The Road to Ixcan
"Todas las puertas cerradas, Solo un camino nos dejan. "* Quiche Indian song Guerrilla warfare. Armed struggle. To some, the words conjure up tiny, power-hungry cliques committed to violence...
...95, no...
...On both sets of myths the cliched rhetoric of the Right thrives: Reagan's "Soviet-Cuban inspired terrorism," Assistant Secretary of State Enders' "violent minorities...
...Its terrible warning haunted the Cuban leaders and taught them the most basic lesson of revolutionary Marxism as updated and demonstrated on American soil: the only way to secure the revolution is to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, mobilize and arm the people, and disarm the enemy...
...4 2 But years later, when the EGP had grown to become the strongest of four politico-military organizations, its members would reflect on the rich lessons of the Ixcan...
...instead, the young officers spent a year in painstaking dialogue with reformist politicians, including Villagran Kramer, before concluding that no viable political opening existed...
...But the roots of failure lie deeper, in a gamut of political and ideological dilemmas ranging from personal antagonisms to profound theoretical schisms...
...It is also the most difficult problem to solve: How is this war going to become their war...
...Of today's revolutionary organizations, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA) have dealt with the ethnic question most extensively, albeit from different perspectives...
...and just as important to love the yellow flower of the tamborillo in February, as to learn how to love and truly respect our companeros.' 43 THE ROAD TO IXCAN 1. U.S...
...Victory does not come overnight...
...It was just as important to learn how to hunt wild mountain animals as to learn how to work politically with the people of the hamlets to win them over to our cause...
...The harsh reality of the Ixcan seemed remote from the dream of a mass-based revolutionary organization...
...2 2 He was right: the 1966-1968 wave of terror slaughtered rural sympathizers by the hundreds...
...2 5 The Post-Mortem Retreat, regroupment, resurgence...
...50, 62...
...military attache George Maynes keeps a watchful eye on the war They allowed the rhythm and laws of the election to dictate their tactics instead of preserving an independent political analysis...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, p. 19...
...2 7 One segment of the movement, the MR-13, turned briefly to Trotskyist advice, while the traditional PGT provided some ideological framework-though at the price of separating politcal and military considerations...
...2 4 The illusion of democratic elections was only one means of taking the steam out of the Left...
...While the FAR began to register major military successes, it still lacked the machinery to protect its civilian supporters...
...In December 1962, a new unified group was unveiled-the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR)-composed of remnants of the MR-13 and ex-PGT guerrillas and the student-based 12th of April Movement...
...Yon Sosa later admitted that his men were unfamiliar with the population of their chosen zone of operations, the torrid eastern department if Izabal, where they captured national headlines by seizing the military posts of Mariscos and Morales...
...It worked systematically and brutally to eliminate all demands, and finally all possibility of participation within institutional channels...
...Indian incorporation into the revolutionary war will be dealt with fully in the March-April 1982 NACLA Report...
...mere sympathy was insufficient.'6 Such struggles as took place in the 1960s were economic and defensive in character...
...The best example of the Trotskyists' "socialism tomorrow" utopianism is in Adolfo Gilly, "The Guerrilla Movement in Guatemala," Monthly Review, Vol...
...7. Menendez, Por Esto...
...The theory of foquismo, successful in Cuba, called for small armed groups in specific areas, whose example would "detonate" mass consciousness and involvement...
...Some withdrew from the country altogether for political and military training...
...the guerrillas of the 1960s, at their zenith, had 500 active combatants...
...Ambassador John Gordon Mein and West German Ambassador Karl von Spretti brought the movement international notoriety, but spectacle was no substitute for internal coherence...
...From the outset, they failed to mesh military and political work...
...3 2 * Under the Peralta Azurdia and Mendez Montenegro regimes, democratic opponents still enjoyed some small leeway for legal activity...
...People came and went freely from the camps in the Sierra de las Minas...
...A high price was later paid for this illusion...
...Georgie Anne Geyer, "The Blood of Guatemala," The Nation, July 8, 1968...
...9 (February 1967), p. 36...
...Today, the lesson has been learned...
...The zone, carefully selected after long debate, is called the Ixcan, where the towering peaks of the Cuchumatanes mountains fall away towards the jungle...
...A new term entered their discussions-prolonged popular war...
...there would be no relapse into the facile triumphalism of 1966...
...If they apply dogma blindly, they will fail...
...1, (1981...
...Instead, de Leon, Yon Sosa and Turcios Lima left for a short, selfimposed exile, soon returning to carry on the struggle...
...4 (1982...
...In Indian areas, they used organizing techniques which failed to take into account the particularities of the indigenous culture.30 * Critically, the movement failed to recognize and embrace the revolutionary potential of the Indian communities, more than half the Guatemalan population...
...What lessons have they learned from those early experiences...
...Each group understood this, and each recognized that the revolution could not be made unless the mass of the population 0 E v, Jan/Feb 1983 31NACUA Report made it...
...The PGT saw the guerrillas as an auxiliary pressure group to hasten change within the institutional framework of bourgeois democracy...
...With no organized popular army to hold military repression at bay, peasants became easy targets for government troops...
...Overconfident and romantic, they let their guard down, calling a temporary halt to armed activity and appearing to endorse the electoral process...
...but there are four centuries of justified Indian distrust of ladinos...
...Today's Guatemalan Left would share the central concerns posed by Debray: "The prime problem for the Guatemalan revolution is to integrate the Indians into the planning, the execution and above all the leadership of the revolutionary war...
...2 In November 1960, junior Army officers attempted a coup against President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes...
...Armed struggle remained the focus, though approaches to the problem varied...
...Alan Howard, "With the Guerrillas in Guatemala," New York Times Magazine, June 26, 1966...
...August 1981), p. 15...
...We know that it is the Indians, half the population, who will determine the outcome of the revolution in this country...
...321-2...
...As repression and counterinsurgency turn into a war of extermination, their participation is often dictated by the sheer logic of survival...
...military assistance, the barracks-bound Army had simply been no match for them...
...The recourse to armed struggle is a rational decision made by ordinary-sometimes exceptional-men and women, with a vision-lucid or confused-of a new social order...
...Por Esto...
...30JanlFeb 1933 31 In the Ixil village of Nebaj, U.S...
...political leadership came overwhelmingly from professionals and students...
...Galeano, Occupied Country, p. 138...
...Of all the parties, only the PGT's analysis of national conditions made any rational sense to them.' 3 On February 6, 1962, Yon Sosa formed the first guerrilla front, the "conscious beginning of guerrilla war in Guatemala...
...3 8 After its sixth military reverse in the wilds of the Peten in 1971, the FAR shifted its base of operations to the capital city and the south coast agroexport plantations, opening the way for better collaboration with the PGT At times separately, at times in concert, the two groups worked hard in the still feeble labor unions, their goal a mass-based working class party...
...Cautious in their dealings with the press, Guatemalan guerrilla leaders prefer to write about themselves...
...Under a new agreement in 1965, the Edgar Ibarra Front would furnish the combatants and the Communist Party the organizational structure...
...advisers...
...Keeping track of the movement's shifts and alliances from 1969 to 1972 is no easy task...
...The PGT agreed that such a war "will take time, because the people have not yet got their own army, and if they are to take power and keep it, they must create one...
...in doing so, they lost their initiative...
...His candidacy on a reform platform seemed to offer an unexpected political opening, and undercut the FAR's conviction that armed struggle was the only way forward...
...Turcios Lima's Edgar Ibarra Front, meanwhile, fighting in the arid hills of the Sierra de las Minas, became one of the continent's strongest guerrilla forces...
...Both Yon Sosa-trained at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone-and Turcios Lima-trained at Fort Benning, Georgia-turned their U.S.-acquired counterinsurgency skills against the Guatemalan Army...
...To some, the words conjure up tiny, power-hungry cliques committed to violence for its own sake...
...Delegations from the village committees and peasant women carrying gifts of fruit and vegetables arrived...
...The FAR encouraged its supporters to vote for Mendez...
...And that of course is the key...
...The Communists remained leery of armed warfare, though their Fourth Party Congress of December 1969 paid lip service to the notion of a prolonged, multifaceted revolutionary war, embracing all forms of action from the economic to the military...
...EGP, Companero, No...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 39...
...Peasant supporters were disoriented by the FAR's call to vote, and urban middle class sympathizers, with more intrinsic faith in the ballot box, were demobilized by the election...
...The defeats of the 1960s, the EGP would later argue, demonstrated the need "to link more closely armed struggle and the entire spectrum of popular and democratic struggles around economic, social and political demands...
...on more than one occasion, ex-combatants either went over to the military or were forced after their capture to lead troops to guerrilla hideouts, which were easily dismantled...
...The 1946 census showed an urban proletariat of 21,661...
...mediately the popular movement takes state power...
...Though the Guatemalan Army made a hash of its anti-guerrilla campaign under Peralta Azurdia, the introduction of U.S...
...Patience was the keynote...
...Concerned Guatemala Scholars, Dare to Struggle, p.21...
...1954," Debray explains, "was decisive for the Latin American revolutionary movements of our time-in a negative sense since it was their matrix...
...8. Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books Ltd., 1971) p. 39...
...Gott, Guerrilla Movements, pp...
...Marta Harnecker interview with Mario Payeras, 1981...
...In the Ixcan, they hoped to eke out subsistence from the unpromising rain forest...
...7 Moreover, any systematic communication was difficult and hazardous between urban factory workers, rural laborers on the coastal plantations, workers in highland mining camps and those in the foreign-owned banana fields of the Caribbean lowlands...
...Thought politically clearer than its predecessors, the FAR embraced several semiautonomous groups, with no single centralized leadership or strategy...
...1 and 2. FAR and PGT analyses of lesser weight are included in Polemica (Costa Rica), No...
...But 1954 had dealt a crushing blow to working class consciousness and organization...
...For the peasantry, the reversal of political gains and the loss of land was an equally tangible example of what counterrevolution is...
...3 1 Early leaders like Cesar Montes and Turcios Lima did touch briefly on the ethnic and national questions in their writings, but it was not until the 1970s that the guerrillas-and above all the Indians themselves-fully addressed the questions of the previous decade...
...By different routes, with ideas that put the accent on mobilizing this or that sector of the population, with different degrees of success, the scattered remains of the revolutionary movement reinitiated their activities under new premises...
...4 The fascination with publicity was not onesided...
...By 1969, the tattered remnants of the FAR were in disarray...
...0 The guerrillas "lacked a coherent organization that could have effectively put a strategy into practice, or even adequately reflected the aspirations of the people...
...In March 1966, Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, reformist candidate of the Revolutionary Party, was elected president...
...By the time they had given enough interviews they came to believe the things they had heard on the best authority: their own...
...Debray argued that the MR-13 tactics "can acquire the character of real provocations, causing defeats that oblige the people to retreat politically as the only way of protecting themselves against repression...
...One foreign journalist was aghast at the laxity of security: "Peasants came in and out apparently without restriction...
...270-2...
...Rebirth Silence followed defeat...
...Norman Gall, "Death is Casual in the Land of the Campesinos," Toronto Daily Star, November 6, 1966...
...In honor of their comrade, -killed by police the previous year, they named it the Alejandro de Leon November 13 Revolutionary Movement (MR-13...
...By 1966, they posed a serious threat to the survival of the regime...
...The guerrilla leadership was, after all, composed of radicalized Army officers, expert in the techniques of rural warfare nJan/Feb%893 but politically naive...
...Historia de ORPA (Mexico City, mimeo, 1982...
...49-50...
...A new military approach was certainly called for to counter the Army's new sophistication in aerial mapping and photo-intelligence...
...In doing so, they will face, and try to resolve, a series of polarities: between urban and rural work, political and military action, leadership conceptions and mass involvement...
...But ducking the repression, sidestepping, the survivors of the 1960s guerrillas dispersed...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, pp...
...The overpowering strength of the Guatemalan armed forces seems the immediate cause of defeat...
...Rethinking by leadership, no matter how profound, does not make a revolution...
...How did the groups decimated 15 years ago rebound so successfully...
...Aguilera, Terror and Violence, p. 97...
...Henry Gininger, "Guatemala is a Battleground," New York Times Magazine, June 16, 1968...
...Most of today's revolutionaries would reach consensus on the causes of their decline in the 1960s...
...Believing that Guatemala was pacified, presidents Arana and Laugerud became complacent...
...6. The most important interviews have been those granted to the Mexican journalist Mario Menendez Rodriguez, printed in Por Esto...
...August 1981), p. 14...
...Jonas and Tobis, Guatemala, p. 180...
...During his campaign, Mendez had offered the Left negotiations...
...Many criticized the way in which MR-13 exposed its peasant supporters...
...But beyond this, they must offer protection...
...2 In building strong ties to the mass of the population, those who initiate a revolutionary war must offer a channel for organizing and clearly expressing popular aspirations...
...When they finally unveiled their organization publicly in September 1979, they called themselves the Organization of the People in Arms-ORPA...
...4, (Winter 1980-1981), pp...
...the Guatemalan guerrilla movement became the great tourist attraction of the moment...
...18, no...
...Although some Kekchi Indians from the Verapaces fought in the Sierra de las Minas, there was little Indian involvement in leadership...
...Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala became media shows...
...Yet in a political system such as Guatemala's, the radical methods of armed warfare do not necessarily presage a radical social program im*All the doors are closed, / They leave us only one way...
...The leaders groped for outside models to guide them, above all the Cuban experience, in the absence of indigenous models...
...This, they supposed, would modernize the economy, revive bourgeois democracy and create an industrial working class as the necessary preconditions for revolution...
...Among the coup leaders were Alejandro de Leon, Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios Lima...
...But there was no hasty rush into the mountains...
...Arising from an aborted military coup in November 1960, the first guerrilla organizations emerged in 1962, with disillusioned ex-soldiers at their head...
...Enforced withdrawal from military action, and the conscious decision to carry out a top-to-bottom analysis of their mistakes, marks out the Guatemalan Left from other contemporary Latin American experiences...
...El camino de la revolution guatemalteca (Mexico City, Ediciones Cultura Popular, 1972...
...Our first objective is to last out, to survive...
...The Army and the Pentagon also insisted on other, harsher medicine...
...8 Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), recalled that his first memories of revolutionary awareness were those of the Arbenz government...
...2. Edelberto Torres-Rivas, "Ocho claves para comprender la crisis centroamericana," Polemica, no...
...2 8 0 The early guerrillas "never really constituted a vanguard of the dominated classes but rather functioned at their margin...
...2 Outsiders in their chosen terrain of eastern Guatemala, they failed to build a solid relationship with the predominantly ladino population of small and medium peasant proprietors...
...never before has a revolutionary movement been annihilated at the zenith of its power and then staged a comeback to the brink of victory...
...The course of Guatemalan history-a frustrated democratic interlude, then monopoly of power by the military-led many to conclude in the early 1960s that only serious social transformation could guarantee an improvement in their lives, and only armed struggle could bring about social transformation...
...The question is whether it can overcome them...
...9. Debray, The Revolution on Trial, pp...
...This experience is vividly recounted in Mario Payeras, Los dias de la selva (Mexico City, Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1981...
...It is rational only if all other avenues of change have been exhausted, for otherwise they will not be joined...
...troops as well as the local military...
...Within three years of the initial approaches of the new, embryonic guerrilla organization, the Ixiles would form a solid heartland of support, as militants and sympathizers of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP...
...652-3...
...From here, its members argued, they could make contact with both the indigenous subsistence farmers of the altiplano and the laborers of the bocacosta...
...The mortal risks involved in confronting a murderous system produce acts of extraordinary heroism and wisdom...
...Nor does it take place in a vacuum...
...others returned to grassroots rural work and collaboration with church conscientization groups...
...EGP, Companero, No...
...The call aroused some working class sympathy, and Guatemala City slums rose up in near-insurrection...
...Security measures, for a clandestine organization, were abysmal, in large measure reflecting the over-emphasis on military skills and poor training in political consciousness...
...1 9 Under their agreement with the communists, they would do the fighting, while the PGT would do the thinking, becoming "the political organization, the 'brains' for the Left...
...and "Guatemalan Guerrillas Slaughtered...
...Richard H. Immerman, "Guatemala as Cold War History," Political Science Quarterly, Vol...
...The FAR had no way of suspecting the deal that had been struck: in order to take office, Mendez would have to hand over conduct of the war to the armed forces and a new influx of U.S...
...Church Objects to Bloodbath," National Catholic Reporter, June 7, 1967...
...The desperate kidnapping and execution of U.S...
...In the aftermath of their defeat, the armed actions of the Left went for spectacle instead of organization...
...3 Civilian Government, Military Terror Events the previous year had helped convince the FAR of the need for rethinking...
...Again, the political naivete of its leaders cost it dearly...
...Despite their internal weaknesses, the guerrillas were by now immensely popular and had kept the regime off balance for three years...
...Gott, Guerrilla Movements, p. 55...
...The FAR's switch to urban work brought a sharp reaction from many of its members working to win Indian support in the heavily populated western departments of San Marcos and Quezaltenango...
...In the intervening twenty years, tens of thousands have followed suit...
...In collaboration with civilian opposition groups, the new politico-military organizations seemed set by 1982 to mount a serious challenge for power...
...have become thoroughly integrated into the cultural, political and social reality of Guatemala...
...See for example Norman Gall, "Impoverished Peasants Make Good Fighters for Red Insurgents," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, November 14, 1966...
...only a handful of sympathetic journalists have visited their camps.6 Their silent, largely unknown struggle has confused many, but it results from stern self-criticism of the Left's impetuous early years...
...2 This held true from the original MR-13, through the first loosely amalgamated FAR, to the conflicts which would later arise between the FAR and the PGT * An overall strategy was absent, in many ways a function of the movement's lack of a precise ideology beyond the vague anger at social injustice which drove them to take up arms in 1962...
...2 0 Political Pipe-Dreams The PGT labored under the illusion that it could recreate an Arbenz-style reformist government by forging alliances with a virtually non-existent national bourgeoisie...
...ORPA statements are Acerca del Racismo, Nos...
...In all the peasant areas we have visited," commented Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) leader Cesar Montes, "we easily explain ourselves by saying that [our] struggle is merely the prolongation by other means of the 1944 revolution...
...Within four days, the uprising had sputtered and failed after rebelheld areas were bombed by the newly trained Cuban exile pilots...
...FAR leader Cbsar Montes, 1967 Nor was counterinsurgency limited to massive firepower...
...The fullest EGP analysis is contained in Companero, No...
...But more important, the Left required a thorough political overhaul of its conception and strategy of armed strugle...
...Armed selfdefense groups were poorly equipped to defend "liberated" territory...
...Short, "Conversations with the Guatemalan Delegates in Cuba," Monthly Review, Vol...
...The urban proletariat, for one thing, was still tiny, despite the advance of industrialization...
...Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1970) p. 15...
...After 1962, the party would play a similar role to its Salvadorean counterpart-a permanent cradle for leftist activists, but condemned to remain on the sidelines as the mass movement gathered force...
...From this alliance, the second FAR was born...
...just as important to learn how to follow tracks, wade through rivers and build rafts, as to identify and fight the mistaken ideas which survive in all of us and lead us into muddled errors...
...It split its forces into three separate fronts, inspired by the foco model...
...More important, they 26 NACUReportJan/Feb 1983 0 E U) Elite troops of the kaibiles prepare for counterinsurgency operations...
...If they grasp the peculiarities of their country-economic, social, political, cultural-and apply that understanding creatively, they may win...
...Mexico City, July-August 1981) and the Chilean writer Marta Harnecker, which have appeared in various issues of the Mexican magazines Punto Final and Proceso...
...The truth is at once more inspirational and more prosaic...
...4 1 At the same time, the backward area harbored a 32JanFeb 1983 33 microcosm of Guatemala's rural contradictions, and the local Indian peasantry had explosive potential for involvement in the war...
...Gott, Guerrilla Movements, p. 43...
...The old MR-13 fought on alone for several years, though weakened by Yon Sosa's murder in exile by Mexican troops in 1970, until it finally fell apart...
...Why did the military and its U.S...
...with it came a sophisticated civic action program of bridge-building, food distribution and selective medical care for targeted villages...
...Ibid...
...2 Eventually he would expel them from MR-13 in 1966, but not before their stance had split the FAR alliance...
...Many guerrillas figured in the list of 8,000 dead, but the vast majority were noncombatants...
...On one front, the MR-13 fought under Yon Sosa...
...It would be a long, patient process of blending together various forms of struggle...
...In many ways, they synthesize what a guerrilla war is all about...
...Turcios Lima and Ricardo Ramirez led the Edgar Ibarra Guerrilla Front (FGEI...
...Combined membership may reach 6,000...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 296...
...August 1981...
...Under the Spotlight After the victory of the guerrillas led by Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959, the press could not get enough of Latin American guerrillas in their mountain focos...
...5. Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 299...
...Cesar Montes, too, ascribed failure to a poor reading of potential local support, a lack of definite direction, clear orientation and adequate organizational structures.' 5 Though the guerrilla failed, the Ydigoras Fuentes regime was shaken by a wave of antigovernment riots in March-April 1962...
...4. Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 299...
...3 7 These were years of patient and anonymous work, of slow and laborious advances, of difficult convergence between different organizations and political beliefs...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, pp...
...Some would even go further: British writer Richard Gott asserts that "the history of guerrilla movements in Latin America, indeed the contemporary history of Latin America itself, cannot be understood without reference to this cardinal event...
...Many of them thought their goal had already been achieved," Debray has written...
...none was brought to trial...
...intervention was another warning: from now on, any popular movement might have to defend itself against U.S...
...1 0 Ultimately, of course, it is the Guatemalans themselves who learned the lessons of their past.NACUA Report For them, the 1944-1954 democracy is "a real and living example of what a revolution is...
...After a few months of work on the coast and the bocacosta-the hilly agricultural belt separating the coastal plains from the highlands-the new group withdrew into the Indian mountains of the Sierra Madre in September 1971...
...When the FAR turned the proposal down flatly, the president gave the Army the green light...
...Debray, The Revolution on Trial, p. 307...
...Ibid...
...Indeed, the PGT explicitly denied that the "backward" Indians had any such potential...
...Any such war carries a heavy toll in human lives...
...They realized the essentially political character of their defeat, and that superficial changes in military or operational tactics would not avert catastrophe...
...To others, perhaps more sympathetic, they suggest raw heroism, military adventure stripped of political substance...
...4 0 Ixcan On January 19, 1972, as ORPA's founders built their network in the west, a group of 16 men-most survivors of the Edgar Ibarra Guerrilla Front-crossed the desolate border from Mexico into northwestern Guatemala...
...It seems improbable," noted Gott, "that the Guatemalan Army could have dealt with the guerrillas so speedily had it not been for this outside assistance...
...Por Esto...
...They talked to Left, Right and center alike about finding a solution...
...More than any other of Guatemala's 22 Mayadescended ethnic groups, the Ixiles know the humiliation of annual migration to the coast...
...With the temporary defeat of the armed movement, the Army was left in charge...
...The nearest population centers of any size are the three towns of the "Ixil Triangle," Nebaj, Chajul and San Juan Cotzal...
...No liberation war is immune to mistakes, setbacks and failures...
...The war would be "a long-term one, which will last ten, perhaps twenty years...
...4. 38...
...Working mainly in the department of Izabal, MR-13 called explicitly for insurrection and the prompt installation of a socialist government...
...mistakes over timetable and strategy will make that human cost higher...
...Any victorious revolution will face appalling economic constraints, and with electoral channels barred to Left and center alike, as Guatemalan scholar Edelberto Torres-Rivas argues, it is not only socialism which can issue from the barrel of a gun...
...But by 1968, their ranks were decimated, victims of tactical and strategic errors and a massive U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency campaign...
...Upset by low pay, endemic government corruption and the presence of Cuban exiles training for the Bay of Pigs, they decided to act...
...They were led by students, who called for a general strike to oust Ydigoras...
...Here in the Sierra Madre they remained for eight silent years, giving the lie to widely held beliefs about the imperatives of guerrilla organizations by slowly expanding their strength without firing a single shot...
...3 Yet today, their successors have grown explosively...
...In July, straight after his inauguration, Mendez offered the guerrillas an unexpected JanlFeb1983 nNAcM Report amnesty...
...Their decision to go on seeking space within the electoral system further isolated the guerrilla movement...
...They reasoned that the Ixcan was "the geographical, political and social region of Guatemala where the state apparatus and imperialist penetration were at their weakest...
...Between 1968 and 1971, those who stayed in Guatemala had an often tense relationship...
...3 6 Though devastating, the military offensive acted primarily to precipitate a political disintegration latent within the Left's own shortcomings...
...What shaped the resurgence of the 1970s was the reality of Guatemala, and above all the dramatic irruption of the mass movement after 1976...
...Jonas and Tobis, Guatemala, p. 118...
...3 (1982...
...17, nos 1 and 2 (May and June 1965...
...7 The Origins: 1954 and 1960 The downfall of the Arbenz government is the pivotal moment of modern Guatemalan history...
...During the 1960s," explained EGP commander-in-chief Rolando Moran in a rare interview, "we used to broadcast things which in reality contained not one iota of truth...
...by 1974, that figure had climbed to only 65,731--still a mere 3% of the economically active population...
...361-2...
...The old FAR painfully marshaled its forces for new, short-lived guerrilla focos in the mountains of northern Quiche and Alta Verapaz and the jungles of the southern Peten...
...The communists claimed to embrace the notion of armed struggle, but failed to change their party structures accordingly...
...9 The likelihood of direct U.S...
...Gott, Guerrilla Movements, pp...
...They were deeply critical of the FAR's failure to give adequate weight to the ethnic question...
...Reluctance of the officer corps to punish its own kind worked in favor of the conspirators...
...With massive aerial bombing, ground search-anddestroy missions and the horrors of napalm in the eastern mountains came the first death squads, nominally independent of the military...
...Under Peralta Azurdia, disdainful of U.S...
...The First Guerrillas Beset by poor thinking, the MR- 13 operation quickly fizzled out...
...3 3 * During the 1966 elections, the guerrillas misread the political conjunction...
...Disillusioned by the result of these overtures, they turned to the Guatemalan Communist party, the PGT, with whom they would later enter into alliance...
...If conditions are not ripe for short-term insurrection, a protracted popular war is harsher, more bitter, full of risks...
...The outcome was a mass slaughter in the east of the country, military containment of the crisis at the cost of indiscriminate state violence...
...From 1962 onwards, "every American provincial newspaper felt obliged to send its correspondent to be photographed with a group of armed guerrillas...
...Settlers in the Ixcan in the early 1970s were wretchedly poor and isolated groups of migrant campesinos, with fresh and bitter experience of being thrown off their lands...
...Class consciousness was further battered by the widespread repression which followed the audacious actions of the still isolated guerrilla bands.' 8 At the height of urban agitation in 1962, the PGT opened a guerrilla front in Baja Verapaz, which was swiftly annihilated by the Army...
...still others devoted their energies to urban labor organizing...
...Miguel Angel Albizurez, interview in El Dia (Mexico City), March 31, 1982...
...By 1967, FAR leaders saw the wisdom of new ideas which had emerged from the Edgar Ibarra Front...
...3. Aguilera, Terror and Violence...
...Carlos Sarti, "El desarrollo capitalista, base objetiva de la movilizacion obrera," Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos, No...
...Mario Lopez Larrave, Breve historia del movimiento sindical en Guatemala, (Guatemala City, Editorial Universitaria, 1979) p. 51...
...Gott, Guerrilla Movements, p. 104...
...5 (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1980) p. 7. 18...
...The demands were the handiwork of a small number of cadres of the Trotskyist Fourth International, to whom the trusting Yon Sosa assigned more and more responsibility...
...They grasped the weakness of foco theory, seeing that their actions had palpably not ignited a mass uprising...
...Green Berets, Vietnam-style tactics, new technology such as remote sensing and night vision scopes, and the overall professionalization of the Army under Mendez tipped the scales in favor of the regime...
...Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Strategic Situation in Central America and the Caribbean, statement by Thomas O. Enders, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December 14, 1981...
...advisers defeat the movement of the 1960s so easily...
...5 (1982...
...a third was made up of ex-PGT cadre...
...Again, the peasantry bore the brunt of Army terror...
...In Guatemala, they will above all seek ways of uniting the ladino population and the Indian majority...
...Their willingness to talk and be photographed with a minimum of security precautions was a symptom of fatal overconfidence...
...the guerrillas enjoyed their new-found notoriety...
...The PGT, still sticking to a semi-open and highly visible presence, was hit hard by the security forces, who wiped out most of its Central Committee in 1972...
...They held out little hope of operating effectively with the urban working class, believing that Arana's savagery had neutralized their potential involvement in the struggle...
...From the dispute, a new guerrilla nucleus emerged, 95 % of its original members Indian...
...Activists under Yon Sosa challenged the PGT's right to be the sole political brains of the movement...
...But the path of armed struggle, carried out against an enemy mobilized for survival, with vastly superior resources and options, is booby-trapped with blind alleys, errors of judgment, unresolved strategy disputes which fester in the enforced separation of clandestinity...
...Learning From Experience Clandestine armed activity aimed at overthrowing the Guatemalan government has a 22-year history...
Vol. 17 • January 1983 • No. 1
