The Road from Ixcan
"It was just as important to love the yellow flower of the tamborillo in February, as to learn how to love and truly respect our companeros." EGP leader In 1972, a detachment of 16 men had...
...Lumbering C-47 transport planes disgorged hundreds of paratroopers over the Ixcin, occupying all key points...
...The International Union of Food and Allied Workers weighed in with a boycott of its products, and international publicity highlighted the stream of Coca Cola workers cut down by the death squads.' The Mineworkers' March In November 1977, Minas de Guatemala closed its tungsten mine in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacin in the remote northwest, laying off 300 workers and stepping up intimidation of their union...
...A victory for the teachers, longshot though it might be, was the chance for a wedge...
...OUnomisuno (Mexico), June 25, 1982...
...It did not seek legal recognition or limit its demands to economic improvements...
...At a national level, clandestine activity began to seem the only remaining alternative to those seeking fundamental social change...
...1 (January-February 1980), p. 2 4 . On unions in the 1960's, see CIDAMO, "The Workers Movement;' p. 31...
...Those who organized against their poverty found that the most humble community demand-a new stand-pipe, electric lighting-was treated by the regime as a mortal threat...
...Eventually even the Bishop of El QuichM left the country, and all churches in his diocese closed their doors...
...he agreed to mediate with the Army and instructed the government to stay clear...
...The strike now quickly grew to include parents, students, public employees, slumdwellers and industrial workers who took to the streets in sympathy...
...The war was on...
...Now, enraged by the layoffs, they took over the factory...
...Police responded by storming the building and ejecting the occupiers by force...
...But growing numbers of the base church refused to be deterred by the repression...
...There were still only half as many organized urban workers as in the Arnvalo-Arbenz years, but, reared in a less benevolent time, these had a clearer sense of purpose and autonomy...
...Instead, the CUC's founders organized nationwide under a single unitary strategy...
...Latin America Political Report, February 29, 1980, and Inforpress Centroamericana (Guatemala), No...
...As the February 4, 1976 earthquake struck, labor delegates had been meeting feverishly to unify their efforts...
...They were never seen again...
...second, a limited, though important, international diplomatic function...
...Commander-in-chief: Pablo Monsanto...
...The time was ripe, the organization decided, for its first armed action and a public announcement of its existence...
...Each existing political organization was studied by the peas-Mar/Apr 1983 g resorted to stray dogs...
...In the highlands the CUC organized them as subsistence farmers, on the south coast as migrant laborers, exposing the overlap between economic exploitation and cultural oppression...
...23 Over landowners' protests, the government decreed a new rural minimum of $3.20...
...Embassy was forced to admit that eight out of ten guerrillas were Indians...
...Further along, Cakchiquel Indians and ladino peasants did the same...
...In those four years, a rush of momentous events marked key moments in the mass movement's growth and interlocking...
...From 1976 to 1978, each fresh strike would set off solidarity actions in other plants...
...3. Mario Lopez Larrave, Breve historia del movimiento sindical guatemalteco (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1979...
...There, they hoped, the mayor would settle their long-simmering grievances over land tenure...
...One hundred thousand took the streets...
...The government's tame Federated Workers' Central collapsed as its members moved left.' Bank employees, university staff and municipal workers all unionized for the first time...
...was different...
...Paralyzing the Plantations The 15-day strike defied the Labor Code's ban on work stoppages during harvest time...
...News of Arenas' assassination sped through the mountains, and by early the following morning, the sky was alive with the drone of helicopters...
...A fifth politico-military organization, the Revolutionary Movement of the People (MRP-Ixlm) rejects membership in the URNG...
...At the same time, the Army established itself more firmly in rural areas...
...It is from this mosaic of class, race and ideology that unity must be arduously designed...
...28-33...
...Compaiiero, No...
...All legal doors seemed closed...
...Isolated way up in the mountains, the Mam Indian miners tried a new tactic, a 250-mile protest march to Guatemala City, to demand reinstatement and a new collective bargaining agreement...
...on March 24...
...for others still, the fight for land was from the outset a struggle for survival...
...On January 25, the four guerrilla groups united around the strategy of popular revolutionary war under the banner of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG...
...If Panz6s was a turning point for the Indians, this massacre killed any flickering hope for peaceful protest...
...Hundreds of activists lost their jobs, and the militant unions of state employees and telecommunications workers were outlawed...
...15-23, and Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, p. 35...
...In almost three years, this original nucleus of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) fired but one shot at their enemy, concentrating instead on building support among the area's subsistence farmers, Indian and ladino...
...Together with indigenous radio stations, they have defied the ideological monopoly of the military state...
...Together with vigilantes stationed on nearby rooftops, they opened fire on the demonstration...
...Organizing a strike, or even a union, has always been to court trouble...
...As a pillar of support for the 1944-54 "revolution," they were afterward targeted for harsh treatment, accused of being riddled with "communist influence...
...CNUS lawyer and labor historian Mario L6pez Larrave, IxtahuacAn march organizer Mario Mujfa and scores of others died...
...XIV, no...
...can the Army win them back...
...From the Churches...
...On the 29th, hundreds of Kekchi Indians from Alta Verapaz marched into the town of Panz6s...
...The first group engaged in a kaleidoscope of tasks: voluntary collective food production, first aid networks for those wounded by Army patrols, taking care of widows and orphans...
...Norma Chinchilla, "Class Struggle in Central America: Background and Overview," Latin American Perspectives, No...
...Operates on seven fronts, including the east of Guatemala...
...SeeJ...
...ant leaders to see if it met the needs of the rural poor...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle...
...They came by the hundreds--children, grandparents, whole families-with their flags, hand-painted banners, nylon tarps to keep off the rain, hoes, machetes and torches...
...Its cutting edge was the eight-year-old National Confederation of Labor (CNT), far the largest grouping...
...With more strength on the ground, argued one theorist, "the revolutionary leadership could be at all times beside and within the mass movement," linking each immediate local issue to a long-range vision of the war...
...And the Slums As in the rural areas, churchpeople were deeply involved in work in the sordid slums around Guatemala City...
...Mutts served as moving " rural signboards, reading "Viva CUC...
...The guerrilla forces now appeared a rational response to an untenable situation, the only ones offering long-term, comprehensive solutions...
...The prolonged war strategy would move through several phases: first, "implantation," the creation of a solid guerrilla base and its political infrastructure, spreading the word through "armed propaganda...
...An interview with the FDCR which appeared in ALAI, February 27, 1981, cites as an example the August 1980 strike by Atlantic coast banana workers...
...For the generals, it was proof that the unions had got out of hand...
...9. See International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Association, The Coca Cola Guatemala Campaign, 1979-1981 (Geneva, 1981...
...Unlike the EGP, it has no mass organization, but wide peasant support, and works largely as a military entity, often brilliantly...
...Never before had workers and peasants, Indians and ladinos, and Indians of different ethnic groups shared such solidarity...
...4 (1981...
...31 died...
...25-26 (Spring and Summer, 1980...
...The bodies of slumdwellers arrested on the barricades turned up later along the roadsides...
...through Guatemala City in solidarity, defying death-squad threats...
...2 It is this combined approach to class conflict and ethnic demands which has given the Guatemalan revolution its special stamp...
...Antonio Bran, "Organizaci6n popular y lucha de clases en el campo;' in Cuadernos de Marcha (Mexico), No...
...With the 1976 earthquake, many saw their frail cardboard and tin shacks swept away...
...ORPA draws its strength from the Indian departments of San Marcos, Quezaltenango, Sololt, TotonicapAn and Huehuetenango...
...By mid-decade, virtually no major enterprise had escaped bitter labor conflict...
...In the fight, traditional communists and despairing social democrats rub shoulders with progressive Catholics...
...The only guerrilla organization with a truly national structure, it works closely with the farmworkers' CUC...
...employers at major plants used the chaotic aftermath to dismiss workers they deemed unruly...
...Inforpress, December 3, 1981...
...EGP leader In 1972, a detachment of 16 men had entered the jungles of the Ixcin, on Guatemala's northwestern frontier...
...the tiny movement pressed forward...
...plainclothes gunmen broke in and dragged away all 27...
...Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) Descendant of the FAR of the 1960s (see JanuaryFebruary issue...
...A confused sound of shots and an explosion ensued, and in no time the building was ablaze...
...All three factions are active militarily, but none is strong...
...but even more threatening were the barricades...
...This fusion made its greatest show of force within a month...
...As they talked, police sealed off the block...
...The emphasis was on the creative use of local resources...
...The regime had militarized class struggle, and the mass movement had to respond...
...Page 14, right-hand column, line 28-Gen...
...It quickly joined CNUS...
...None fully qualified...
...At its height, CNUS was a coalition of extraordinary breadth, embracing not only urban workers but slumdwellers, peasants, students and even church-related community groups...
...Though the Catholic Church's origins are deeply conservative, foreign missionaries in the 1960s began to break from the stifling anti-communism they had been imported to preach.'" The rural cooperative movement of that decade was the first step, together with the social training workshops in which the missionaries reflected on rural social conditions...
...On March 31, delegates of 65 unions met to consider their response...
...But at 2 a.m., hundreds of police amassed outside...
...3 o It was another plateau in the long process...
...In the labor unions, the PGT camarilla has regained considerable strength...
...On the contrary, the regime's hard line was an incentive for U.S., Japanese and European investors...
...25-26 (Spring and Summer, 1980), p. 15...
...Richard Adams, Crucifixion by Poter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), p. 84...
...By the time the fire trucks arrived, 39 people had burned alive...
...From the talks emerged the National Committee of Trade Union Unity (CNUS), whose role would be to confront the repression and defend labor rights...
...The EGP proposed to center its struggle in the highlands...
...3 The brief respite of 1944-54 was followed by an anti-labor savagery so indiscriminate that even the staunchly anticommunist American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) felt moved to protest...
...As elsewhere in Central America, the local Communist party had to swallow its pride and confess that history had assigned it a fringe role in the drama...
...25-26 (Spring-Summer, 1980), pp...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, p. 29...
...For the first time, there were Indian orators...
...Family parties, religious brotherhoods, even soccer tournaments became the safest vehicle for education and organizing...
...The regime was not prepared to countenance dissent from this quarter...
...2. Ibid, and Compafiero (Mexico), No...
...Cited in Ibid...
...But between 1976 and 1980, one after another learned that peaceful change was a chimera, the political-military organizations of the Left the only viable alternative able to interweave the myriad forms of struggle...
...The survivors argued for a pro*For further information on the Guatemalan revolutionaries, their origins and basic strategy, see "The Road to Ixcan" in Part I (Jan-Feb 1983), and the box on p. 9 of this issue...
...military action had not ignited mass insurrection and, in the end, the guerrilla organizations had been destroyed by the Army...
...In January 1982, the EGP, FAR, ORPA and the PGTNi3cleo de Direcci6n Nacional joined forces in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG...
...Though the EGP had a mere 50 armed combatants by 1975, hundreds of peasants clamored for guns to fight the Army...
...5NACLA Report Z...
...These stages precede the moment when the movement can take on the armed forces-and perhaps invading U.S...
...Plantation workers, for example, lacking billboards and walls, would paint slogans on cattle...
...Popular Revolutionary War The EGP was one of a new breed of revolutionary organizations who had taken to heart the defeats of the 1960.* The foquista efforts of that decade had failed for lack of a clear strategy for mass involvement in the war...
...2 4 Landowners, particularly the coffee growers, were not mollified when the military quietly assured them they would not have to actually pay the new rate.2" While sugar or cotton growers might weather the storm by layoffs and mechanization, demand for labor in the coffee fields was constant: the hilly plantation terrain and the delicate manual task of berrypicking made mechanization almost impossible...
...Commander-in-Chief: Rolando MorAn...
...From the outset, the CUC spoke of "uprooting the tree of exploitation...
...Radicalized churchpeople became a prime conduit of the revolutionary message in the Indian highlands...
...Insisting that any remaining legal space had to be exploited, CNUS continued to meet openly, but security was a nightmare...
...Towards Unity For 29 years, scores of guerrilla organizations, labor groups and political parties have tried to complete Guatemala's interrupted history...
...Latin America Political Report, October 13, 1978...
...Iglesia Guatemalteca en el Exilio, "Algunos apuntes para un anilisis sobre los efectos del militarismo sobre los intentos de desarrollo de las comunidades del altiplano de Guatemala',' unpublished mimeo, Managua, 1980...
...There are widely different ideologies...
...Laying the groundwork for the CUC had taken five meticulous years...
...Silete dias en la USAC (Guatemala), March 17, 1980...
...182-6...
...It represents principally," wrote conservative journalist Roberto Gir6n Lemus, "an organized demonstration of salaried agricultural workers...
...Peasants called him "The Tiger of Ixcin...
...THE ROAD FROM IXCAN 1. See interview with Rolando Morin which appeared in Punto Final (Mexico...
...NACLA interviews with CGUP leaders in Mexico City, Managua and Washington, D.C., June-September 1982...
...2 In the factories and plantations, this became true by 1980...
...Then others too-hitherto paralyzed by fear-could take hope about expressing their own stifled demands...
...its leaders remained unknown figures until 1980...
...Willing or passive accomplices of the military, their personnel managers were often military men, and Military Police units would commonly be posted on the shop floor...
...The repression of the rural cooperatives by landlords who rightly saw them as a threat to the cheap migrant labor supply opened the eyes of missionaries who had seen them as an alternative to radical reform...
...Increasingly, the movement went underground, its methods converging with those of the guerrillas...
...And as support blossomed, it took on fresh meaning...
...Bran, "Organizacion popular...
...The progressive middle class will have a place in its ranks...
...for others, faith in electoral change was travestied by evidence of fraud and corruption...
...Bran, "Organizaci6n popular...
...they threatened to break through the barrier of fear and cooptation.5 The traditional Christian Democratic union leadership was alarmed...
...XII, no...
...At each moment, the doors of legal protest were slammed shut by the regime, forcing the protesters to learn their organizational potential and the military brutality which awaited dissent...
...Via CNUS, the world sat up and took notice of Coca Cola...
...The modernization of Guatemala's economy, with the breakdown of subsistence farming, mushrooming cities and huge new "factories in the fields," has thrown up a bewildering array of social classes...
...Church-sponsored grassroots organizations flowered in the wake of the earthquake...
...But even the legal game of union registration and petitioning for the right to strike was an uphill fight...
...Any notion of an "intact" Mayan social order was absurd, the EGP argued...
...The target was Luis Arenas Barrera, a landowner whose rapacity made him feared throughout the northwest...
...With wages frozen since 1973, this did little more than catch up with inflation...
...6. Albfzurez, "Struggles and Experiences," p. 146...
...We are witnessing a new scene with actors different from the Indian who removes his hat, places it over his chest and humbly asks his patrdn for a few centavos more, por la gracia de Dids...
...Latin America Political Report, October 6 and 13, 1978...
...FP-31 leader minded followers chafe with impatience...
...10 (November-December 1980), pp...
...This was something new...
...As CNUS' critiques became bolder and the class content of their declarations more explicit, union members and labor lawyers became moving targets for the death squads...
...Inside the Embassy, Ambassador Cajal was sympathetic...
...In it, said the CUC, "Indian and ladino blood mingled...
...Street fighting erupted in the capital and the western highlands, with police firing on unarmed crowds...
...Migrants had streamed into the capital in growing numbers since the 1960s, displaced by the encroachment of export agriculture and mining in peasant areas, the mechanization of large farms and the lack of year-round employment...
...Class and ethnic protest fused...
...Together with the most militant groups of workers, slumdwellers, students and Christians, it posed an alternative-the January 31 Popular Front (FP-31)-named for those who had died in the Embassy...
...For some, the battle for union recognition has brought disillusionment about peaceful tactics...
...Yet a new mass movement had indeed begun to stir in early 1973...
...5. Miguel Angel Albfzurez, "Struggles and Experiences of the Guatemalan Trade Union Movement, 1976-June 1978' Latin American Perspectives, No...
...the historic grievances of 22 ethnic groups find common cause with the rebellious anger of the long-term unemployed...
...On August 7, 1973, 4,000 people marchedNACLA Report "In Guatemala, murder is called Coca Cola...
...In response, the Lucas regime proposed doubling urban fares from 5c to 10e...
...Whether subsistence farmers, rural migrant laborers or sharecroppers, urban factory workers or marginal slumdwellers, radicalized students or middle-class professionals-all became active opponents of the regime...
...In that Labor Day parade was the largest Indian turnout Guatemala had ever seen...
...From both directions, streams of workers poured onto the cloverleaf by the Roosevelt Hospital, merging with a throng of waiting urban supporters...
...It began with a strike of 20,000 public school teachers for higher wages, frozen since 1962...
...Edelberto Torres-Rivas, "Guatemala: Crisis and Political Violence,' NA CLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...When landowners singled out these beasts for slaughter, the workers No Turning Back At 11 a.m...
...Under the tyranny of the pre-1944 government, all organizing rights were abrogated, the very words "unionism" and "strike" prohibited by law...
...6 Rapid reaction groups learned to evacuate villages under Army attack...
...Profits depended on superexploitation...
...From their efforts, the National Slumdwellers' Movement was born...
...The FP-31 called for "much more profound forms of struggle," and would itself offer "a unitary structure to deepen support and coordination between the mass organizations and raise [their] fighting potential," in preparation for a future insurrection...
...33...
...longed popular war, based on general mobilization of the populace and creation of a self-sufficient infrastructure...
...in the Indian highlands it had long been a reality...
...Though the highlands could not be described as liberated zones, new democratic structures sprouted, with village committees handling all local affairs from land tenure disputes to crime, weddings and funerals...
...Had strong influence in the labor movement of the 1970s, first through the CNT and then CNUS...
...4. CIDAMO, "The Workers Movement in Guatemala;' in NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Since the previous August, the workforce had been battling for union recognition and a collective bargaining agreement...
...Interview with the PGT by Marta Harnecker appearing in Nueva (Quito), October-November 1981...
...2 6 Indeed, economic victory was not the strikers' paramount concern...
...But it had seen its role as a defensive response to the regime, not as coming to grips with the double edge of mass organizing in Guatemala-the political and the military...
...Schoolteachers Show the Way To survivors of the suffocating anti-communism of 1954, combined with the counterinsurgency terror of the 1960s, the rebirth of grassroots organizations seemed a remote fantasy...
...The war must be that of the Indian majority, said the EGP, and only through a social revolution can their centuries of cultural oppression be overcome...
...In rural areas, clergy took their place in the Army's shooting gallery...
...See, as well, the testimony of Steven W. Bosworth before the House Banking Subcommittee, August 5, 1982...
...See descriptions in Noticias de Guatemala (Costa Rica), October 20, 1981...
...Radicalization and the acceptance of armed struggle does not come to all sectors at the same rhythm...
...It will not be an exiled group of notables, like CGUP, but an organization rooted in the daily struggle inside Guatemala...
...Teachers had always been a militant and mobilized group...
...The State Department estimated their strength at 3,500 combatants, 10,000 members of Local Irregular Forces plus 30,000 to 60,000 actively organized supporters...
...While leadership grapples with thorny theoretical debates, the mass of practicalGuatemala's Politico-Military Organizations Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) Biggest of the four groups, with massive organized support in the Indian highlands of El Quich6, Alta and Baja Verapaz, Huehuetenango and Chimaltenango...
...By Tecpin, 55 miles short of the capital, the miners learned their demands had been met...
...Next, the war would become "generalized" in the countryside, with the Left accumulating strength and extending its social, political and military influence...
...Through Church efforts in the highlands and the slums, new generations of indigenous leaders emerged, and their fruitless efforts to win community demands peacefully led them too to question the very roots of the system...
...By May 1978, conflicts between religious communities and the Army, and between grassroots Church activists and the conservative hierarchy, exploded...
...Prensa Libre (Guatemala City), February 27, 1980, and Inforpress, February 28, 1980...
...In a war atmosphere, overtly political structures invite repression, so the peasants came up with creative alternatives...
...A single peasant, Gregorio Yuja Xona, survived...
...As in Nicaragua's September 1978 insurrection, disaffected urban youth wearing face masks blocked the roads with paving stones and burning tires, and peppered traffic lanes with thumbtacks-a vast spontaneous uprising which the mass movement did not control...
...8. Albizurez, "Struggles and Experiences;' and Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win (New York, 1981), p. 27...
...thousands more flooded in from the devastated countryside...
...They marched in well disciplined rows with their own tight security...
...the CUC settled for $3.20 at the behest of other CNUS members...
...It was sparked by a strike on the sugar plantations-including Pantale6n, the nation's biggest mill-and soon included workers on cotton and coffee plantations, a total of 75,000 in the three sectors...
...The talks were suspended as all hands turned to aid survivors of the disaster...
...advance units beat the doors down with axes...
...It was a radical shift from the Communist PGT, and many urban labor organizers, who saw peasants-and Indians in particular-as poor raw material for a revolution...
...Some peasant leaders toyed with the idea of an exclusively Indian body, but as instances of Indian-ladino cooperation within CNUS grew, the notion waned...
...Discussion is underway to incorporate the remaining PGT factions into the unity...
...The CUC moved forward in militant self-confidence...
...troops-in frontal combat...
...It would be a pivotal decision: repression had driven the movement to choose between caving in and escalating their concept of self-defense...
...nuns and priests in clerical garb walked shoulder to shoulder with workers and peasants...
...Blase Bonpane, "The Church and Revolutionary Struggle in Central America,' Latin American Perspectives, Nos...
...Next day, badly burned, he was dragged from his hospital bed, his mutilated corpse later dumped at the university...
...CUC work merged with that of the guerrilla organizations in sabotage and harassment of the Army, preparation in armed self-defense and political education...
...3 7 Under the tutelage of the guerrilla organizations, new social relations are in place, all with respect for the traditional collective values of the indigenous population...
...New York Times, March 15, 1982...
...references Errata Please note the following corrections for 'Garrison Guatemala," part one of this two-part issue: Page 7, left-hand column, line 28, should read- From 1950 to 1977...
...What now...
...2 9 The CUC, long disturbed at the lack of security and self-defense among FDCR members, had pulled out of the coalition after the sugar strike...
...For almost a decade, the four political-military organizations (see box) had fought on different regional fronts...
...Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT) The traditional Communist party, now split into three wings, divided mainly on the role of armed struggle...
...Until the intense repression made them impossible, local, regional and national assemblies provided for the participation of all, young and old, Indian and ladino, in decision making...
...6 (November-December 1978), p. 43...
...1 6 In September 1978, CNT-led bus drivers struck for a wage increase...
...Launched publicly in 1979...
...3 4 In this war, noted a Mexican visitor to an ORPA-controlled area, there are two kinds of people: those who work for the revolution and "those who await death, trapped between terror and starvation...
...Fortunately, the armed Left was by then strong enough to give the mass movement the coherent direction it needed...
...Immediately, miners at the Oxec mine and construction crews at the huge Chixoy and Aguacapa hydroelectric plants downed tools in sympathy.Mar/Apr 1983 As the workers and their families trekked down the Pan American highway, Quich6 Indians ran from their homes offering food, clothing, money and moral support...
...Page 22, right-hand column, line 8-The quote attributed to Alberto Fuentes Mohr was actually said by FUR leader Manuel Col6m Argueta...
...Industrial modernization and a flood of foreign investment in the 1960s did little to help...
...On June 21, 1980, amid growing rank-and-file disquiet that "legal space" was a delusion, 27 union leaders met at the dilapidated CNT headquarters in downtown Guatemala City...
...Amid the crumbling of the old social order, the alternative is taking shape...
...In 1974, railroad, electricity and tobacco workers struck...
...On a political level, the agroexporters' grasp of the strike's meaning was as articulate as the Left's...
...The formation of a mass political front based on a worker-peasant alliance had long been a priority...
...2 1 TheNACLA Report specter of machete-wielding Indians and ladinos lining the Pan American highway was a nightmare come true for the plantation owners...
...worst exposed to repression, fighting sectarian skirmishes, they must escape the tunnel vision which underground existence can breed...
...1 7 Economic activity in Guatemala City came to a near standstill...
...strike in the public sector, demanded a single publicly-owned bus company and put up barricades to paralyze traffic...
...See the bulletin from the Asociaci6n de Cafieros in Inforpress, February 28, 1980...
...A Single Voice for the Countryside From its first public appearance on May 1, 1978, it was clear the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) was no ordinary organization...
...Going Underground In the year after the Spanish Embassy, events shifted radically...
...and finally the cities, bastion of the regime...
...The CUC arose as a fusion of cooperatives, Christian groups and peasant leagues -a new kind of political instrument to give the rural movement coherence...
...A tenuous unity was strained further...
...Fifty Indians from Uspantin had visited congress in August 1979 to protest local disappearances...
...Radicalized away from its Christian Democratic origins, the CNT would, within two years, break away from CLAT, the regional Christian Democratic labor federation, sealing the independence of the Guatemalan labor movement...
...A march on June 8 to protest Panz6s drew 60,000 demonstrators...
...The flashpoint came as 152 workers were a 0 :E 2 sacked from Coca Cola's local franchise, Embotelladora Guatemalteca S.A...
...and third, as a forum for discussions toward the unified political front dreamed of by the Left.:" The political front is the key missing element...
...Yet, by 1982, many obstacles had been overcome...
...Israel Marquez, former secretary-general of the coca Cola plant's union Armed guards patrol the Coca Cola plant during the 1976 strike...
...the "Leadership Nucleus" (PGT-Nucleo de Direccion Nacional) and the PGT Military Commission have also broken away...
...See, Gabriel Aguilera, "The Massacre at Panz6s and Capitalist Development in Guatemala:' Monthly Review (December 1979), pp...
...for their pains, they had been beaten and arrested, told that "this is no place for indios...
...press denunciations of the slaughter were issued by at least ten religious groups, including the newly formed Justice and Peace Committee, which grouped lay intellectuals and religious, and would become one of the most broad-based of the mass organizations...
...New Unity, New Methods The basic strategy of the nascent movement was to open up "democratic space" for working class organization...
...The main body, or camarilla,-is criticized by dissidents for neglecting the militarywork agreed at the 1969 Party Congress...
...Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA) Broke from the FAR in 1971 over its neglect of the indigenous question...
...But generals and agroexporters alike knew that the strike's significance ran much deeper...
...In the EGP's words, "destruction of other forms of political participation laid the basis for a convergence of the armed revolutionary movement with the popular and democratic sectors...
...Now the survivors were back, organizing in the countryside and, by the mid-1970s, working in the heart of the urban mass movement...
...7. For the full history of the strike, see Food Monitor (November-December 1980...
...Actors and Stages Yet the Indian highland population alone will not win the war...
...For four years, the Quichi had been under military occupation...
...8 Within three weeks, 26 noted professionals, labor, peasant and party leaders, intellectuals and Christians, formed the Guatemalan Patriotic Unity Committee (CGUP), endorsed simultaneously by the guerrilla organizations, FDCR and FP-31...
...on January 31, 1980, a group of people-mainly CUC members from the Quich--peacefully occupied the Spanish Embassy...
...Without one, the other was futile...
...The CUC's genius was to work with the same people in two complementary ways, defying traditional skepticism about harnessing the inchoate force of migrant labor-650,000 families from different towns and villages, multilingual, often migrating to a different farm each harvest season...
...XIV, no...
...Unification has not been easy, though all recognize that it is essential...
...Commander-inChief: Gaspar Ilom...
...Interview with CNT, in ALAI (Montreal), February 12, 1982...
...Back in 1979, CNUS had spurred the creation of the Democratic Front Against Repression (FDCR), a loose amalgam of unions, grassroots groups and social democratic parties...
...More recently...
...Yet they walked on to their destination in support of striking workers from the Pantale6n sugar mill, who in turn brought out sympathizers from the industrial estates around Lake Amatitln...
...See, NACLA, "Crisis in Nicaragua;' NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...But its core will be the revolutionary organizations of the workers and the campesinos...
...By the end of 1977, the surge of strikes, marches and occupations forced both sides to draw battle lines...
...Steps toward unity of the four made a common approach viable for the first time...
...Its role was threefold: first, to throw down a political gauntlet to the regime during its pre-election crisis...
...local CUC chapters built man-traps and blocked roads to impede the military's advance...
...Over the 1970s, many realized that the existing political order gave them no hope...
...Legal union work was dead, and the few strikes were often accompanied by armed self-defense...
...Page 10, right-hand column, line 31, should read-60,000 barrel-per-day oil pipeline...
...6 But the lull was short-lived...
...Laborers blocked all mill entrances, sabotaged machinery and burned stockpiled crops...
...2 2 Their immediate demand was for a daily wage hike from $1.12 to $5.00-still 31e short of covering minimal nutrition needs for a family of six...
...5 (1982...
...Economic boom had brought new urban employment, but rising inflation fueled discontent...
...As one onlooker commented: "This is what Guatemala has been waiting for from the Church -for over 400 years...
...3 3 The Guatemalan Army admitted in horror that "whole peasant families join in as strategic collaborators...
...Began actions as the MRP-lxim in July 1982.NACLA Report "Today, more than ever, all the revolutionary, patriotic, popular and democratic forces must move toward the constitution of a unitary political front...
...so, too, may a few reform-minded military officers, if any can be found...
...Also, NACLA interviews in Mexico City, June 1982...
...For most slumdwellers, travel on the city's ramshackle bus lines is an economic headache: even for employed workers, daily travel can eat up 15% of their income...
...The Arana regime, startled by the show of strength and aware of pre-election publicity, caved in to the teachers' demands...
...and "GPR" (the acronym for Popular Revolutionary War...
...Concentrating on this sector, it only resumed military action in 1978, and has now organized fronts in Guatemala City, Chimaltenango and three areas of the remote, underpopulated Peten...
...13-23...
...By 1980, they were firmly rooted in more than half of the country's 22 departments...
...At once, a CNUS general assembly of workers, students and shanty-town dwellers agreed on a general Indian hearts and minds are with the guerrillas...
...Romeo Lucas Garcia was by then president of Guatemala...
...Like all victories of the popular movement, it was costly...
...Originally formed by ORPA dissidents under the name of Nuestro Movimiento (Our Movement), but later joined by militants expelled from the FAR and EGP and members of the PGT Military Commission...
...1 (JanuaryFebruary 1980), pp...
...1 " To the disgust of Army hardliners, the government withdrew the fare increases and instead paid a 3.5c-per-ride subsidy to the bus owners...
...which] indicates a state of class consciousness, and class consciousness is arrived at through union education...
...Furthermore, the cities threatened to join in, with CNUS talking militantly of a general strike to demand that the urban minimum wage be raised from $2.00 to $7.00 per day...
...The population would be organized at every level-as regular guerrilla fighters, as paramilitary groups to defend local communities, and in a plethora of economic and social tasks from food provision and shelter to communications and intelligence...
...2 7 Though more than 10,000 workers lost their jobs in the aftermath, the joint action of CUC members had stayed the hand of a repressive military regime...
...In the Indian areas, the EGP and ORPA (Organization of the People in Arms) were spoken of as "our army," and by early 1982, even the U.S...
...As at every watershed, some sectors of the mass movement reacted more rapidly than others...
...This was theMar/Apr 1983 phase of'"massification" of the war, with guerrilla columns operating as the military spearhead of a supple, mass-based political structure in the highlands...
...With the eyes of the world on Guatemala's upcoming election, there seemed to be the promise of some space for opposition...
...8 CNUS made it possible for workers in different factories and industrial sectors to link up in joint action...
...Middle-level cadre, fiercely loyal to the group they fought with, are the trickiest...
...Believes in uniting military and political aspects of the war...
...They complained too that scales used to calculate piece-work rates were under-weighted, with Indians and ladinos obliged to use different ones...
...United action by Indians and ladinos, resident workers and temporary day laborers was unprecedented in Latin America...
...Interview with the FP-31, in ALAI, March 27, 1981, and founding communique of the FP-31, mimeo, January 31, 1981...
...The culminating stage will be mass insurrection, likely to follow levels of military combat not yet witnessed in the region.' The EGP sees three distinct geographic fronts for the Guatemalan revolution: the rugged Indian highlands, where central government is weak and the terrain ideal for guerrilla warfare;Mar/Apr 1983 the coastal agricultural belt, with a stronger Army presence...
...When the dust settled, more than 100 lay dead.'" The regime hastened to blame Christian activists for inflaming the peasants...
...Instead, they found 150 troops, called in by local landowners, posted in the town hall...
...The reaction from Christian base communities and cooperatives was immediate...
...30...
...between 1976 and 1981, a dozen died...
...While the CUC's own newspaper, Voz, circulates in Indian languages, other local peasant news sheets complement the message...
...Only then will there be talk of liberated zones...
...Ibid...
...Since the 1950s, the Indians had known from the despoiling of their lands and forced migration to plantation wage labor what modern exploitation was all about...
...In the 1960s the FAR-then a military commission of the PGT-went independent...
...That will not come about until each sector-worker, peasant or student-has overcome its past schisms and achieved solid internal unity...
...IEPALA, Guatemala, unfuturoprdximo (Madrid, 1981...
Vol. 17 • March 1983 • No. 2
