Guatemalan Civil War

Guatemalan Civil War
Part of Cold War
Cemetery in Rabinal
Date 1960 - 1996 Standort Guatemala Result Peace accord signed in 1996
Belligerents
Guerrilla Army of the Poor Revolutionary Organization of Armed People Rebel Armed Forces Guatemalan Labor Party (1960-1982) Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (1982-1996)	Guatemala
Commanders and leaders
Rolando Morán

The Guatemalan Civil War (Spanish: Guerra civil de Guatemala) ran from 1960 to 1996, and had a profound impact on Guatemala.

Origin

In 1944, a group known as the "October Revolutionaries" instituted liberal reforms, strengthening urban workers and the peasantry. Comprised of left-leaning students, professionals and liberal-democratic coalitions, they were led by Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951–1954). Right-wing Col. Carlos Castillo Armas led a coup in 1954, backed by the CIA.

By 1960, after a series of oppressive regimes, the country plummeted into civil war between military governments, right-wing vigilante groups, and leftist rebels. This is the longest civil war in Latin American history and funded primarily by the US government until 1977. An estimated 50,000 leftists and political opponents were murdered in 1970s. However, indigenous groups were especially targeted by the right-wing death squads. By the end of the war, 200,000 citizens were dead.

In 1999, a UN-sponsored truth commission pronounced that the army was responsible for 93% of atrocities committed during the war, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity for 3%. As a result, former rebels apologized for their crimes, and President Clinton apologized for U.S. support of right-wing military governments. The army never apologized. So President Alfonso Portillo Cabrera (2000-2004), pledged to prosecute responsible soldiers and compensate victims. However, he was closely associated with dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983), who led many of the atrocities committed during the most violent phase of the civil war.

Groups involved

Four principal left-wing guerrilla groups — the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People (ORPA), the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and the Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT) — conducted economic sabotage and targeted government installations and members of government security forces in armed attacks. These organizations combined to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in 1982. At the same time, extreme right-wing groups of self-appointed vigilantes, including the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA) and the White Hand (La Mano Blanca), tortured and murdered students, professionals, and peasants suspected of involvement in leftist activities.

Early years of conflict

Shortly after President Julio César Méndez Montenegro took office in 1966, the army launched a major counterinsurgency campaign that largely broke up the guerrilla movement in the countryside. The guerrillas then concentrated their attacks in Guatemala City, where they assassinated many leading figures, including United States Ambassador John Gordon Mein in 1968. Between 1966 and 1982, there were a series of military or military-dominated governments.

1982 coup d'état

On 22 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by General Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked candidate of outgoing President and General Romeo Lucas García. They denounced Guevara's electoral victory as fraudulent. The coup leaders asked retired Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of Lucas and Guevara. Ríos Montt had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential elections and was widely regarded as having been denied his own victory through fraud.

Ríos Montt was by this time a lay pastor in the evangelical protestant Church of the Word. In his inaugural address, he stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God. He was widely perceived as having strong backing from the Reagan administration in the United States. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress, suspended political parties and cancelled the electoral law. After a few months, Ríos Montt dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the de facto title of "President of the Republic".

Guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt sought to defeat the guerrillas with military actions and economic reforms; in his words, "rifles and beans". In May 1982, the Conference of Catholic Bishops accused Ríos Montt of responsibility for growing militarization of the country and for continuing military massacres of civilians. An army officer was quoted in the New York Times of 18 July 1982 as telling an audience of indigenous Guatemalans in Cunén that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you." The Plan de Sánchez massacre occurred on the same day.

The government began to form local civilian defense patrols (PACs). Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many people, especially in the rural northwest, had no choice but to join either the PACs or the guerrillas. Ríos Montt's conscript army and PACs recaptured essentially all guerrilla territory — guerrilla activity lessened and was largely limited to hit-and-run operations. However, Ríos Montt won this partial victory only at an enormous cost in civilian deaths.

Ríos Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in thousands of deaths of mostly unarmed indigenous civilians. Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of noncombatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the military and the PACs they controlled. The internal conflict is described in great detail in the reports of the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) and the Archbishop's Office for Human Rights (ODHAG). The CEH estimated that government forces were responsible for 93% of the violations; ODHAG earlier estimated that government forces were responsible for 80%.

Resumption of democracy

On 8 August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his own Minister of Defense, General Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, who succeeded him as de facto president. Mejía justified his coup, saying that "religious fanatics" were abusing their positions in the government and also because of "official corruption". Seven people were killed in the coup, although Ríos Montt survived to found a political party (the Guatemalan Republican Front) and to be elected President of Congress in 1995 and 2000. Awareness in the United States of the conflict in Guatemala, and its ethnic dimension, increased with the 1983 publication of the "autobiographical" account I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala; the author was later awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in favor of broader social justice, although soon after the New York Times discovered that portions of her work were fabricated.

General Mejía allowed a managed return to democracy in Guatemala, starting with a 1 July 1984 election for a Constituent Assembly to draft a democratic constitution. On 30 May 1985, after nine months of debate, the Constituent Assembly finished drafting a new constitution, which took effect immediately. Vinicio Cerezo, a civilian politician and the presidential candidate of the Christian Democracy Party, won the first election held under the new constitution with almost 70% of the vote, and took office on 14 January 1986. It took, however, another 10 years of conflict, before there was an end to the violence. Peace accords were signed between the guerrilla umbrella organization URNG and the military in 1996. The General Secretary of the URNG, Comandante Rolando Morán and President Álvaro Arzú jointly received the UNESCO Peace Prize for their efforts to end the civil war and attaining the peace agreement.

Notes

• http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/december96/guatemala_12-30.html

See also

• List of civil wars
• MINUGUA: United Nations verification/peacekeeping mission in Guatemala, 1994-2004

External links

• Key texts and agreements in the Guatemalan peace process
• Guatemala Memory of Silence report by the Historical Clarification Commission (Truth Commission)