The Decade of the Dinosaurs
Three generals ruled Guatemala during the 1970s: Carlos Arana Osorio (1970-1974), Kjell Laugerud Garcia (1974-1978) and Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982). Arana, they say, was the cunning old fox,...
...The military's Democratic Institutional Party (PID) made overtures to the emasculated Revolutionary Party (PR) and the right wing of the Christian Democrats...
...If the political system remained unchanged, the Garden of Eden would continue to bring forth its fruits in abundance...
...2 6 SusJan/Feb 1983 17NACLA Report tained economic growth, boosted by the post1976 earthquake construction boom, gave the generals confidence to proceed with their plans...
...Even modest community demands-a new standpipe in the barrio, a drainage system, electric Evolution of Domestic Consumer Price Index 1961-1981 (avg...
...Though migrant labor has existed since the inception of cash crops, traditional rural relationships crumbled fast as the expansion of cotton and sugar lands and peasant dispossession swelled the ranks of the migrant semi-proletariat to 49% of the total rural labor force...
...Richard Nixon's arrival to the White House in January 1969 backed by Cuban exile and Sunbelt investors, paved the way for their invasion of Central America...
...The Army placed a permanent detachment of 400 troops at Playa Grande in the lxc&n, western roadhead of the new highway...
...Lucas and Garcia Granados, knowing of the new road plan, had purchased the land in 1975 from the Dieseldorf coffee barons, richest family In Alta Verapaz, for only $175,000...
...The Conaredictions of Agrarian Avarice If it has been a carnival for the wealthy, it has been a house of horrors for Guatemala's poor...
...10JanlFeb 1983 m 0 Largest ever IDB-funded project in Guatemala, the Chixoy hydroelectric dam is the centerpiece of development in the Frania...
...Laugerud's attempt to stabilize military rule embraced a series of tactics...
...ernizers...
...La Tarde (Guatemala...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win (New York, 1981...
...4. "Guatemala contra Exmibal," (Guatemala, Universidad de San Carlos, Facultad de Ciencias, 1970...
...To Arana's horror, Rios Montt took 45% of the vote, clearly unacceptable...
...pacification the central demand of landowners and foreign investors alike...
...An elite minority of suppliers monopolized distribution of fertilizers, seeds and credits, granaries, mills and storage facilities, and passed the burden of rising world market prices and local inflation on to the minifundistas...
...Even- tually, the Army resorted to settlement by coer- cion...
...Attracted by soaring land values, coffee-grower Ricardo Sapper Cordia ravaged long-settled Kekchi lands...
...Miami Herald, March 29, 1978...
...For details, see International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Associations, The Coca Cola Guatemala Campaign 1979-1981 (Geneva, Switzerland, 1981...
...Legislation put through in 1975 gave them a 100% tax exemption on profits for five years, and a oneyear exemption from import taxes on machinery, plant, fuel and spare parts.' By the end of the 1970s, 193 U.S...
...Arana's abrasive style did not endear him to economic competitors, but Guatemala's first Five Year Development Plan (1971-1975) held out hopes of generating enough wealth to go around...
...The fast-growing middle classnever allowed more than crumbs from the rich men's table-stood alienated from the military regime...
...Arana, they say, was the cunning old fox, Laugerud the insipid reformer, Lucas the psychotic tyrant...
...Those who migrated faced land and labor abuses from the National Electrification Institute and the petroleum and nickel companies...
...Prensa Libre (Guatemala), September 2, 1977...
...Efrain Rios Montt...
...State Department's 1977 designation of Guatemala as a "gross and consistent violator of human rights...
...Babies die, poisoned by the insecticide residues in their mothers' milk...
...The limited import-substitution industry of the common market period was grinding to a halt, and after the 1969 Honduras-El Salvador war, regional trade was in disarray...
...13-23...
...The fires of class conflict were stoked by suffocating repression and the refusal to open up the political system...
...By the time of Arana's inauguration, winds of change were blowing through the economy...
...The Engineer Corps, INTA and the Shenandoah Oil Corporation jointly built a new transversal road as far as the Ixc&n...
...In response came state violence with a modicum of civic "pacification," aimed above all at the Ixilspeaking villages of Nebaj, Chajul and San Juan Cotzal...
...The best available short studies are Aguilera, Estado militarJonas and Tobis, Guatemala (for the period up to 1974...
...CIDAMO, "The Workers' Movement in Guatemala," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...A powerful National Committee of Trade Union Unity (CNUS) crystalized around a 1976 strike at the local Coca Cola franchise, EGSA, and a devastating earthquake the same year, whose main impact hit urban slum-dwellers and highland peasants...
...Set back from the fields are communal dormitory shacks, described by the International Labor Office as "totally unacceptable with regard to hygiene, health, education and morality...
...Cooperative members were often worse off financially than when they had migrated...
...Laugerud's reforms were too lukewarm to *Two parties vied for recognition by the Socialist International: the United Front of the Revolution (FUR) and the Democratic Socialist Party (PSD...
...El Grafico (Guatemala), November 20, 1978...
...See Debray, The Revolution on Trial, pp...
...the Army not only had ascended to state power but had become the dominant economic fraction of the ruling class...
...But the Pet6n is wretched cropland, its pasturage better suited to cattle raising...
...Internal cohesion promoted loyalty to the military caste and squashed any tendency within the ranks toward Peruvianstyle reformism...
...Ernesto Paiz Novales and a coalition of Christian and social for cattle-raising and 58% unsuitable for cultiva- tion...
...AID provided a $5.6 million soft loan in 1976 to settle 5,000 families specifically organized into cooperatives...
...It is routine...
...His CAO crony, Luis Alfonso Lopez, was corruptly "elected" president of Congress in 1976 amid a bribery scandal and, according to one Army officer, Arana "was in the Casa Presidencial almost every day...
...Union leaders and Army alike were taken aback by the sheer scale of an angry movement which, thought moribund, now burst on to the streets...
...Hanna Mining Company held a 20% stake-expanded sharply as world prices for nickel, a vital component for jet engines and aerospace technology, rose fivefold in the late 1960s...
...If not in time for the 1978 elections, a restoration of democracy could surely come by 1982...
...Within a year, they established the Agropecuaria Yalpemech S.A., revaluing the land at $300,000...
...scope from cattle ranching into rubber and chicle farming for export...
...Their confidence was ill-founded...
...Miami Herald, March 8 and 15, 1974...
...Malaria is rampant...
...9. Latin America Economic Report, November 14, 1975...
...The New Infrastructure To provide energy and communications for the large, foreign-based corporations, and to open up the virgin farmlands of the north, largescale infrastructural projects got underway by 1974...
...Add to this a 1.2 billion barrel-per-day oil pipeline from the Mexican border to the Caribbean, a small oil refinery in Baja Verapaz, a new Pacific port complex at San Jose and a $1 billion national highway system, and the concept was awesome...
...El Imparcial (Guatemala), May 18, 1976...
...The problem, argued the generals, was not land distribution but land shortage...
...Instead, it served notice that it intended to remain in power, shaping a system under which its economic and political status could never be challenged...
...La Hora (Guatemala), November 7, 1978...
...Slam It Shut Again Under pressure from his right flank, Laugerud backtracked...
...El Dia (Mexico City), March 6, 1982...
...Latin America Economic Report, January 26, 1979...
...transnationals far outweighed national industrial capital-most industries employing more than 50 workers were foreign-owned...
...One or two aban- doned farm animals forage in the weeds of the un- tended fields...
...XIV, no...
...so too is nickel...
...Far from stabilizing the regime, his tactics had only succeeded in undermining it further...
...5 And Guatemala was transformed into the hub of regional economic planning-headquarters for the AID Central American mission, the Central American Economic Integration System (SIECA) and the Central American Monetary Council...
...drilling engineers are ripping the heart out of the torridjungle...
...In the process, they became Guatemala's strongest political force...
...83-99...
...Disputes escalated into massacre on May 29, 1978...
...avg...
...In partnership with his nephew, Raul Garcia Granados, scion of one of Guatemala's richest families, Lucas owned 14 large farms in the Franja...
...Bodies began to appear along roadsides in a new wave of terror...
...Boletin Estadistico del Banco de Guatemala...
...Images of the Frania Transversal del Norte (Northern Transverse Strip), a vast swathe of ter- ritory stretching from the Mexican border to Guatemala's narrow Caribbean coast...
...Colonizing the frontier as a substitute for agrarian reform has been a dream of Guatemalan presidents since Castillo Armas...
...Capitalist modernization in the 1960s had segmented the bourgeoisie into agrarian, industrial, financial and commercial fractions, the rhythm of their formation dictated above all by the needs of transnational capital...
...2 In the peak years of regional integration (1960-68), the influx of foreign capital to Guatemala had trebled, most going into oil and nickel extraction, industry and commerce...
...In Huehuetenango on the Mexican border, the military launched a concerted offensive against the militant local labor unions, especially those involved in the 1977 IxtahuacAn miners' strike...
...And the Huey will take appropriate action...
...First conceived as an electoral machine in 1970, the CAO had taken on a life of its own as a personal vehicle for Arana's ambitions of longterm political power...
...their reforms too little, too late...
...A booming economy should aim for sustained annual growth rates of 7.8% through the 1970s...
...Early proposals to settle 70,000 families over 20 years were soon scrapped...
...Washington Post, March 1, 1974...
...By election time the military was sure that the Arana bloodbath had done its job...
...The National Workers' Federation (CNT), largest member of CNUS, severed its ties to the Christian Democratic Latin American Workers' Federation (CLAT...
...25 Opening some space for democratic activity, settling strikes by negotiation and lowering the tenor of repression might win over key leadership of the labor unions and isolate the radical Left...
...Sizeable chunks were part of a 125,000-acre section destined by the National Institute of Agrarian Transformation (INTA) to peasant families but bought up by military officers...
...The military high command was united in its belief that "the Army is the only force capable, morally and materially, of governing Guatemala...
...in 1978, troops attempted to forcibly relocate 12,000 campesinos into the Ixcbn...
...Like most tourists, Guatemala's military rulers failed to grasp the explosive change in rural class structures under the impact of accelerated capitalist development...
...According to the 1973 census, the area was already traditional home to 120,000 Guatemalans, most of them Indians-the Kekchi, Quich6, Mam, lxil and Pocomchi...
...Then separate off the right wings of the Christian Democrats and social democrats, exposing what the generals insisted was a handful of "communists directed, financed and incited by the Cuban government...
...New York Times, March 2, 1974...
...The 1973 budget "When a law is needed, it is considered a matter of ordinary business to discuss how much is to be allotted as gifts to [Guatemalan] congressmen...
...On the other hand, the Franja was seen as a convenient place to shunt the hordes of peasants driven off their own land further south...
...Under a smokescreen of "agrarian frontier" rhetoric, the military hoped to lure a new work force into the region as cheap captive labor for construction projects, the transnationals and the generals' own ranches...
...Pacifying the Franja The 1976 IxcAn scheme called for 64 "model hamlets," each with a service complex consisting of a school, drinking water, a church, a market, a communal meeting hall and access roads...
...At its intersection with the new highway from Cob&n to the Pet6n lay the 25,000 prime acres of Yalpemech...
...El Diarlo de Centroamerica (Guatemala...
...Edelberto Torres-Rivas, "La Proletarizacion del Campesinado en Guatemala," Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, No...
...Corruption was the norm in government...
...Of course, the few peasant colonizers who came-seduced by the frontier myth of official propaganda and nostalgia for their own lost smallholdings-had neither capital nor sufficient land for cattle...
...New bases protected oil installations and highway-building teams...
...Rios Montt, though raging at "a regime of absolute illegality," was outmanned and outgunned...
...Open the Door an Inch...
...Embassy, Subsidiaries and Affiliates of American Firms in Guatemala, March 1980...
...2 1 Laugerud decided to seek greater social stability by promoting limited credit and service cooperatives in the highland areas, especially around Chimaltenango...
...It went to politicians, the rich, the military...
...An Army recount showed Laugerud with a healthy 5.5% winning margin...
...Kjell Laugerud Garcia, a career officer of Norwegian extraction, took office in 1974...
...In January 1971 alone, 483 people disappeared...
...Rapid capitalist development brought profound changes in class structure, and agroexporting expansion fueled rural inequalities...
...1, (January-February 1980...
...And within months they mortgaged it toobtain a$750,000 loan fromthe Bankof America National Trust and Savings Association...
...In fact, the land was handed straight over to Lucas, then defense minister...
...Plans for a new highway through the Franja made matters worse...
...Also crucial to Laugerud's rightist alliance was the Organized Aranista Central (CAO...
...The expanded Franja project was officially unveiled in 1976...
...When peaceful Kekchi protesters marched into the town of Panz6s, to discuss land grievances at the government's invitation, they were met with a hail of bullets from troops called in by a local landowner...
...The funeral of a murdered activist could trigger a teeming protest by thousands chanting neutralize the Left, but enough to allow it some space in which to reorganize...
...3, 1982, pp...
...The first step was to open up the sparsely populated jungles of the Petbn in 1966...
...Latin America, January 24, 1975...
...Against Laugerud's civilian-military coalition, the Revolutionary Party fielded Col...
...Gen...
...But these epithets, reducing waves of terror and intervals of reform to a leader's whims, mask the logic and continuity of the military regimes...
...Dead: 119 Kekchi...
...The Pet6n was also too remote to attract many settlers...
...From 1961 to 1973, annual increases in staple food production averaged a mere 1.6% (corn), 2.3% (wheat) and 4.8% Export Earnings from Agriculture and Industry, 1970-1978 [S million) Agriculture Coffee Cotton Bananas Sugar Beef Other AGRICULTURE TOTAL As % of all exports Industry Manufactured goods Mineral products INDUSTRY TOTAL As % of all exports EXPORTS TOTAL 1970 100.6 27.2 13.6 9.2 12.7 22.1 185.2 62.3 1970 107.5 4.5 112.0 37.7 1971 96.3 26.0 14.4 9.9 17.4 17.7 181.6 63.3 1971 101.8 3.4 105.2 36.7 1972 105.3 40.9 25.7 16.1 18.1 18.4 224.5 66.8 1972 107.4 3.9 111.3 33.2 1973 145.6 47.9 24.7 21.9 25.1 23.4 288.6 65.5 1973 146.4 6.6 153.0 34.5 1974 173.0 71.0 31.4 49.6 21.5 34.3 380.8 65.4 1974 193.1 8.4 201.5 34.6 1975 164.2 75.9 35.1 115.6 17.0 22.0 429.7 67.0 1975 203.1 8.2 211.3 33.0 1976 243.0 87.8 45.7 106.7 14.5 57.6 555.2 70.8 1976 221.7 7.5 229.2 29.2 1977 526.5 152.1 45.6 81.8 27.9 69.9 903.7 76.7 1977 267.8 7.3 275.1 23.3 297.2 286.8 335.8 441.6 582.3 640.9 784.4 1178.8 Source: World Bank, 1980 1978 455.0 161.6 49.9 28.6 27.5 80.0 802.6 69.2 1978 341.5 16.3 357.8 30.8 1160.4 16 NACLA Report9e1 0 The politics of oil...
...Gleijeses, Crisis and Response...
...the area devoted to export crops swelled by 45 %. The tendency for each generation to divide farms into smaller units for its children was aggravated by the brutal uprooting of peasants by the Army and landowners' paramilitary thugs...
...2 This should not suggest that the entire mass movement became instant revolutionaries...
...From the outset, the Franja was a militarized zone...
...7 (December 1979), pp...
...Real reforms were unacceptable to the agroexporting class, MLN supporters and Army loyalists alike, and token reforms only opened a Pandora's box...
...Their instincts were well-suited to rapid-profit speculation in tourism, real estate and new forms of agribusiness export (fruit, flowers, vegetables and, later, cardamon...
...Central America Report, Vol...
...They all grabbed what they could...
...But the Army felt increasingly unhappy with the marriage...
...For another, most peasants refused the lure...
...From 1972 to 1975, the nucleus of a new guerrilla organization had been gathering strength in the lxchn, patiently or13NACLA Report a CO With the water pressure tube, construction at Chixov nears completion...
...Spiegler himself controlled a further 7,900 acres as director of the military consortium, Promoci6n 45...
...companies had taken advantage of the "favorable investment climate," 52 of them in agribusiness...
...From 1960 to 1974, the Guatemalan agroexport economy outperformed all but two other Latin American nations...
...So did the U.S...
...Miguel Angel Albizurez, "Struggles and Experiences of the Guatemalan Trade Union Movement, 1976-June 1978," Latin America Perspectives, Nos...
...As the mass movement swelled in size and confidence, its positions grew more radical...
...However, the rules were clear: a civilian candidate would not be permitted to win...
...Inforpress, no...
...If the phrase "model hamlet" rings a Vietnam-related bell, the link is easy to make...
...1 (January-February 1980...
...And by opening new agencies like the Army Bank to rationalize its economic holdings, the military showed that its ascent to riches under Arana was no short-term whim...
...New York Times, September 13, 1975...
...6. Ibid., pp...
...The military's extreme laissez-faire approach to economic management, sustained growth rates and a denial of political reforms provided a large enough pie for most of the bourgeoisie, even if the military's slice grew dramatically...
...Miami banker, 1974 granted Arana $12,000 a month in presidential "expenses" and allocated him $1.6 million more a year in confidential discretionary funds...
...Herded to the fields like cattle, 70 people crammed to a flatbed truck, 600,000 Indian peasant families migrate to the coast each year for three months to earn a meager wage which their highland subsistence Jan/Feb 1983 150 b plots can no longer give them...
...And the Franja is a playground for speculators from the new military-civilian class which rules "The government gave away or sold land titles to outsiders...
...Brought into government initially as coercive protector of the established order, its senior officers used state power as a launching pad into agroexporting, industry, finance and real estate...
...With the help of FYDEP, the government agency in charge of developing the northern department of El Pet6n, favored cohorts acquired finance and land titles, broadening their JanlFeb1983 1112 NA~I Rspcr As well as infrastructure, the transnational corporations gained financial benefits...
...Arana's authoritarian design to modernize the economy argued that not even the solid growth rates of the 1960s were adequate...
...Berkeley, California), Vol...
...Economic competitors were expressly excluded, and the far-right MLN was the first to smart at the Army monopoly, railing that ostensibly public land had passed massively into private hands, "thanks to the special influence of interested parties...
...But otherwise, cotton growers and bankers, traders and cattle ranchers, lived in relative harmony until the mid-1970s-as long, that is, as the economic boom lasted...
...If they continued to migrate, the peasants faced increased unemployment by the end of the decade as the big plantations sank their capital into mechanization...
...Graphic descriptions of plantation life by Alan Riding appear in New York Times, September 13, 1975 and November 9, 1977...
...The ritual of elections, which only the Right could contest and only the Army could win, degenerated into farce...
...World Bank, Guatemala...
...We don't want elections, we want revolution...
...light-took on threatening political dimensions...
...After twelve years of their rule, a deep political crisis engulfed Guatemala's ruling class...
...As president of Congress under Arana, Sandoval had fortified his position, channeling state funds to his paramilitary supporters...
...The reason we're here," explains H.L...
...Edelberto Torres-Rivas, "Guatemala-Crisis and Political Violence," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol XIV...
...The Army's Political Model While Arana kept his bargain with foreign capital, he redrew the rules of the political game at home...
...Salvador SAnchez, "La Franja Transversal de Guatemala," Le Monde Diplomatique en Espaflol, October 1979...
...By 1974, Arana had broken much of the MLN's freelance terror machine...
...After the earthquake, church groups working in the Indian highlands and foreign aid-financed urban slum projects became an explosive new ingredient in opposition to the regime...
...Sources: Thomas J. Maloney, "El Impacto Social del Esquema de Desarrollo de la Franja Transversal del Norte sobre los Maya-Kekchi en Guatemala," Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, No...
...Anti-communist bonds notwithstanding, Laugerud judged that new political alliances would be more expedient...
...They have a long tradition of revolt, ever since the Kekchi rose up in rebellion against the rapacious German, British and Guatemalan coffee planters who streamed into fertile Alta Verapaz, now the heartland of the Franja...
...Each promised change: Arana offering "Bread and Peace," Laugerud "gradual civic reform," Lucas depicting himself as "the Center-Left Soldier...
...The chief of staff held veto power over cabinet appointments...
...25-26 (Spring and Summer 1980...
...109-11...
...The military puppet masters could now afford the illusion of electoral pluralism, knowing that they pulled the strings of centrist and reformist participation...
...Overhead, the throbbing rotor blades of a U.S.-supplied Huey helicopter break the silence...
...The Lucas Stake When it came to exploiting the Franja, no one could touch Gen...
...Small cropduster planes wheel constantly over the hot flatlands, spraying even as the migrant Indian cottonpickers are bent to their task...
...As both moved north the latifundio-minifundio conditions of the rest of the country were replicated in the Peten...
...corporations which had invested in Guatemala over the previous decade...
...Though they made fortunes from livestock, agri- culture and forestry on the new frontier, their avarice made enemies of all other bourgeois groups and brought frontal class conflict with the local peasant population...
...Each new president burned his bridges to left, right and center...
...True, the Christian Democrats and fellow reformist parties* lost credibility by reaffirming electoral methods after 1974...
...Official of the National Institute of Agrarian Transformation, INTA Guatemala...
...Community farming rights have been no barrier to the generals and their cohorts...
...Though the tactic made sound capitalist logic, it antagonized the agroexporters, who feared that any improvement in living conditions would dry up their dependable supply of cheap migrant labor...
...THE DECADE OF THE DINOSAURS 1. No comprehensive analysis yet exists of Guatemala in the 1970s...
...The Army evicted 120 families settled by INTA in Raxruja on the pretext that the area would become a military reserve...
...On the 1974 elections, see Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 1974...
...For one thing, the regime had little serious inter- est in cooperatives, regarded by many officers as tantamount to communism...
...After a closeddoor meeting with the incoming president-during which money allegedly changed hands -he accepted diplomatic exile in Madrid...
...Without formal deeds to the land, the Indians were simply expelled...
...2 (May-August 1972), pp...
...Conflicts between the MLN and the newer, more dynamic groups were often rancorous...
...Inflation, a new phenomenon since 1973, was eroding workers' already meager living standards...
...Preferential access to government and private bank finance would allow landowners to introduce modern agrarian technology...
...As the Exmibal nickel mine began operations, Indians on the banks of the Rio Polochic were forcibly relocated to make way for strip mining...
...Economically, the rural oligarchy had been eclipsed by the modgenerals including ex-president Arana, Defense Minister Otto Spiegler and Hans Laugerud, brother of the former president...
...ganizing among the local Indian population...
...See table...
...In July 1976, Sapper claimed ownership of 3,375 acres of farmland embracing the Kekchi villages of Secuachil, Semococh and Yalicoc...
...1 0 Direct investment amounted to $260 million, the largest figure in Central America, and 33 of the world's top 100 firms had established local operations...
...But four years later, World Bank economists complained that cooperativization had never spread beyond the initial pilot area-the remote IxcAn, in the northwest corner of Guatemala...
...Inter-American Development Bank Annual Report, 1981...
...There are large untouchable estates we call 'The Zone of the Generals...
...344-5...
...Partnership with foreign capital, always attractive, became overtly criminal...
...The MLN's marginalization from affairs of state finally provoked a split in the party in 1975...
...Here, in virgin territory, the regime created a new geographical base-away from the traditional centers of agrarian power, for the most rapid and violent form of capital accumulation...
...Latin America, November 2, 1973...
...Increasingly, that terror hit the center of the political spectrum...
...Striking mineworkers from the remote highland town of Ixtahuacan found their 300-kilometer march to the capital in 1977 joined by 100,000 united peasant and worker sympathizers...
...But behind the accumulating wealth lurked rural misery and inequality, as export plantations engulfed arable land which had been producing for domestic consumption...
...More important than the internecine disputes of the rich was the changing relationship between the armed forces and the bourgeoisie as a whole...
...the handful of squalid Indian huts are charred rubble...
...Without ever losing their economic predominance, the traditional agrarian interests saw their political role supplanted by military men making independent fortunes in industry, commerce and finance, and acting as junior partners to the foreign petroleum companies Largest of the new operators was the giant Canadian nickel corporation, INCO...
...3. Aguilera, Estado militar...
...47-57...
...The Coca Cola saga would rivet international eyes on the Guatemalan labor movement for five years...
...New York Times, July 9, 1980...
...Mother Jones, November 1981...
...By Lucas Garcia's inauguration in 1978, the armed forces and the rest of the bourgeoisie faced starkly drawn options: thoroughgoing reforms or the full weight of state terrorism against all opponents...
...Unable to countenance the political repercussions of reform, the regime took the only recourse it knew...
...beans...
...The 1974 election fraud told the mass movement that even basic democratic freedoms could not be reclaimed within the framework imposed by the armed forces...
...Zone of the Generals On the rocky mountain slopes in the north of Quich6 department the corn is head high, beginning to run wild from neglect...
...5. Jonas and Tobis, Guatemala, p. 97...
...Pacification and Growth Widespread distaste for the brutality of his counterinsurgency campaign of 1966-68 had put Arana in mothballs for a year as ambassador to Nicaragua...
...As a military man, he understood military realities...
...3 (1978...
...Christian Democrat leader Danilo Barillas, 1975 party leaders-who had agreed to the military's political rule book...
...29 (May-August 1981), pp...
...Peasant farms lost 26% of their acreage over the 1970s...
...Like the Garden of Eden, this was ultimately a fantasy world...
...Precise estimates of Lucas' property are hard to come by, but they range from 81,000 to 135,000 acres...
...8. El Nuevo Diario (Guatemala), October 10, 1978 and February 18, 1980...
...In 1975, they unveiled theirexistence publicly, calling themselves the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP...
...But after cementing strong ties to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, he was recalled to be the military's presidential candidate in the 1970 elections...
...politically, the MLN's warrior-monk image was a liability...
...Starting with Arana, the military developed its own economic interests...
...Official studies estimated that the poor limestone soil of the Franja made only 7% of the land viable for regular crop production, 35% 12 NXCARGortJan/Feb 1983 Down the Slippery Slope No matter how disdainful of public opinion, any ruling group has to find ways of legitimizing its power...
...Three hydroelectric plants alone-Chixoy and Chulac in the highlands and Aguacapa on the south coast-cost well over $1 billion...
...representatives eagerly argued the case for both loans...
...After an initial injection of $7.8 million from the Central American Economic Integration Bank in November 1974, international cash flowed into a project whose 300,000 kw generating capacity was the largest in the region...
...Christian Democrats and social democrats were fair game for the death squads if they threatened to become more than an ineffectual adornment to the military version of pluralism...
...There is little choice but anger, flight and-increasingly-selfdefense...
...Initially suspicious of each other, their common predicament eroded prejudices, laying the basis for a new kind of political action which would shake the Lucas regime to its foundations...
...With his home base in Cob&n, he amassed a fortune valued at more than $10 million in land alone...
...The Guate- malan government has pumped hundreds of mil- lions of dollars into the area to build huge hydro- electric plants to cut the production costs of oil and nickel extraction...
...Since 1970, Mario Sandoval Alarcon's MLN had been its main electoral ally...
...Piero Gleijeses, "Perspectives of a Regime's Transformation in Guatemala," paper prepared for the Second Expert Discussion on Central American Perspectives after the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn, West Germany, March 1981...
...Gabriel Aguilera, "The Massacre at Panz6s and Capitalist Development in Guatemala," Monthly Review, Vol...
...Handing Out Favors The bonanza has proved a useful way for the Army to secure its inner circle of loyalists...
...Thanks to the presence of large-scale capital investment projects, land values skyrocketed...
...The second Development Plan (1976-1979) gave even greater emphasis to such projects under Laugerud's direction...
...V, no...
...Urban tensions erupted...
...investors at a cost of $24 million...
...The gunning-down in 1971 of Adolfo Mijango Lopez, wheelchair-bound leader of the social democratic Revolutionary Democratic Union (URD) set the tone...
...Washington duly signaled its pleasure at Arana's election by dispatching $32.2 million in economic aid during 1972, the second highest annual figure ever to Guatemala...
...With blind complacency, the ruling class believed that its economic growth model was eternal...
...1 3 The previous year had brought an upsurge of working class mobilization throughout Central America, and strikes in Guatemala by electricity, railroad and communications workers, teachers and students...
...Throughout, Arana remained the power behind Laugerud's throne...
...Year 61-65 66-70 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 Inflation 0.1% 1.5% -0.5% 0.5% 10.0% 16.0% 13.1% 10.7% 12.6% 7.9% 11.5% 12.0% 12.4% Sources: United Nations Economic Survey of Latin America, 1979...
...Piero Gleijeses, "Guatemala: Crisis and Response," unpublished ms...
...A clique of high-ranking officers functioned as a central committee in all but name...
...Though the armed forces encroached on many key areas of the economy and the state through Mafia-like methods, the bourgeoisie was not unhappy with the alliance...
...91-104...
...Granted a ten-year tax exemption by the Guatemalan government in 1968, INCO's initial investment of $50 million in 1960 soared to $180 million by 1969.4 On a different scale, 32 nationally owned companies were bought out by U.S...
...23 (June 12, 1978...
...2 2 The few peasants who did benefit often found themselves targeted for harassment or death by the Right...
...Locked in the classic agrarian mentality of those whose products are shipped straight overseas with little regard for the demands of a local market, the bunker vision of the Right only hardened in response to the U.S...
...7 Though graft was nothing new, Arana raised it to new heights...
...Arana had promised that he would use "all the might that goes with holding power" to ensure the election of his hand-picked successor...
...The plum of Lucas' holdings was the Yalpemech farm...
...12 The military took full control of the electoral machinery, narrowing down the spectrum of "tolerable" opponents...
...By 1975, Laugerud's ministers of agriculture and industry, and PID congressional deputies were among the chief beneficiaries...
...Its Guatemalan plant, Exmibal-in which the U.S...
...A native of Alta Verapaz and fluent Kekchi speaker, Lucas had been in charge of Franja development before assuming the presidency in 1978...
...The ancestral farming rights of the Kekchi of Alta Verapaz were abused more than most...
...But they and many of their working class followers believed that the Laugerud opening, though limited, could be pushed...
...First, consolidate the PID-PR-CAO power axis, squeezing out the MLN...
...This Week in Central America and Panama...
...See also Leonel Luna, "El racismo y la revolucion guatemalteca," Polemica, no...
...5 Never again would significant numbers of voters place their faith in peaceful reform through the ballot box.' 6 Secure in its fraudulent victory, the Army shored up its political defenses...
...After 1970, colonization of what is now the Franja became an obsession with Arana, and new guidelines formed part of the 1971-1975 National Development Plan...
...July 1982...
...Two parties dropped their original civilian nominees in favor of military officers...
...The militant new Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC) registered sweeping successes among south coast plantation workers...
...2 0 The brutal reversal of agrarian reform in 1954 set in motion pressures which, by the Laugerud and Lucas regimes, threatened explosion...
...Military rule neutralized still further the ineffectual parties, and the armed forces filled the vacuum with their own quasi-party structures...
...The pilot is searching for survivors of the massacre...
...Land disputes raged...
...The World Bank supplied $145 million in 1975 and the InterAmerican Development Bank $105 million in 1976-that bank's largest-ever single loan...
...And a revived guerrilla movement began to inflict stinging blows on the Army...
...Chixoy was the pearl of the program...
...On both counts, the development of the Franja enmeshed the regime deeper in political crisis...
...8 During the Laugerud administration, Arana used his influence to further extend his financial tentacles into meat packing, fisheries, timber, construction, vehicle importing, cement works, publishing, broadcasting and breweries.19 The Gathering Rural Storm The vast cotton plantations of the south coast stink with toxic chemicals...
...Those who did were the already prosperous ranchers of the south coast...
...Latin America, June 25, 1976...
...The Franja's 3,500 square miles are a magnet for transnational investors: oil is here...
...1, no...
...The creeping political crisis of the Guatemalan bourgeoisie in the 1970s lies in its failure to build and hold together a viable social base...
...Arana, Laugerud and Lucas each took office at the head of a different right-wing coalition...
...Violence, escalating into naked terror during the periods 1966-68, 197073 and 1978-82, proved the only means of defending the status quo...
...Within the military, Laugerud chiseled away at MLN support in the officer corps...
...This was in striking contrast to El Salvador, where only six are present...
...A more sophisticated program was needed...
...Nancy Peckenham, "Land Settlement in the Pet6n," Latin American Perspectives, Nos...
...169-77...
...25-26 (Spring and Summer 1980), pp...
...He stood at the apex of an interlocking alliance of 14JanlFeb iNS 15 democrats backed former Chief of Staff Gen...
...Within no time, the combative MLN leader was denouncing his boss because of a modest rural cooperative program designed to win peasant support...
...With over $200 million in direct investments, the U.S...
...7. Miami Herald, December 8, 1974...
...In 1979, INTA moved its headquarters from Guatemala City to Raxruja in Alta Verapaz, lying between Lucas' principal holdings in Sebol and the Rubelsanto oilfields...
...Both were caught between the unremitting demand of the poor forland and greater purchasing power, and the clamor for expansion by latifundistas in an economy still geared to agroexports...
...2 4 Ties to community and culture find it hard to resist a brutal experience of modern wage labor...
...Kekchi Indians live in the shadow of the Rubelsanto pipeline...
...And Cob&n, capital of Alta Verapaz, became military nerve-center of the Franja...
...If any have returned to the hamlet, they will be deemed "subversives...
...The economy was booming...
...2. Poitevin, El proceso de industrializacion, p. 190...
...Furthermore, the growth of a bourgeoisie of indigenous origins gave the Indian populationespecially in the west-a taste of class exploitation within their own ethnic community...
...Nonetheless, the fascists' organized power base was an undeniable asset, and Laugerud selected Sandoval as his vice-president...
...The military continued to use a list of 72,000 proscribed opponents, drawn up in 1954, adding new names constantly...
...None could deliver...
...31, no...
...Revolutionary opposition was clearly unacceptable, but the political process would now exclude anyone whose views were left of what the armed forces deemed the center...
...Not 60 miles away, at Rubelsanto, bare-chested U.S...
...Arana, Laugerud and Lucas all handed out Franja properties to the Army high command and middle-ranking military officers...
...On the plantations, ladino and indigenous workers shared the same conditions, the same injustices...
...Defeat of the guerrillas had done nothing to mitigate social tensions, and the bourgeoisie made it clear to Arana that pacification was top JanlFeb1983 |NACIAReport of their agenda...
...If the Indians have land titles, and many do, they can expect no redress through the courts...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle...
...not only nameless peasants and workers, to be hastily buried in graves marked XX, but even national figures -intellectuals, trade union officials, moderate "In Guatemala, it is useless to think of governing, except as the result of a political decision by the Army...
...Agronomists assessed the rocky plots of under 19 acres granted to each family under the pilot colonization scheme insufficient to support more than five years of subsistence...
...At Pantaleon, for example, the country's largest sugar-refining complex, the labor force was cut back by one-third from 1975 to 1981.23 The tourist brochures speak of tranquil Indians "untouched by time...
...6 State power gave Arana-never the most fastidious of operators-a unique platform...
...Megan, general manager of the Shenandoah Oil Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas, "is because we're optimistic about making money...
...Provisional land titles and small, poor-quality subsistence plots left new peasant settlers easy prey to eviction...
...What was qualitatively different was the systematic use of the state apparatus for the enrichment of the bloc in power-senior military officers and their closest civilian and bureaucratic allies...
Vol. 17 • January 1983 • No. 1
