburb for Sunday morning worship...
...The appeal to traditional indigenous values of austerity, hard work and rectitude is similar to the morality promoted by the revolutionary organizations...
...it would also help ease their domestic indebtedness, since their overseas dollar accounts would pay off more debts in quetzales than the current exchange rate allows...
...Prevailing economic structures, argues the General, do not engender class hatred, and will not be touched...
...Popular opposition was not just to be overcome, but annihilated...
...Officers became convinced that a radical new political solution was needed...
...Susanne Jonas, "The Guatemalan Counterinsurgency State: The Complicity of the U.S...
...seven the professional sectors (colleges and universities, a judicial association, a municipal organization and the press...
...Guevara, had delivered a keynote speech to a pre-election rally of 50,000 faithful in the national soccer stadium...
...Clean up government corruption, annihilate the revolutionary movement, change a few economic policies to make the temporary recession more comfortable for the privileged, and wait for things to return to normal...
...If they engage in combat, they are "the people" defending themselves from the guerrillas...
...The first is the phase of feeding those who remain after successful counterinsurgency...
...Why can't we just be Guatemalans...
...But the bulk are not given the luxury of choice...
...The present government," stormed Sandoval Alarc6n, "is wholly incapable of putting a brake on the guerrillas...
...Many were red-enemy territory-when Rios Montt took power...
...In their first pronouncements, the young officers spoke of fresh elections within 60 days...
...Losing the War In the field, the fight against the Left was going disastrously...
...Facing a cutback in world coffee export quotas and mounting production costs, the growers' associations complained bitterly that their members were unable to repay outstanding credits or secure new government loans...
...ElDia, April6, 1982...
...With agroexporters petitioning for tax exemptions on one side, industrialists demanding rigid monetarist measures on the other and the ranks of the revolutionaries swelling with untold thousands who had nothing left to lose, Lucas flailed onwards, satisfying nobody...
...Rule would be by presidential fiat, the only machinery of consultation a Council of State, whose functions would be apolitical and purely advisory...
...The problem with the Salvadorean military, the Guatemalan officers say, is that they make 2,000-man sweeps through Morazin and Chalatenango, then pull out and let the guerrillas roam free...
...All this translates into the maps which line the walls of high command offices in Guatemala City...
...Latin America Regional Report, February 12, 1982...
...Where elections had failed, the coup would succeed in narrowing the rancorous splits within the ruling class...
...The FUN, registered as a new party in 1978, espoused a more nationalist economic program than the other two...
...A five-member secretariat, hand-picked by Rifos Montt, directs the limited business of the Council...
...Excilsiou...
...Now he enjoyed the backing of the two most right-wing parties, the MLN and the CAN...
...For all able-bodied men between 18 and 50, patrols are obligatory...
...Latin America Weekly Report, June 18 andJuly 30, 1982...
...In an airy green tent donated to Rifos Montt's Church of the Word by a grateful convert-a Guatemalan circus wrestler named Tarzan the Terrible-the General joins hundreds of fellow believers in hymn singing and the laying-on of hands...
...3 2 Tight credit policies and high interest rates have driven their blood pressure to the danger point...
...citizens not to travel to "high risk" Guatemala...
...4. Cynthia Arnson and Flora Montealegre, IPS Resource Update (Washington D.C...
...The crisis deepened daily, and Lucas offered no way out...
...Congress was to remain closed, all political activity outlawed...
...In desperation, local Army commanders began to pressgang Indian peasants into military reserve service-the first Civil Defense Patrols...
...dozens of micro-sects like the Church of the Word, a mission of the Eureka, California-based Gospel Outreach, bring up the rear...
...Political parties in Guatemala are electoral machines and inoperative," he reminded the party chiefs...
...moves against speculators constitute "a threat to two million Guatemalan traders...
...Few had come to terms with its significance, least of all the Lucas regime...
...Those who still have the power of accumulation increasingly exercise it abroad, and in dollars, leaving behind and demoralized those with less liquid capital...
...At the same time, the subsistence farms of the Indian peasantry are ever less viable, their poor soil declining, their acreage shrinking...
...Landowners' old need for cheap plantation labor is drying up...
...Guatemalan electoral law allows for all manner of last-minute coalition building, and previous military regimes had made expedient alliances with one or another right-wing party...
...But many, tacitly or overtly, have collaborated with the counterinsurgency drive, organizing joint ProtestantArmy rallies against the guerrillas and their Roman Catholic sympathizers...
...But Israeli and Argentine assistance, and the Guatemalan Army's own chauvinistic sense of purpose, have also guided the campaign after increasing frictions with Washington...
...Maldonado Schaad in particular exploited his position to shield pro-Lucas bureaucrats from prosecution under the vaunted anti-corruption drive...
...Bearing a formal letter of protest, the three defrauded candidates were headed for the National Palace...
...see also El Di'a, June 23, 1982 and Washington Post, May 26, 1982...
...In a word, the Plan involved the total militarization of political struggle...
...As he spoke, masked plain-clothes police and steel-helmeted riot squads fanned out from police headquarters, lobbing smoke bombs and tear-gas grenades at the procession...
...As far back as late 1981, General Benny had seen the attraction of recruiting Indian peasants from the war zone into a permanent military reserve, somewhat like the death squads, only on a vaster scale...
...Many did...
...The degradation of plantation wage labor breaks down traditional ties, overturning long-held moral values and replacing them with alcoholism and wife-beating...
...anyone in pink and yellow hamlets is suspect...
...Horacio Maldonado Schaad and Col...
...D CC 13NACLA Report There is no question that the war itself has taken a heavy toll, particularly on the tourist industry...
...The existing economic model, domi23 o :ENACLA Report nated by traditional cash-crops, has run into the ground...
...But in stressing individuality and subservience to earthly and heavenly authority, the appeal of the sects lacks a key dimension offered by the Left: organization and participation...
...government opinion, too, brightened...
...Its prime target has been Central Bank president Jorge Gonzalez del Valle, a leading protagonist of import controls as a means of conserving currency and an opponent of devaluing the quetzal, long pegged to the U.S...
...The rural slaughter increased, out of sight and out of mind...
...All this will lay the basis for phase three of the program, which the Army calls "development...
...The National Reconstruction Committee in Guatemala City, set up after the 1976 earthquake and run by the military, holds some of the answers...
...A 1975 newspaper horoscope wrote him off as a "has-been" whose star sign offered no political future...
...A fierce competition against the Roman Catholics of the "popular church" is on for community loyalties...
...The PNR's populist campaign declared the party "the voice of the silent and silenced majority...
...When trade delegations from the United States, Israel and Taiwan swarmed into Guatemala during the summer asking to set up assembly plants, the government rewarded them with incentive legislation which included the tax-free import of raw materials and semi-finished goods...
...The NCC report is one of the first attempts to decipher the long-term economic logic behind the massacres...
...Presidential candidate Gustavo Anzueto Vielman, a member of the right-wing business lobby, Amigos del Pals, put forward a radical monetarist program-"The Path to Peaceful Prosperity"-proposing to abolish 50 out of 56 existing taxes, deregulate consumer prices, remove exchange controls, free interest rates and eliminate all restrictions on foreign capital...
...Moods brightened as marimba bands replaced unmarked Cherokee station wagons in the streets of Guatemala City...
...This is Bullets and Beans...
...First, Venezuela's guerrillas were never so pervasive, and second, Guatemala does not have Venezuela's booming oil economy...
...Rounding out the list are ten indigenous representatives, and one each from rural workers, urban workers, the cooperatives and the women's association...
...The marginalized political parties have no illusions about this scheme either...
...But all the opposition parties spurned its overtures, except the miniscule National Unity Front (FUN...
...Donna Summer's voice blasts out of record stores to crowds of chic teenage shoppers, while displaced Indians, recent migrants from terror and starvation in the highlands, shuffle blankly past...
...The Christian Democrats, meanwhile, gravitated into an electoral alliance with the National Renovation Party (PNR...
...For this reason, the Army must now project itself politically...
...Francisco Bache, Assembly of God preacher, in Cunen, El Quiche...
...3. Inforpress, October 1, 1981...
...dollar...
...Unomdsuno, March 24, 1982...
...What is to be built on the ashes of the Indian highlands...
...Lucas' presidential candidate, Gen...
...Grappling with the surge of the Left and its own internal conflicts, the private sector was pushed to the limits of its tolerance by the serious credit squeeze and the concomitant greed of the Lucas government...
...Storekeepers, fearing trouble, had rolled down their steel shutters...
...That, apart from the Army's budget restraints, is why the patrols carry sticks instead of M-16s...
...Search-and-destroy missions need a follow-up...
...5. Excilsior (Mexico City), July 31, 1981...
...If the Left has made more recent or superficial inroads, why kill needlessly...
Vol. 17 • March 1983 • No. 2
