Lucas Garcia: The Descent into Anarchy
Until Carter, Washington had endorsed the intransigence of every regime since 1954 at critical turning points. It favored military over civilian options not only in 1963-when guerrillas were...
...Opportunistic leaders wanted to gain a stake in the political process...
...His harsh Chilean-style monetarism, blaming economic ills on state intervention, sounded like a coherent long-term alternative to many disenchanted businessmen...
...The exhaustion of state terror as an effective means of domination knocked another pin from under the fast crumbling Lucas regime...
...Militarycontrolled agencies include a pension and investment fund-the Institute for Military Social Security (IPM) and the Army Bank...
...other activists felt their middle class base might still be brought in from the cold...
...Parties have been rendered superfluous by the irrelevance of the electoral process...
...The military dangled the carrot of legal registration in front of the FUR, which obliged by tacitly endorsing Lucas' win and keeping aloof from the new, broad-based Democratic Front Against Repression...
...Their monopoly of power has been accompanied by corruption on a massive scale...
...Gabriel Aguilera, "Estado Military Lucha Revolucionaria en Guatemala," unpublished paper, 1982...
...You won the elections, but I won the count...
...Aguilera, Estado militar...
...ALAI, April 3, 1981...
...Banco del Ejercito, Balance general condensado, 1972...
...3 4 Fiddling While Guatemala Burns The uncontrolled violence against the popu24JanlFeb 1U3 25 lar movement suggests that the main conflict is between the state and the mass of the populace...
...2 5 Banking on Guatemala The institutional ties built by the Bank of America (BoA) have gone further than any other foreign corporation...
...they go to a military court...
...The military's refusal to climb down from its money-making rollercoaster fueled right-wing schisms...
...But its estrangement from the military power center was complete...
...Arana, long a favorite son for his counterinsurgency skills, now also offered economic appeal to his backers in the upper echelons of the CIA, Pentagon and Republican Party...
...Bodyguards stand watch over the boardroom while behind the doors military uniforms mingle with sober, Miamitailored business suits...
...BoA manager Keith Parker Freedom Foundation should have close ties to government in a violently right-wing society...
...Open publication of death lists and victims' photos added to a national psychosis of terror...
...Within nine months, Somoza was in Miami, the FSLN in power...
...NACLA Newsletter, Vol...
...They have lists of people that are suspected of being communists, and they kill them...
...2 3 After his forced resignation from the vice presidency, Villagran Kramer characterized their politics sardonically: "Amigos del Pais (the longest established professional body in Guatemala, founded in 1794) is equivalent to theJohn Birch Society, and the Guatemalan Freedom Foundation is even more to the right...
...6 It was his last interview...
...3 8 Command structures break down...
...Rather, the military has chosen to own what it identifiesthrough economic self-interest and its particular concept of national security-as key areas of economic life...
...Lucas showed some early base of support among the middle class, but in any organizational sense that support was extremely shallow...
...As it loses its ideological grip, the military has also moved into direct control of culture and education...
...Who but an employer, reasons CNUS, could compile such hit lists of troublesome unionists...
...LUCAS GARCIA: THE DESCENT INTO ANARCHY 1. Washington Post, May 14, 1981...
...Guatemalan Election Results 1958-1978 Year/Winner '58 Gen...
...They also own Channel 5 of Guatemalan television.36 Control of the press and restrictions on the dissemination of information have tightened...
...administrations had rubberstamped since 1954...
...Demonstrators, emulating the Sandinista insurrection they had seen on TV a month before, wore face-masks and built barricades...
...Roger Plant, Guatemala...
...Inforpress, June 7, 1979...
...Since then, it has become a financial monster with active capital of $119.2 million in 1981.31 In 1981, Lucas' Congress approved a further $20 million injection of state funds...
...Washington Office on Latin America, Update Latin America, March-April 1981...
...If coffee exporters asked for a tax break, for example, they were likely to be given a tax increase, to fatten state revenues for the military's pet projects...
...Terror escalated to unheard-of levels...
...After all, it had always worked before...
...4, November-December 1981...
...Huehuetenango, 1978...
...ANACAFE report, cited in El Grafico (Guatemala City), June 16, 1981...
...So had the pretense that death-squad killings were the result of fictitious encounters between "extreme Left" and "extreme Right...
...Military men run 46 semi-autonomous state institutions...
...The IPM put up some of the capital for Arana's foundation of the Army Bank in 1972, but even more was siphoned out of public funds...
...See Unomasuno (Mexico City), February 10, 1982...
...Lucas' wild bloodletting, and his willful ruination of the economy, antagonized the Carter Administration...
...The Psychosis of Terror The major death squad of the Lucas period, the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA), faced a new target-an organized mass movement...
...Within weeks, FUR leader Manuel Colom Argueta was also dead, his murder agreed on at a March 1979 meeting between senior Army officers and high-ranking representatives of the private sector...
...At the same time, the first tremors of recession shook the private sector out of its dream world...
...1 By the late 1970s, any distinction between institutional terror-exercised by the state on behalf of the ruling class-and freelance terror from extra-legal groups of the bourgeoisie had blurred into meaninglessness...
...By 1981, there was a rupture in the crucial CACIF-military alliance...
...They found instead that the military only insisted on being cut in on all the most profitable enterprises...
...Romeo Lucas Garcia % Adult Population Voting for Abstention Winner 33.2% 12.7% 43.7% 46.2% 58.0% 63.5% 10.0% 10.5% 8.4% 8.3% Sources: Instituto de Investigaclones Politicas y Sociales, "Los Partidos Politicos y el Estado Guatemalteco desde 1944 hasta Nuestros Dias," Universidad Centroamericana, San Salvador, 1980...
...His own aim, the Vice President told a U.S...
...MLN decline was exemplified by the enforced choice of retired Col...
...And during the peak years of counterinsurgency (1966-68) the squads bloomed like 21NACU Repport poisonous flowers...
...The new Secret Anti-Communist Army, a death squad repeatedly linked to Chupina's office, issued a death-list of 40 prominent opposition figures, and set about the job of killing them...
...you're guilty, you're shot...
...2 8 All this has brought the bank favored status in Guatemala...
...6. Ibid...
...And it used state power to protect its own monopolies, denying competitors the preferen19NACUA Report tial treatment they demanded to ride out the recession...
...2 1 Yet CACIF is not monolithic, and does a poor job of mitigating the feuds between the powerful individual chambers of industry, commerce and agriculture...
...While true, this is only part of the story...
...The generals reported the value of the sales as $425 million, salting away the difference in private bank accounts in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands...
...Inforpress, August 20, 1981...
...See Allan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," COHA Research Memorandum, October 30, 1980...
...7.Jose Fajardo, Centroamerica, todos los rostros del conflicto (Bogota, Editorial Oveja Nega, 1980) p. 164...
...Irritated at its consistent exclusion from a Cabinet of military officers and PID hacks, the private sector seethed with frustration at Lucas' ineptitude and corruption and his failure to crush the Left...
...IPM funds, in collaboration with the South African Trade and Project Management Service, financed the military-owned Cementos Guastatoya, infringing a long-agreed civilian sector monopoly over the lucrative cement industry...
...New ones are still being formed, the latest being the August 1981 League for the Extermination of the Indian Race...
...The ESA's scale of operations was awesome: 311 peasant leaders killed during 1980, 400 University of San Carlos students and teachers butchered in four months.'" Democratic Socialist Party leader Alberto Fuentes Mohr described the death squads' tactics: "Every single murder is of a key personpeople in each sector or movement who have the ability to organize the population around a cause...
...Ultimately, the military elite have even allowed the legendary cohesion within their own ranks to crumble...
...it was the only foreign firm granted corporate membership in Amigos del Pais, which it allegedly retained until at least 1980...
...5, (September 1970) p. 9. 27...
...Poitevin, El Proceso de Industrializasion, p. 190...
...Their investment confidence slumped, and their capital began to flood out of the country...
...6 "It's everyone for himself...
...The fragmentation of military unity under Lucas was something new, a further Achilles' Heel of the military state...
...Decomposition is rapid...
...By 1981, the military and its immediate right-wing allies were isolated, fast losing control...
...The violence was never concealed, especially in the years when the fascist MLN shared power...
...The military, now an independent economic power, has used the politicaleconomic levers at its command only for selfenrichment, not to maneuver a stable bourgeois consensus behind its rule...
...The MLN-real winners of another flagrantly fraudulent election-protested, but Arana's goon squads and the military high command intervened to uphold Lucas' election...
...This growing domination of the economy by those who wield state power is in no sense state capitalism: the overall trend remains toward the privatization of the economy...
...ALAI, December 4, 1981...
...The war against communism, Arana argued, prefiguring a line which Argentine generals would later echo, was a dirty business...
...Between the Lines (Los Angeles), Vol...
...business community...
...All-out class war rocked the economy, and many capitalists began to desert the fast sinking ship of state...
...Diario Impacto (Guatemala City), October 14, 1981...
...Washington Post, September 8, 1980...
...Young officers reported that between 1975 and 1981 the Guatemalan military registered $175 million worth of arms purchases from Israel, Italy, Belgium and Yugoslavia...
...They adopted flamboyant names-An Eye for an Eye, Purple Rose, The Hawk ofJustice...
...Though successive administrations had widely divergent agendas for Latin America, each found the Guatemalan political center too fragile to sustain a challenge to military rule...
...Even as AMCHAM kept up its anti-communist diatribe, more realistic CACIF leaders were closeted in session with the U.S...
...Aguilera documents a total of 32 active death squads from 1960 to 1980...
...Look here, you son of a bitch," he shouts, "I've come to hear you tell me the truth-that I won the elections...
...Yet its behavior was a logical extension of the process which U.S...
...generals and colonels control what captains and lieutenants cannot yet aspire to...
...3 0 The Garrison State Their main complaint was that since the 1970s, the military's role had changed, overstepping its "normal limits" and invading spheres of activity customarily reserved for civil society or the civilian state apparatus...
...In 1975, BoA led a private bank syndicate of $15 million representing participation in the $105 million IDB credit to the Chixoy hydroelectric plant...
...For the private sector, the Army's recourse to systematic terror, elevating the last resort of capitalist rule to a first principle, was decidedly not the problem-only its failure to go on producing results...
...A 1981 Amnesty International report laid to rest any remaining idea that the death squads were independent of the top echelons of the Army and security forces by tracing the chain of command all the way to Lucas' office...
...Mother Jones, November 1981...
...As the final guarantee of its power, the Guatemalan Army has always been able to resort to its monolithic internal cohesion...
...The Disintegrating Military Military expansionism has affected not only the country's economic base...
...Businessmen excluded from the corridors of power began to mutter that Guatemala was being "Somozanized...
...As in Nicaragua, so in Guatemala...
...Even though the first mass disappearances and killings of the 1960s had been quickly tied to Army and national police headquarters and to the La Aurora Air Force base, the Army continued to depict the death squads as a spontaneous "civic response" to the Antichrist of communism, a conscious strategem to offer seemingly independent corroboration of its own harsh rule...
...Individual BoA executives continue to figure on Amigos' 211-strong membership roster.29 The American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) was a more strident defender of the Lucas regime...
...5. Washington Post, September 4, 1980...
...Plunder replaced planning...
...9 Ten corpses a day appeared, hideously disfigured by torture, along the roadsides, in storm drains, under viaducts...
...Maintaining the Guatemalan "example" and the skewed political model which it bred became a near obsession, outweighing the qualms of Washington doves...
...Equally serious has been the state's failure to do its job as effective manager of a capitalist economy...
...A $5 million appropriation launched the bank, whose charter called for it to open credits for cattle raising, industry and real estate development...
...If you use human rights in a country with guerrillas, you're not going to get anywhere...
...In the most celebrated case of Mafia-style activity-an arms-buying racket controlled by eight generals-runaway sums were involved...
...Lucas came to power in March 1978 on a record low voter turnout...
...Unknown men...
...By now, Congress had suspended military aid to Guatemala...
...In the countryside, security forces, private landowners and MLN thugs used terror in ways which made one group indistinguishable from the others...
...Linked to the Guatemalan system as much by their political history as by their dollar assets (many U.S...
...Military entrepreneurs have moved into hotel and real estate speculation on the shores of beautiful Lake Atitlan, Guatemala's prime tourist attraction...
...With a smile, Somoza replies: "Yes, it's true...
...Ibid...
...7 A decade earlier, Regis Debray had written of the effects of the terror: "Administered in large enough doses over a long enough period, it has an anaesthetic effect...
...It's a war, you see, a war between the communists and the anti-communists...
...Villagran Kramer offered Lucas a last veneer of respectability and a last bridge to Washington...
...2 In other cases, officers would use the death squads as enforcers for their private rackets and fiefdoms within the police force.'" Fifteen years of this had provided the right climate for private enterprise to reap the harvest of economic growth...
...And you should remember that the guy who loses is a bigger son of a bitch than the guy who wins...
...The death agony of Somoza in Nicaragua reminded the ruling class of its mortality...
...We cannot talk about an electoral method of change...
...Latin America Political Report, January 28, 1977...
...More worrisome than this new wealth is the machinery created for its acquisition and protection-an array of institutions fusing the armed forces with the state...
...3 3 IPM money has also bought the Army a profitable, multi-storied parking building in downtown Guatemala City...
...2. Latin America Political Report, March 17, 1978...
...Nairn, "Subsidization of Terror...
...Lucas shrewdly capitalized on their confusion...
...The military caste has special privileges...
...businessman Fred Sherwood, CBS News Special, "Central America in Revolt," March 20, 1982...
...4. On Christian Democracy, elections and the military, see Inforpress, March 4, 1982...
...German Chupina...
...policymakers also saw the attraction...
...Three colonels are sitting there...
...Cynthia Arnson and Flora Montealegre, IPS Resource Update (Washington, D.C...
...There you catch somebody...
...With recession sharpening capitalist competition for shrinking profit margins, the individual private sector chambers clamored for special treatment...
...The National Confederation of Trade Union Unity (CNUS) has accused CACIF and the Guatemalan Association of Agriculturalists of organizing the rural death squads...
...Innocent people would get hurt...
...Bank of America, Annual Report, 1976...
...Shelton H. Davis and Julie Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence in Guatemala: The Suppression of a Rural Development Movement, (Boston, Oxfam America, 1982) p. 33...
...AMCHAM remained faithful to Lucas' barbaric regime even when CACIF members began to desert it...
...Army grants pay for young officers to study the "subjects of the future" -electronics, mining and petroleum engineering...
...Vice president VillagrAn Kramer, 1979 There is an old anecdote which Nicaraguans tell about elections under Somoza...
...As Lucas confronted powerful mass resistance, more mature than the guerrilla movements of the 1 9 6 0s, the Guatemalan ruling class asked: why not respond again with terror...
...A Conservative opponent of Somoza's, the story goes, has just lost the presidential election...
...8. Latin America Political Report, October 13 and November 17, 1978...
...In 1979, the armed forces established their own Department of Radio and Television...
...From 1978 to 1981, 20 leaders of the social democratic United Front of the Revolution (FUR) were assassinated, as were 16 Democratic Socialist Party politicians and 70 Christian Democrat activists and mayors...
...27 The only private bank authorized by government to make loans in excess of $5 million, BoA has become the primary source financing largescale projects...
...Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington Report on the Hemisphere, April 7, 1981...
...only days later, he was gunned down in the street...
...Embassy to find ways out of the Lucas impasse...
...More remarkable are the close economic and political ties between these lobbies and the resident U.S...
...State violence rebounded against the regime...
...Carlos Arana Osorio '74 Gen...
...Premo, Political Assassination, p. 499...
...Ricardo Peralta Mendez...
...Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes '63 elections cancelled '66 Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro '70 Gen...
...The colonel, given to hiring out his Mobile "Of course, the death squads were organized under the patronage and approval of the government and the Army...
...8 By 1980, the obscenity was still a commonplace, but the anaesthetic had worn off...
...Ibid., p. 5. 28...
...30...
...In October 1978, Lucas triggered a 60% effective general strike and rioting throughout the capital and highlands, when he doubled urban bus fares...
...If at least part of the state's task is to mediate class conflict, the Guatemalan military state has proved too voracious to even mediate intra-class disputes...
...There's just no restrictions at all...
...5 He was predictably labeled a Marxist by the MLN, and accused by his eventual successor, Col...
...Lucas business associate RaOl Garcia Granados Military Police as vigilantes to private businessmen, assigned police provocateurs to inflame the throngs, and thus justify blanket repression...
...3 Rebuffed in 1974, they nonetheless again fielded a military candidate in 1978, Gen...
...The Guatemalan Army, cursing Carter the "communist" for betraying a loyal ally and vowing not to repeat the traumatic collapse of Somoza's National Guard, killed off any remaining centrist opponents attractive to the State Department...
...3 5 When the effectiveness of terror and the sustained growth of the economy both evaporated under Lucas, previously masked tensions in the ranks of the private sector exploded...
...calculations, was less important than the political legacy of the 1954 counterrevolution, to which Washington had acted as midwife...
...The military's first instincts told it to use this period of high inflation to branch out into ever more aggressive forms of speculative accumulation...
...The mass movement had learned to survive terror...
...thousands have experienced their meaning...
...Oscar Mendoza Azurdia, of being "an agent of both the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Latin America Political Report, April 13, 1979...
...Through his increasingly vocal party, he proposed the unrestrained machinery of the free market as a path to economic recovery...
...It favored military over civilian options not only in 1963-when guerrillas were on the upsurge-but again in 1968 and 1970-when they had been beaten down...
...Arana too now felt the chill winds of economic competition...
...Since elections were a charade, the Democratic Institutional Party (PID) and the Revolutionary Party (PIR), which formed the core of Lucas' electoral alliance, were not effective political instruments, but merely platforms for patronage and enrichment...
...Next morning, he storms into the dictator's office...
...The centrist opposition parties were badly split...
...the obscene becomes commonplace, the abnormal normal...
...Those in business suits are not political party leaders, as they might have been a decade ago...
...20-22...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 360...
...135 (September-October 1982) pp...
...His initial hesitation about whether to crush or accommodate the strike exasperated the fiercely right-wing police chief, Col...
...Taking Care of Business They arrive at meetings in chauffeur-driven bulletproof Mercedes...
...investors took part in the 1954 invasion as pilots and planners, making Guatemala their home afterwards), they consider themselves an integral part of the local ruling class...
...Painting Guatemala as a "beleaguered citadel" and decrying the "doctrinaire adherence to slogans" of the Carter period, its lobbyists buttonholed Washington decision-makers and testified to congressional committees, praising Lucas' defense of "free world" values...
...See, for example, the testimony by U.S...
...Lucas' Interior Minister, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, 1979 Guatemala's intrinsic economic importance, though a factor in U.S...
...The speeches revolve around a single theme: how to eradicate communism and return to the status quo of the 1970s...
...Disputes, previously limited to the rift between the MLN and more dynamic sectors, now affected all groups...
...1, no...
...By 1981, the bodycount had reached 6,000.'0 Hombres desconocidos...
...Enrique Peralta Azurdia as its presidential candidate...
...2 2 Side by side with the ostensibly "apolitical" federations stand the rabid private enterprise lobbies which devoted considerable money and energy to wooing the Reagan Administration...
...So that makes it nice...
...21...
...IV, no...
...tian Democrats, now divided into feuding left and right wings, had spent the 1970s flirting with the idea of building a "centrist alliance" with the PID...
...Aguilera, Estado militar...
...9. See Daniel L. Premo, "Political Assassination in Guatemala: A Case of Institutionalized Terror,'"Journalof Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, Vol...
...6 The MLN remained the single largest party, with 20 out of 61 deputies...
...See Mario Solorzano, "Quien cree en las elecciones...
...A mass movement revived both in its psychology and its clandestine organization managed to survive the rampant terror...
...MJan/Feb 1983 M 0 4, Intimidation will not hold back the people's struggle...
...By 1970, 40% of its Guatemala loans were going into agribusiness...
...2 Like Laugerud, Lucas was the protege of ex-president Arana-reputedly because Arana saw him as the most unintelligent and pliable member of the high command...
...2 4 It is scarcely surprising that Amigos and the "When you've got a situation like you have here, you need the strongest government you can get...
...Control of credit flows allowed the armed forces to shape this unequal competition, even if in doing so the clique around Lucas Garcia was in fact sounding its own death knell...
...professionalism disintegrates...
...Those who knock on the door at dead of night and speed off in unmarked Cherokee station wagons, dragging away "communists" whose mutilated bodies will later be left on public display...
...To perplexed observers, it seemed as if the Ltcas regime-domestically isolated and an international pariah-suffered from an acute death-wish...
...But the model was becoming indefensible...
...4, (November 1981) p. 448...
...They mutilated their victims' faces and genitals and boasted of their exploits in apocalyptic communiques...
...The corrupt government bureaucracy-stuffed with self-seeking military officers and technocrats-showed neither inclination nor capacity for pulling the economy out of its nosedive...
...Where there had been "limited democracy," there was now limitless state terrorism...
...and local-remain in the equation...
...Yvon Le Bot and Louise Morin, "Le role du patronat et des militaires dans le coup d'etat au Guatemala," Le Monde Diplomatique, (May 1982...
...New York Times, March 12, 1982...
...Only the armed forces and the business community-U.S...
...Statistics show the steady discrediting among the electorate of Guatemala's "limited democracy...
...In 1974, 1978 and again in 1982, elections were fraudulent, the officially endorsed military candidate winning a pre-ordained victory over a limited range of officially endorsed opponents...
...The business federations are listed in full in Jose Rodolfo Maldonado Ruiz, Poder politico en Guatemala de algunos grupos sociales organizados en asociaciones no politicas (Guatemala City, Universidad Rafael Landivar, 1980...
...3. Latin America Political Report, September 17, 1976...
...The first death squad, the National AntiCommunist Organization, took up operations in 1960...
...What they should do is declare martial law...
...George Black, "Central America: Crisis in the Backyard," New Left Review, No...
...It is not classic Mussolini-style corporatism: the regime has never tried seriously to work with the trade union movement, and terror has 220 E Guatemala City, 1982...
...Since 1963 CACIF has given unswerving support to military rule, and has customarily provided each regime with its minister of economy...
...The profits from these enterprises find their way into the pockets of senior officers and into consolidating the military as an institution...
...4 Lucas' vice-presidential running mate was the experienced centrist, Francisco Villagran Kramer, who had severed his earlier links to the reformist parties...
...It works very well...
...Even within the officer class, there is potential here for cracks...
...normal promotion procedures are set aside, leapfrogged by favorites of the high command...
...alienated the middle-class professional associations and the predominantly conservative Catholic hierarchy...
...Recruitment of rank-and-file soldiers as cannon fodder, pressganged in swoops on Indian markets and village assemblies, to be indoctrinated with hatred of their race and their communities, is more difficult than ever...
...23, no...
...The military bourgeoisie, monopolistic, scandalously corrupt and with a stranglehold on state power, had isolated itself from all its civilian counterparts...
...3 2 Together with the Bank of America, the Army Bank co-financed the luxury 800-unit Santa Rosita military housing project...
...June 1982...
...Since 1978, there has been ambitious talk of a military university...
...9 Guatemala's business federations are the largest and most important in Central America...
...A gaping rift even developed between Arana, founding father of the militarized state, and Lucas, its current exponent...
...CIA aviator, businessman and former AMCHAM president Fred Sherwood tion, it became the main agricultural lending agency in Guatemala, second only to government as a source of agroexport capital...
...No serving Army officer would accept the albatross of an MLN nomination.7 Death Wish...
...Latin America Political Report, March 30, 1979...
...Washington Post, March 28, 1980...
...Kjell Laugerud Garcia '78 Gen...
...The October 1978 bus-fare riots had dispelled any remnant hopes of reform under Lucas...
...Some U.S...
...A subsidiary of BankAmerica Corporation, the largest bankholding company in the United States with 1981 end-of-year assets of $121 billion, BoA opened Guatemala City branches in 1957, 1959 and 1968.26 As a principal founder of the Latin American Agribusiness Development Corpora23 Jan/Feb 1983NAcUReport "[The government is] very, very cooperative...
...The New AntiCommunist Organization announced publicly that it would cut off the tongue and left hand of its enemies...
...Overlap between the military's coercive role and its ownership of key means of production has severely distorted the function of the state...
...The slaughter of the center was a signal of impotence...
...But this time was different...
...Siete Dias en la USAC (Guatemala), May 7, 1979...
...3 7 Disgust at corruption under Lucas was compounded by the demoralization of young officers in the field, fighting and dying in a bitterperhaps unwinnable-war against an ever stronger popular movement, resenting their flabby, desk-bound superiors...
...Young peasant conscripts now have an alternative, a popular army, to turn to...
...Every Guatemalan knows the words...
...Into the breach have come the private business federations, molding a corporatist form of political representation within the military regime...
...2 0 The most influential umbrella body is CACIF, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations, founded in 1957...
...They have the sympathy of most of the Guatemalan people...
...Since military commissioners were authorized to bear arms such as machine-guns (normally restricted to the Army), many farmers and businessmen simply took out credentials as commissioners to set up their own hit squads...
...Officers enjoy access to special stores where luxury consumer imports are sold at discount prices...
...Unnatural Disaster, (London, Latin America Bureau, 1978) p. 52...
...ChrisLimited Democracy "The people do not care about elections because of their experiences in the past...
...reporter, was "to avoid a Custer's Last Stand in Guatemala...
...As cash-crop prices plummeted and the brutal global recession reverberated through the economy in 1980-1981, the old policies abruptly proved unable to satisfy coffee growers, cotton exporters and industrialists at the same time...
Vol. 17 • January 1983 • No. 1
