The Guatemalan Civil War

I'm going to assume that most people reading this blog only have a vague idea about Guatemalan history, so I thought I would give you all a little background briefing. In this installment, I'll explain a bit about the civil war. I have always had a hard time getting my head around all the ins and outs of Guatemalan politics, but it helps to understand, even superficially, what happened during the civil war. It's fascinating, and something that few Americans of our generation know about.

The civil war in Guatemala began in 1960 and lasted 36 years. The war left an estimated 200,000 people dead and displaced more than one million refugees. A number of left leaning coup attempts occurred following the 1954 invasion and overthrow of Arbenz by the right-wing liberacionista army. Tension between right-wing and left-wing army officers grew as the 1950s came to a close, leading to a final failed coup attempt in 1960 committed by leftist junior officers. Those officers involved in the coup but not captured in the aftermath, some of whom had recently received counterinsurgency training from the US military, formed guerilla movements based in the eastern regions of the country. Beginning in the early 1960s, the military began to combat this opposition by means of counter-terrorist campaigns that utilized modern weapons, military police, paramilitary death squads, and torture to eliminate the guerilla threat. By 1967, the Guatemala military had eliminated the majority of the guerilla leadership along with thousands of rural ladino peasants.

After regrouping in Mexico, the survivors of the early guerilla movement returned to Guatemala in 1972. The repressive campaign against the guerillas continued, and became more selective after the 1975 execution of a prominent landlord by guerillas. However, these selective tactics had little effect, and the army once again returned to random, mass repression in 1978. Repressive tactics included paramilitary strikes, summary executions, kidnappings, and forced disappearances, measures that resulted in an average of eight hundred deaths a month. Following the controversial and fraudulent 1982 elections, a group of Air Force officers conspired with landed and business elite and staged a coup that brought General Efraín Ríos Montt to power. Once in power, Ríos Montt proclaimed a state of siege, suspended the constitution, banned political parties, disbanded Congress, and devised a new counterinsurgency plan to deal with the guerilla threat. He also ousted and exiled soft-liner military officers involved in the administrations of previous president-generals, and executed civilian and police authorities who had held positions within the previous regime, accusing them of not respecting the law and violating human rights.

The counterinsurgency plan under Ríos Montt split both civilian and military efforts between killing guerillas and their supporters and providing food and shelter to the survivors. The Pacification campaign (initially dubbed “Operation Ashes”), a scorched-earth strategy based on establishing killing zones intended to weaken the guerillas’ base of support in the Guatemalan highlands, was nominally intended to rescue civilian noncombatants from the guerillas. In practice, however, the military made no distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Instead, soldiers killed and burned all living things within a particular zone. An estimated 90 percent of noncombatants killed during the civil war died between April and October 1982. In order to implement this plan, the military called in over 2,000 reservists and organized local Civil Patrols of Self-Defense. These Civil Patrols, an auxiliary force made up of an estimated 30,000 forcibly recruited peasants, patrolled villages in 24-hour shifts and perform search operations with the army. Members of these patrols were often forced to participate in massacres in their own or neighboring villages. In many areas, army officers ordered the kidnapping, torture, and murder of those who refused to join a Civil Patrol or commit violence against their neighbors.

A new military coup ousted Ríos Montt in 1983; Defense Minister, General Oscar Humberto Mejía Victores took over as president. Upon assuming power, Mejía ordered National Assembly and presidential elections, which led to the 1985 election of President Vinicio Cerezo, the Christian Democratic nominee, and the first transfer of power to from military to civilian authority since the beginning of the war. This transfer of power, however, was purely nominal, as the military maintained control of politics despite a civilian president. The 1990 presidential election brought Jorge Serrano to the presidency. Three years later, Serrano launched a failed coup attempt against Congress, and was exiled. Despite a supposed return to civilian rule, the war, military dominance, and political instability plagued Guatemala during the 1980s and most of the 1990s. Peace negotiations between guerilla groups and the government began in 1990, but were not signed until December of 1996.

Stayed tuned for the next installment, which discusses the Peace Accords...

Dissertation Field Work

For those of you who don't know, I'm heading down to Central America in a few weeks to start field work for my dissertation. I've set up this blog so anyone who is interested can follow my trials and tribulations as an academic researcher in Latin America. Sounds like fun, right? Dusty libraries, layers of bureaucracy, thumbing through archives, newspaper ink on my fingers everyday. But I also will be interviewing journalists, politicians, and activists. So if you're interested in (a) the nuts and bolts of academic inquiry, (b) what I'm up to while I'm out of the country, (c) the dynamics of political rhetoric in Latin America, and/or (c) stories about interesting places and the interesting people you can meet there, then check back here every once in a while.

Here's a quick run down of my game plane for the next few months. I'm heading down to Guatemala and El Salvador to get started on my field research. My project is, more or less, about the issue of crime control during political campaigns, and the relationship between the media, public opinion, and politicians during political campaigns. Crime is a very hot topic in Latin America, and campaigning on crime control issues often follows a pattern that was made famous in the US by Rudy Giuliani in New York. Candidates will often support mano dura (loosely translated as "iron fist" or "heavy hand") policies against crime, which often include harshly punitive measures. I am interested in how the debate over crime control policies evolves during electoral campaigns. So I will be in Guatemala and El Salvador for about two months digging in newspaper archives, talking to journalists, and interviewing politicians. I'll be doing the same thing in Brazil over the summer, and, if all goes well, I'll be in Argentina in the fall. But first I'm heading out to New York to visit friends and get a quick Poekoelan fix before heading out of the country. And I'm taking a short vacation in Guatemala before I get to work. So stay tuned...more posting to come when I've actually on the road.