Guatemala: Crisis and Political Violence
Torres-Rivas, Edelberto
In the context of Somoza's downfall in Nicaragua, and the imminent possibility of civil war in El Salvador, conditions in Central America as a whole are now receiving more attention and serious...
...In nominating its candidate, the Army effectively chooses the titular head of state...
...Rather, a process of internal differentiation has taken place, both within the coffeeproducing group itself and with the advent of new agricultural products for export...
...1, p. 2 7 1 . 8. Diario Impacto (Guatemala), July 28, 1979...
...Elections to fill the vacancy were blatantly rigged...
...The reactionary class dictatorship took the form of a military government, in which the state assumed the task of defending the interests of the threatened classes, and ultimately became totally identified with them...
...The state's commitment to so-called "private initiative" is such that capital's assault on the working class is actually led by the state...
...The current president of the Bank of Guatemala, the most modern and favored institution of the bourgeoisie, is a military man...
...He won because the Mendez government had been totally discredited as repressive and incompetent...
...Press reports, which are not necessarily complete or reliable, indicate that 546 people were assassinated for strictly political reasons within this same two-month period...
...Repression of the union and peasant movements has become the key to political violence in Guatemala over the last few years...
...He directed an anti-guerrilla campaign, with material and logistical support from the United States, that took the lives of 15,000 in three years...
...The Christian Democratic Party, which has been registered for some time, has achieved neither a stable, programmatic presence nor a popular base of support...
...On the contrary, it JanlFeb 1980 1920 NACLA Report tends to aggravate them...
...Another is that one-quarter of the population earns 66.5% of the national income, while another quarter earns only 6.7%.' The lists of "disappeared persons" are a reality, too, as is the fact that 50% of the adult members of this "democracy" can't read or write...
...The escalation of violence in Guatemala has passed through several stages...
...In 1970, the PR was in the opposition...
...The periodic changing of the guard was achieved by electoral means, as the dictatorship sought to hide its face behind a democratic facade...
...A sizeable group of these newcomers have invested their fortunes and used the strings of government to better compete in the market...
...Thirdly, it is essential to determine what class the state serves as a reactionary class dictatorship...
...In the myopic view of the ruling class, any sign of popular movement is considered subversive and demands swift repression...
...The crisis revealed itself in the bourgeoisie's failure to legitimize its rule and has only been accentuated with the passage of time...
...I, No...
...Only those that need to climb the social ladder choose that path...
...The constitution of a Democratic Front against Repression, in March 1979, signals an important step forward in this confrontation...
...But nothing could be further from the truth...
...In summary, the reactionary class dictatorship is at the direct and exclusive service of these sectors, and is incapable of resolving the secondary contradictions that exist among them...
...But violence is intended to stave off a situation in which political unrest compounds the political crisis and transforms it into a generalized, social crisis of revolutionary proportions...
...The trade union movement is illegal because the state refuses to legalize its existence, even within the narrow limits set by the state itself...
...A progressive interlude in Guatemalan history came in the 1940s and early 1950s...
...Social contradictions have sharpened as a result of capitalist economic growth in its 22 NACLA ReportJanlFeb 1980 House-to-house searches in the 1960s...
...In short, Guatemala's political reality has been dominated for a century by a defiance of democratic norms, in social, political and economic terms...
...When death is a daily occurrence, it becomes an accepted dimension of personal life...
...There, if the pillars of military rule are not yet crumbling, at least they are trembling...
...To be sure, it rapidly gained independence and formulated its own program...
...Moreover, a climate of terror had enveloped the country, with Arana himself a leading figure in its creation...
...Counterinsurgency Programs," in Guatemala, pp...
...The emergence of popular organizations, the growth of trade unionism and the awakening of the peasantry constitute a defensive reaction to the repression required to keep the system functioning...
...In the first place, due to conditions described below, this mass movement can only grow as an opposition force, resisting not only the bosses, but the state itself...
...Aided by U.S...
...In summary, liberal democracy--a mechanism that organizes relations of domination among social classes--has not developed, and force has filled the void...
...The Movement of National Liberation (MLN), the extreme-right "party of organized violence," was defeated after two months of popular unrest that ended with the election of General Ydigoras Fuentes, a conservative opponent of Castillo Armas' party...
...Today, there is also a sector of nouveau riche entrepreneurs, that amassed their fortunes by influence-peddling and the like...
...Since power tends to become concentrated, the end of the Mendez administration in 1970 coincided with the demise of civilian rule in Guatemala...
...The Catholic Church is no longer the willing accomplice of the powerful...
...Yet this character has been imposed on the movement by the peculiar circumstances of political life in Guatemala...
...It became a weapon in the hands of right-wing forces against all political rivals...
...But the interlude came to a bloody end in 1954, when direct U.S...
...But the repression of the 1970s, which regained homicidal furor in May 1978 (under the government of General Lucas Garcia), has its own distinct character...
...ESCAPE VALVES The misery and the desperation of millions of Guatemalans are expressed in a variety of ways...
...Industrial growth, the discovery of important mineral deposits in the last decade, and the relative modernization of export agriculture has altered, definitively, the class structure of the country in at least two ways...
...OPERATION GUATEMALA" When "Operation Guatemala" was imported and instituted in the 1960s, the pretext was defense of the democratic order, threat- ened by the rise of the guerrilla movement...
...This article, edited by NACLA, is a shortened version of a paper presented at the Latin American Sociology Conference held in November 1979, in Panama...
...Contrary to appearances, however, the power of the state was not privatized...
...Only the judicial branch has, for the time being, escaped such penetration...
...In 1958, General Ydigoras Fuentes won the election as an opposition candidate, on a bourgeois-nationalist platform...
...Power constituted in this way seeks to control society by any available means...
...The attitude of the civilian government of Mendez Montenegro (1966-1970) was more than one of guilt by complicity...
...la I 1 /-f,-- .. . .. . 1- ." . .. - 1: c eJanlFeb 1980 21 tion, both groups earn an average per capita income of $35 a year, while the agrarian bourgeoisie receives an average of $2,591 - or 64 times more than the population they exploit...
...4. See NACLA, "The Vietnamization of Guatemala: U.S...
...Counterinsurgency did not succeed in stabilizing bourgeois rule...
...Laws, courts and police were overshadowed by the appearance of Mano Blanca (literally, White Hand) and other para-military organizations that modeled themselves on Brazil's notorious Death Squad...
...Horror desensitizes and permeates all social relations (family, work, interpersonal, social, etc...
...In a different context, trade union organization can serve to stabilize the system...
...In an immediate sense, this took the form of a marriage between the military and the business sector, mediated by control of the state apparatus...
...In this way, the state protects a process of pseudo-modernization from above, to the benefit of a bourgeois alliance in which foreign capital plays a decisive role...
...In the second place, it is being forged in conditions of class exploitation in the more advanced capitalist sectors i.e., in the factories, mines and agroindustries that have grown up in the last few years...
...Social and regional inequalities in Guatemala are growing...
...As an abnormality, it is tolerated as a transitory moment in the existence of a state that seeks to legitimize and perpetuate itself through consensus...
...The Guatemalan military doesn't have its own party...
...Even military cadres are recruited from this source...
...They have created their own organizations to fiercely defend bourgeois interests against all threats, imagined or real, and to develop a defensive consciousness of their status...
...activity in Vietnanx.' Arana, as well as his successors, Schell Laugerud and Lucas Garcia, were all Army candidates, backed by precarious minorities, operating within a narrow, anti-communist framework...
...It was a yes/no proposition, with no alternative candidates, and with "votes" cast orally and in public...
...Vulgar "perks," subtle bribes, bank loans without collateral, speculation based on inside sources, and a thousand other forms of corruption have become a means of vast personal enrichment, created by access to power...
...intervention...
...Furthermore, new avenues for investment, and hence for accumulation, have opened in the industrial and service sectors...
...In the context of Somoza's downfall in Nicaragua, and the imminent possibility of civil war in El Salvador, conditions in Central America as a whole are now receiving more attention and serious examination...
...The extreme sensitivity of the Guatemalan bourgeoisie, with its praetorian guard, maintains it permanently on the defensive and immune to any suggestion of compromise...
...Trade union, student, and peasant organizations have increasingly begun to challenge the bourgeois pact of domination and death that has prevailed in Guatemala for decades...
...The workers' movement was structurally (and historically) exactly what it could have been at the time...
...One reality is that democracy consists of rigged elections and the assassination of opponents, be they prominent politicians or rebellious peasants...
...This time, its main target is an organized popular movement: the trade unions, peasant organizations and popular sectors...
...5. Several Marxist political theorists have written on the "state of exception...
...Y) An "informal sector" has appeared in the cities--a mass of underemployed proletarians whose physical presence in the urban growth of Guatemala City could no longer remain hidden after the violent earthquakes of 1976...
...There can be no "margin of tolerance" toward communism...
...In Guatemala, the bourgeoisie no longer produces leaders...
...I, No...
...State power was used to recreate the conditions for a new model of economic growth, offering political protection to the process of capital accumulation and the establishment of a capitalist economy...
...Under the banner of revolutionary nationalism, the democratically elected governments of Arevalo (1945-51) and Arbenz (1951-54) enacted significant political and economic reforms...
...For the first time, the Army broke with its tradition of caudillismo and acted with institutional unity...
...In the 28-day period from May 8 toJune 4, 1979, the national press reported 150 murders attributed to the death squad, or 5.3 per day.' In fact, the daily average is higher, since the death squad rests on weekends...
...On the whole, trade union and peasant conflicts have been motivated by the need to defend an already abysmal and still declining standard of living...
...The fear of what is subjectively accepted as an external threat prohibits the establishment of mechanisms and institutions that could mediate between classes, and between the state and society as a whole...
...No party of the left has been allowed to register for elections...
...Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was flown in from Honduras, on a U.S...
...The Mano Blanca, for example, was a para-military organization from its very inception, disguised and out of uniform for the dirty work of torture and assassination...
...The conditions of the poor in Guatemala include massive and permanent unemployment, incomes eaten up by inflation, acute housing shortages and hunger as a mass phenomenon...
...The extensive scope of counterinsurgency left an indelible mark on Guatemalan society...
...Since 1960, the economy has grown at an average rate of 5.7% a year, approximating the average for Latin America as a whole.6 But the case of Guatemala presents daily, incontrovertible proof that economic growth alone cannot resolve social problems...
...The proliferation of new sects among the poorest sectors is alarming, as individual desperation is channeled into collective faith...
...An internal crisis, provoked by the guerrilla movement, eventually forced the regime to hold elections...
...A second clarification refers to the increasingly working-class character of the popular movement...
...he has the power to summon the ministers of state and functions as a sort of super minister...
...Financial capital has grown as well, with banks and private finance companies controlling a wide range of economic activities...
...But it was not the psychological effects alone that enabled counterinsurgency to make death a symbol of victory...
...The Castillo Armas government (1954-57) tried to legitimize its rule by holding a plebiscite in 1954...
...Rather, throughout its history, different fractions of the bourgeoisie have had great difficulty in constituting a stable power based on consensus...
...If the economy turns on the export of agricultural production, based on concentrated ownership of land, capital, marketing networks, etc...
...The official response to this increase was direct, physical repression...
...the number of graduates of the Military Academy has tripled over the last ten years...
...Life in the urban slums is extremely violent and only a small quota of that violence ever touches the outside world...
...In sum, the visibility of Guatemala's political crisis serves only to hide, albeit less and less, the social basis of that crisis...
...then, the party (any one of the three main right-wing parties) provides electoral backing and legal sanction...
...It played an extraordinary role in building decisive support for the Arbenz government, in conjunction with the recently organized peasantry...
...22, p.333...
...These comisionados militares, or military agents, were local informers employed by the Army in the countryside, to identify and eliminate guerrilla sympathizers...
...Control is sought not through support, but through repression...
...All the immediate causes of social conflict cannot be discussed here.The ultimate source, however, can be traced to the nature of capitalism...
...Between 1960 and 1976, the index of criminality rose by 760...
...There were urban victims as well, and victims from other social classes, but the repression of 1954-57 was primarily a "vendetta": a frightened and embittered bourgeoisie punishing the rebellion of their peons in the countryside...
...In 1970, General Arana Osorio relied on the MLN, an avowedly extremist party of the right...
...Ten years later, even the disguise was dropped and the names reverted back to the Army and police...
...Again, the results were unfavorable to the MLN and groups of the extreme right...
...Many have died in a struggle still heavily weighted against them...
...In the first 52 days of 1979, for example, a daily average was reported of 10.5 political deaths in the Guatemalan countryside...
...intervention in toppling that regime, power was assumed by the most reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie, and counterrevolution focused its wrath on the agrarian sector...
...Secondly, it is important to mention the role being carved out for petty bourgeois intellectuals...
...The realities of Guatemalan political life are quite different...
...Between 1966 and 1970, Arana was commander of the Zacapa region of Guatemala, a major stronghold of the guerrilla forces...
...3. General Jorge Ubico was the only candidate and winner of the 1931 elections...
...with what is called the "concentration camp mentality...
...JanlFeb 1980 21M Moresba h ofno ahrHroee oemciegne yaoyosassisi 98 Statistics confirm the extent of the problem...
...Both the state and the economy in Guatemala function entirely at the service of a bourgeoisie that is nourished ideologically and financially from abroad, and that basks in the climate created by counterrevolution and maintained by counterinsurgency...
...The guerrilla threat unleashed a wave of political persecution and killings, in which the enemy was defined in the broadest possible terms...
...But it was a trade union movement of artisans on the one hand and "white collar workers" on the other, which remained trapped by its own petty-bourgeois base...
...But official violence and terror failed to eliminate the source of instability within the dominant class itself...
...Internal struggles dating from that time explain the instability referred to in the first part of this exposition...
...Crisis, as an analytic category, refers to social processes whose predictable development is altered or interrupted...
...The consequences of such conditions are only beginning to be felt, adding a potentially explosive dimension to the intra-bourgeois crisis that has been a permanent feature of political life since 1954...
...The Central American Common Market stimulated the emergence of an industrial and commercial fraction of the bourgeoisie that has become increasingly powerful...
...Today, the popular and working-class movement is acquiring very different characteristics...
...On May 28, 1978, defending their lands against the advance of agrarian capitalism, 102 peasant men and women were machine-gunned to death at Panzos...
...A second escape route leads to personal disintegration and indicates pervasive social disintegration...
...Combining opportunism and technical training, a service class has emerged from the new ranks of the middle classes, providing low-level technocrats to fill the administrative posts of domination...
...it can minimize tensions by giving people a mere "sense" of participation...
...The institutionalized and legal defense of group interests are tried-and-true ways for the bourgeoisie to legitimize its political domination...
...JanlFeb 1980 2526 NACLA Report Demonstration marking the first anniversary of the brutal massacre at Panzos...
...24 NACLA ReportJanlFeb 1980 25 Both assertions need further clarification...
...But what fear served to unify, the inexorable logic of the market divided soon after...
...The term "militarized state" should be used with caution, and perhaps only to underline a growing tendency toward military assault on the adminstrative machinery of the state...
...The crisis that consumes Guatemalan society, and that has an immediate politicalexpression, cannot be explained solely by reference to the configuration of state power, or to the agrarian character of the economy...
...THE NATURE OF THE CRISIS In theory, the "state of exception"" is a critical form of existence of class power...
...As a pre-condition for taking office, Mendez was forced to accept certain conditions imposed by the military and to relinquish important decision-making powers...
...First, public functions were seemingly transferred to private hands: the "para-military" bands began to function, clandestine cemeteries 2324 NACLA Report were created, and protection went on sale as a lucrative, new business...
...Moreover, the internal crisis has been reinforced by a crisis imported from abroad that now engulfs -the capitalist world as a whole...
...Contrary to some explanations, the agroexport fraction of the Guatemalan bourgeoisie has not been significantly weakened...
...A military man as head of state is a perverse tradition of Guatemalan politial life...
...Official violence--class violence--has always been aimed at the poor...
...Intrabourgeois conflicts, to be examined below, cannot be resolved through the expedient of political violence...
...Attempts on the lives of its members have already been made, as the Guatemalan government moves against a new, more united opponent...
...In Central America today, it is the brutality of capitalism in its early epoch of industrial expansion that is being reproduced...
...This, combined with the effects of the Nicaraguan revolution, increasingly define the character of crisis in Guatemala...
...But this victory for civilian rule was illusory...
...In Guatemala this relationship is built upon electoral deals and alliances of convenience...
...But in Guatemala, it was military rule with a difference...
...In March 1979, the United Revolutionary Front (FUR), a moderate, centrist group, was finally allowed to register after 14 years of struggle and negotiation...
...The popular sectors have organized themselves in the defense of narrow economic interests...
...And in 1978, an alliance of the PID and the Revolutionary Party (PR) nominated General Lucas Garcia...
...1) A proletarian nucleus, in the strict sense, has been formed in the "integrated industries" producing for the regional market, in the nickel, copper and petroleum sectors, and on the banana, cotton and sugar plantations...
...it does, however, have its own presidential candidates, and their election can easily be secured by a transitory alliance with one of several right-wing groups...
...and the duration of military service has doubled...
...Three years later, the president was assassinated by a Edelberto Torres-Rivas teaches sociology at the Consejo Superior Universitario Centroamericano (CSUCA) in SanJose, Costa Rica...
...The third stage began in the 1970s and continues to this day...
...It is even more glaring in contrast to the growth of ostentatious, imprudent and provocative wealth...
...CLASS DICTATORSHIP It is hard to put a label on a regime that, as in the Guatemalan case, fits neither the totalitarian nor the fascist mold...
...And political participation is always susceptible to being manipulated, formalized and reduced to mere ritual...
...Behind a constitutional-democratic facade, the counterrevolution sought to consolidate a new pact of class domination...
...It acceded to the tremendous growth of the repressive apparatus, far beyond the control of civilian authority, which proceeded to assassinate guerrillas, friends and family of guerrillas and, ultimately, threatened anyone suspected of democratic sympathies...
...The examples are too numerous to exhaust: protesting a rise in the cost of public transport, 47 people were killed within a two-month period in 1978...
...It cannot be categorized as totalitarian because no hegemonic center (party, elite) has managed to monopolize total power...
...It is this situation which is now being pushed to its logical limits...
...18, Table No...
...Priests and nuns have been persecuted, and even executed, for their activities in support of the poor...
...and if to this we add a state that is decidedly on the side of private enterprise, the result can only be growing inequalities and social tensions...
...In the eyes of these technocrats, the government is promoting a mesocracy (the rule of the middle classes...
...Since 1954, the Guatemalan regime has tried in vain to restore the old order...
...A conservative adaptation to dire conditions has taken a religious, millenary form: the belief that a dubious hereafter will satisfy the hopes that terrestrial life has denied...
...1.8% of that population receive: 40.7...
...Hence, what's at stake is a crisis internal to the dominant power bloc, which results in a lack of cohesion at critical junctures...
...Underlying this difficulty, and inherent in the very existence of diverse bourgeois fractions, is a "style" of development that, in the long run, is totally insufficient in its dynamics and negative in its results...
...Meanwhile, it can be consulted in most university libraries...
...Large landowners took their revenge on those who had benefited from agrarian reform under Arbenz, expelling them from the land...
...NEW TARGETS For the first time in Guatemala's history, a broad mass movement, combining spontaneity and organization, has emerged...
...The trade union, peasant and popular movement does not describe itself as anti-status quo...
...It was replaced by raw, military power...
...He has published numerous essays and books on dependent development in Central America...
...Nor is it fascist, since fascism is a response by the big financial bourgeoisie to a crisis provoked by its own weakness vis-a-vis the workers' movement, conditioned by internal and international factors that are absent in the specific case of Guatemala and in Latin America as a whole...
...The 1954 challenge was repeated in 1964-69, with the guerrilla insurgency...
...Social problems that a bourgeois democracy would resolve and absorb as a matter of course appear on the Guatemalan political horizon as threats to the existing order...
...According to the newspapers, Guatemala has been ruled in the 1970s by a series of democratically elected governments...
...Fighting for the independence of their unions, two Secretary Generals of the Guatemalan Bottle Workers Union (Coca-Cola) were assassinated and three members of the union's Executive Committee were sentenced to death...
...its traditional contribution to "established order" is rapidly fading...
...It was born and bred in a complacent climate of bourgeois democracy, and learned to walk with official support...
...In this game of appearances, simulation is, above all, a confusion of the public and private, an erosion of the state's profile as an institutional reality...
...Unfortunately, this book is currently out of print, while we try to raise funds for a new printing...
...However, the electoral victory of General Arana Osorio in 1970 marked the first time in 40 years that a reactionary candidate gained office by electoral means.s Until that date, 18JaniFeb 1980 19 the military had been able to secure power only by means of coups d'etat, phony plebiscites or rigged elections, that is, by abandoning constitutional legality altogether...
...Ambassador Lodge accuses the USSR of "plans and conspiracies" in Guatemala-pretext for U.S...
...THE MILITARIZED STATE Within this reactionary class dictatorship, military personnel have come to exercise more and more civilian functions in the administrative apparatus of the state...
...In 1974, a coalition of the MLN and the Institutional Democratic Party (PID) elected General Schell Laugerud...
...today the MLN plays that role...
...These counterinsurgency operations were inspired by the infamous "Operation Phoenix" that took the lives of 80,000 Vietnamese...
...What are commonly referred to today as the "dangers" of urban life reflect the inevitable effects of urban misery...
...But in battling its effects, assassinations become a daily occurrence...
...They would all fail miserably in their attempts to stabilize the country, while exacerbating the very causes of social unrest...
...It is among these groups that the struggles and conflicts have taken place...
...Another source of intra-bourgeois conflict is unequal access to international capital, which offers considerable advantages to certain industrial investments in the race to control the regional Common Market...
...The fact that its presidents wear uniforms and that military titles precede their names is coincidental...
...What, then, is in crisis in Guatemala today...
...The bourgeoisie has declared a veritable war against the trade union move- ment, the peasantry, student protestors--in short, against the political representatives of the dominated classes...
...9. Ibid...
...The crystallization of military power in this decade cannot be understood without examining the nature of the relationship between the Army and political parties...
...Other figures can be used to describe the same situation: 83.3% of the economically active population in the countryside earn 34.8% of the total rural income...
...Nonetheless, the insurrectional armed struggle, in and of itself, never posed a real military threat to the Army, nor did it offer a political alternative to the system...
...and Noticias de Guatemala, Vol...
...Moreover, the top 1.5% alone accounted for 23% of this wealth...
...It did, however, have the potential to become an important, destabilizing force- above all, in the context of repeated attempts by diverse bourgeois sectors to forge alliances and build a stable form of control and political domination...
...GUATEMALA: CRISIS AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE 1. The World Bank, Guatemala: Economic and Social Position and Prospects (Washington, D.C.: 1978), p. 1 2 2. For an extensive analysis of the reformis- period and the U.S...
...Instead, it destabilized the society as a whole...
...The Guatemalan crisis originated in the bourgeoisie's inability to resolve internal class contradictions, contradictions hidden by its unrestrained use of violence against other classes...
...Second, the state pretended to take a neutral stance toward a conflict that, at worst, it seemed unable to control...
...At the critical moment of the counterrevolution (1954-55), the diverse bourgeois fractions achieved a tenuous unity...
...It is important to recall that the workers' movement that emerged in Guatemala between 1948 and 1954 had a very different character...
...In recent years, the different fractions of the Guatemalan bourgeoisie have become strengthened...
...The "old bourgeoisie," which preceded the growth of industrial investment in the region under a new international division of labor, often comes into conflict with the "new bourgeoisie," born into the Common Market structure...
...The bourgeoisies of Central America, however, are not ready for democratic pluralism under their control...
...They now serve as provincial governors, directors of public enterprises, diplomats and deputy ministers...
...16 NACLA ReportJan/Feb 1980 t.Ar f k or N" 17 -r .2) E*P At an extraordinary session of the Security Council in 1954, U.S...
...The next stage was "Operation Guatemala," when class hatred was institutionalized as a public function of the state and implemented by the Army...
...This concept is most clearly elaborated in two books by Nicos Poulantzas,Fascismand Dictatorship (London: New Left Books), 1974, and The Crisis of the Dictatorships (London: New Left Books), 1976...
...Coercion takes primacy over ideology and power no longer attempts to disguise the use of force for the sake of consensus...
...From 1965 to 1967, the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) and the November 13th Movement (MR-13) controlled the mountains of Las Minas, disputed the Army's control of the Atlantic Highway, and camped at night with impunity in the towns of Zocapa, Chiquimula and Izabal...
...Cotton worker carries a 100-pound load, a day's work of picking in defoliant-sprayed fields...
...Between March and July 1979, the national police report -1 375 assassinations (a 2.5 daily average...
...A democratic process--one that aimed at a model of economic development that would have altered the interests of the dominant classes--was violently interrupted...
...The sons of the most powerful coffee growers never attend the Military Academy...
...In the mid-1970s, 5% of the population absorbed 34% of the national income...
...In addition, the military was given a free hand to expand the repressive apparatus of the state...
...Disagreements emerge continuously over specific policies of the state, which is incapable of attending to contradictory priorities at one and the same time...
...Over the last 15 years, poverty has deepened and spread at an amazing pace...
...most untamed form, in which the raw logic of dependent accumulation presides over all else...
...The political crisis, then, can be explained by the persistent problem of establishing a legitimate form of domination...
...This historical function is determined by the dominant bourgeois interests, and does not presuppose their physical, direct participation in the public management of the state.JanlFeb l1980 Nevertheless, the role of petty-bourgeois intellectuals and political cadres has become increasingly important since the 1940s...
...Mendez Montenegro, a civilian, defeated two military candidates in 1966...
...Ideological manipulation (not creation), political action, cultural life, are all the province of personalities that have emerged from the middle classes...
...But financial capital is of agrarian/commercial origin, and is therefore connected to some of the most important economic groups in the country...
...To be sure, the guerrillas had killed off some military officers, a few landowners tightly linked to the repression, and many military comisionados...
...7. Noticias de Guatemala (Guatemala City), Vol...
...Neither a "social-democratic" style nor a reformist response to demands from below has ever emerged...
...MILITARY CAMPAIGNS The 1970s saw a series of military regimes come to power in Latin America...
...In order to combat several hundred guerrillas, more than 18,000 Guatemalans were annihilated in the space of two years...
...if industrial development, under the control of foreign capital,is monopolized at birth...
...The Army chief of staff, according to a 1979 decree, controls, registers and decides upon all appointments to the public bureaucracy...
...According to the Constitution of 1879, Guatemala is legally organized as a democratic republic...
...It began in July 1954, with the anti-communist revenge against the national-revolutionary program attempted by Arbenz...
...intervention installed a CIA protege in the presidential palace...
...member of his own party, over a petty conflict of interests...
...Colonel Peralta Azurdia governed for a thousand days, with no constitution or parliament, while Guatemalans lived under a "state of seige...
...And it is all the more remarkable because consciousness and combativity have been forged in a thick atmosphere of terror...
...By institutionalizing repression to a degree unparalleled in the authoritarian tradition of the country, counterinsurgency engendered a dual simulation on the part of the state...
...embassy plane, to head the first in a succession of rabidly anticommunist regimes...
...It is estimated that 8,000 peasants were assassinated in the first two months of the Castillo Armas regime...
...Obviously, Arana's election did not restore democratic rule...
...Either one will do, depending on the circumstances, since opportunism is their raison d'etre...
...Ydigoras, in turn, was overthrown by a coup d'etat engineered by his own Minister of Defense in 1963...
...The bureaucracy, even at its highest levels, never defines the ultimate direction of the state...
...But as the repression continued, year after year, what began as a specific campaign against the guerrillas became a political assault on the broad, democratic opposition...
...The causes of crime are neither considered nor combated...
...Guatemala is often eyed as the next trouble spot...
...The growth of a strong guerrilla movement in the early 1960s was used as an excuse for failure, and as an argument for the need to intensify repression...
...Over the last 18 months in particular, the inherent weakness of this form of domination has led to the intensification of repression...
...Severe alcoholism, drugs, prostitution and various forms of delinquency are rampant among the poorest sectors of society...
...Yet recently, some religious groups have adopted a sympathetic stance toward the problems of the poor, and are attempting to organize an expression of popular unrest...
...Its leader, Manuel Colom Argueta, was promptly assassinated...
...8 "The victims had been tortured and later killed at gunpoint, knifed or strangled," read the police report.9 Finally, there has been a third response to misery and repression that is not an individual form of escape, but a collective form of struggle: the trade union and political struggle...
...They were carried out by the Guatemalan Army under the military leadership and with the logistical support of the United States Government...
...193-203...
...Historically, such interruptions have given rise to the reactionary dictatorship of a class...
...The latter group includes the mafia-type elements mentioned above, the politicians and military officers that have amassed illicit fortunes...
...Under the leadership and initiative of the National Committee for Trade Union Unity (CNUS), the Democratic Front was formed by 167 organizations, including political parties, religious groups, worker and peasant organizations, and student associations...
...advisors and the CIA dubbed it "Operation Guatemala," modelled after the early U.S...
...role in overthrowing the Arbenz regime, see NACLA's 265 page book entitled Guatemala, edited by Susanne Jonas and David Tobis (1974...
...No one can deny that the country has experienced economic growth...
...In so doing, the state de-legitimizes its own role...
...6. The World Bank, Guatemala, p. 25...
...These conflicts represent the difficult and partial defense of interests of the class as a corporative class, and not as a class engaged in establishing its hegemony, or that contemplates political power and the struggle to seize it...
...The political/party spectrum does not accommodate vibrant colors--only the dull gray of Guatemalan "democracy...
Vol. 14 • January 1980 • No. 1
