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TWO

Showcase for Democracy, 1953–1957

Dios—Patria—Libertad

God, Fatherland, and Freedom

Slogan of anticommunist students and the Armas regime

Adiós—Patria—Libertad

Goodbye, Fatherland and Freedom

Banners at the Huelga de Dolores, 1955

WHILE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA) cheered “Dios, Patria y Libertad,” students at the 1955 Huelga de Dolores waved a different banner: “Adiós, Patria y Libertad.” The students bade a scathing farewell to the free and democratic nation constructed during the Ten Years’ Spring (1944–1954). In fact, this turn of events had been foretold in the previous year’s celebration. The 1954 No Nos Tientes featured a playful editorial entitled “An Open Letter to Close-Minded Readers.” It read, “We Guatemalans have had frankly wretched luck throughout history: for many decades a group of patriots . . . have handed us over to the gringos so that they could steal banana[s].” But the other agents of imperial expansion, the Soviets, were equally problematic. The editorial continued, “now what is happening is that we want to throw away the sickle even if it’s with the hammer, thanks to our sorry luck to be the chosen victims of such foreign-looking, always purgative, leaders.” In such a situation, they wrote, “the only one who is not gripped by this idiocy is the student.”¹

In the early years of the revolutionary governments, San Carlistas had been bureaucrats-in-training who worked with the government to build a better nation. But the university, its students, and the meaning of the middle class had begun to change. By the mid-1950s, only San Carlistas could be trusted to resist advances made by Yankee and Soviet imperialists who sought to exploit Guatemala’s vulnerability and value. An elaborate float in the satirical parade (desfile bufo) also reflected this belief. It depicted Guatemala as an indigenous woman in traditional huipil. Two suitors, “Soviet Paradise” and “North American gold,” flirted while Guatemala moved listlessly between them.² While the float explicitly critiqued the exploitative politics of neocolonialism, it implicitly disdained women’s subservience. Perhaps unintentionally, it revealed how gender, race, and class shaped San Carlistas’ understandings of political authority. Feminized and indigenous Guatemala was acquiescent to the desires of masculine global superpowers. Again, only San Carlistas could see the risk.

A few months after this float appeared, the anticommunist Liberation Forces of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas invaded from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and quickly defeated the Guatemalan military.³ President Jacobo Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, and with that, the Ten Years’ Spring abruptly ended. Castillo Armas became interim president. Many Arbenz supporters fled to Mexico City; some returned to the same communities they had left after Ubico was overthrown.⁴

This chapter addresses the changing relationship between university students and the Castillo Armas regime. It traces the impact of these changes on political culture in Guatemala City, especially highlighting the emergence of Catholic anticommunist students as an important political force. Though their numbers were relatively small, anticommunist students were disproportionately influential. They are important, too, for how they challenge our assumptions about student militants and provide an ampler perspective on the issues and anxieties that propelled student activism.⁵

Though only a fraction of San Carlistas supported him, early in his presidency, Castillo Armas and his advisors met with students and professors of all political inclinations in an attempt to preserve a warm relationship with the universitarios. To fight the specter of communism, much feared and lingering just on the edges of the Guatemalan nation-state, peeking through the pages of university students’ books, and hiding in workers’ hearts, the Castillo Armas regime combined firm anticommunist policies with friendly gestures toward the university and workers’ groups. Only with the May Day and June 1956 protests did the relationship between the government and USAC become intractably antagonistic.

USAC remained the only institution of higher education in Guatemala until 1961. This meant that San Carlistas were not merely a portion of the middle class; rather, the route to the exercise of the professions necessarily passed through USAC. University study also generated some social meaning for that preparation and labor, and created opportunities for certain friendships and rivalries.⁶ In the revolutionary decade, to be a San Carlista meant to be a valued expert and proto-bureaucrat. Commitment to Central American unity, sovereignty, democracy over fascism, the secularization of the state, liberalization of social life, and social welfare programs became the universitarios’ legacy. During the Castillo Armas regime, democratic guardianship justified growing antagonism toward the government. San Carlistas expressed this in terms of freedoms, rights, and responsibilities. Free market capitalism, personal property rights, and political freedoms, guided both pro–Castillo Armas anticommunist students and pro-Arbenz students. Other principles, like civil freedoms, constitutionality, and electoral democracy bolstered groups who opposed Castillo Armas’s regime. These growing ideological fissures were aggravated by Cold War internationalism and the political and cultural influence of the United States.

The university splintered in the years between the counterrevolution and the beginning of the civil war. Some San Carlistas argued that it was their duty as universitarios to protect the 1945 Constitution; others asserted that the fight for justice required the defeat of communism; still others sought a return to apoliticism and the elimination of the role of the university in national political life and, in return, politics in university life. The social role and meaning of “San Carlista” shifted from proto-bureaucrat to state antagonist in these years. This chapter follows a series of events that provoked this shift. It emphasizes internal factors that enabled the rise of anticommunism and, later, the cohesion of the political left and right.

In fact, the period defies our understandings of the left and the right, in part because these terms attained their contemporary meaning in these years. This brief but complex moment between the counterrevolution and the beginning of the civil war usually appears as either the tragic postscript to the revolution or the telling prequel to the civil war. Furthermore, most of the scholarship about the end of the revolution was written in the midst of the civil war. At that moment, it was difficult to see Castillo Armas’s coup as anything but the beginning of many decades of military rule. Historians paid a preponderance of attention to U.S. economic and political intervention, implicating the United States in the Central American civil wars and their aftermaths.⁷ But this focus also permitted an erroneous view of Guatemalans as passive, disorganized, capricious, or even self-interested dupes.

The rich counterrevolutionary archive quickly belies these depictions. Complex internal and external factors, especially region, race, land ownership, and education enabled the success of Castillo Armas’s disorganized motley crew of Cold Warriors.⁸ In order to explain this change, this chapter begins with a discussion of the Plan de Tegucigalpa, a student-authored anticommunist plan for government written by the CEUA in late 1953 that would become the foundation of Castillo Armas’s 1956 Constitution. For around nine months, CEUA students carried out counterinsurgency propaganda plans devised for them by agents in a CIA field office, spreading leaflets and painting graffiti in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of the pueblo. These middle-class anticommunist students “functioned as a broker between the upper echelons, both domestic and foreign, of reaction and the street thugs and paramilitary forces responsible for some of the worst acts of counterrevolutionary terror.”⁹ Some, like Lionel Sisniega Otero, transmitted the anticommunism of the upper echelons as a broadcaster for Radio Liberación. Many later joined the military, business leaders, and the Catholic Church to form the National Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Nacional [MDN]) Party. Importantly, even this agonistic brokerage reinforced the social role of the middle class as thought leaders.

In 1955, the U.S. State Department observed, “Guatemala’s middle and ‘intellectual’ classes from the beginning have been deeply and emotionally committed to maintaining the political freedoms, social reforms, and feeling of nationality for which they fought in the 1944 Revolution.”¹⁰ This emotional commitment was apparent among the editors of USAC’s most widely read student newspaper, El Estudiante. An editorial entitled “University and Pueblo” from the June 9, 1955, edition pledged, “Today’s struggle was yesterday’s struggle and will be the struggle forever, if [the University] is to act with the decency and honesty that the Nation desires.” It continued, “The nobility of spirit and the moral respectability that were constant in the youth of the past should be the same virtues that inspire the actions of the students of today. The sacrifices made in a not-distant moment will be lost if the youth of today do not raise the pristine flags bequeathed to them by the students of the past.”¹¹ Less than a year after the counterrevolution, student journalists reminded their classmates of their revolutionary duty to the pueblo.

A year later, protests in May and June 1956 sowed the seeds of the popular movement. I discuss the effects of these protests, weighing newspaper coverage, government decrees, and student-authored press releases.¹² Growing numbers of San Carlistas viewed the Castillo Armas regime as morally bankrupt and asserted that they were duty-bound to fight for the pueblo. After Castillo Armas prohibited trade unions and political parties, the university became one of the few remaining spaces for opposition. The regime came to see USAC and its students as a threat. The chapter concludes by revisiting the ongoing public debate over the appropriate role of the university in national political life. By the time Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957, Guatemala’s “showcase for democracy” had dissolved into States of Alarm and Emergency and political violence.¹³ Student nationalism was marked by its oppositional relationship to the state.

ANTICOMMUNIST STUDENTS AS STATE MAKERS

Ever vigilant against communism in the Western Hemisphere, U.S. intelligence officers quickly identified the small ranks of the CEUA as an asset.¹⁴ An intelligence officer from the CIA field office (codenamed “LINCOLN”) approached a CEUA member in Guatemala City shortly after the group’s formation. At the time, the group counted around just fifty members, but their anticommunist spirit was exuberant, unlike “the cynical politics of [General Miguel] Ydígoras and Castillo Armas.”¹⁵ The plan was to intimidate government officials and create the impression of a broad antigovernment movement. For months, CIA staffers spent hours imagining projects for the students to carry out. The CEUA’s first action took place on September 15, 1953, when they pasted 106,000 anticommunist stickers on buses and trains. Later CEUA students marked government officials’ homes with signs reading “A Communist Lives Here” and sent fake funeral notices to President Jacobo Arbenz and José Manuel Fortuny. One poster that appeared in the capital city read, “Guatemalteco: On the day of the Liberation, those who aid Arbenz WILL DIE! Those who support the Patriotic Resistance will fight and WILL LIVE for a better Guatemala! The great day is coming! Choose!”¹⁶ The CIA transmitted publications for the students to distribute and students interrupted public meetings to do so.

With the help of an organization of anticommunist market women, the CEUA distributed thousands of copies of Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano’s anticommunist pastoral letter. They sponsored a radio program until April 1954, when armed men invaded the station mid-program and beat the student broadcasters.¹⁷ The infamous “32 Marking Campaign” had students paint the number 32 in public places throughout the capital, and on buses and trains bound for the city. This was in reference to Article 32 of the Constitution, which outlawed foreign political parties. According to CIA operative Jerome C. Dunbar, “The aim is to create suspense and interest among those who do not know the meaning, and to induce conversation about the symbol.”¹⁸ The students’ success can be deduced from the reaction they elicited from the Arbenz government (growing numbers of arrests and exiles) and from the support they received from prominent Catholics (the archbishop and the market women’s organization).

FIGURE 3. Lionel Sisniega Otero and Mario López Villatoro broadcasting for Radio de la Liberación, Chiquimula, 1954. Photograph by Alejandro Guzmán. Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).

Many of these covert missions required students to take great risks. By May 1954, the CEUA’s membership dwindled. Many militant students had been arrested and some even exiled.¹⁹ There was a debate, too, within the CIA field office as to the efficacy of the projects that engaged in philosophical debates with communism. They were better off, some agents argued, “[creating] dissension, confusion, and FEAR in the enemy camp.”²⁰ For their part, the CEUA students began to critique the propaganda they were asked to distribute. They purportedly found it too divisive and began to suspect that they were being used to bait the Arbenz government into using repressive tactics. By May 26, 1954, ten CEUA students were in jail, no new students had been recruited, and others refused to work.

In fact, the growing counterrevolution no longer relied on covert propaganda operations. A plan for military invasion was underway, led by Castillo Armas and troops of exiled anticommunists. Since Arbenz’s election, student exiles gathered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and San Salvador, El Salvador where they joined two groups, the Committee of Guatemalan Anticommunist University Students in Exile (CEUAGE) and the Anticommunist Front of Guatemalans in Exile (FAGE). In June 1953, a few months before the CEUA’s first public action, the CEUAGE began to publish its Bulletin of the Committee of Guatemalan Anticommunist University Students in Exile in order to connect exiled anticommunists throughout the hemisphere. The paper was printed at a shop in Tegucigalpa called Talleres La República and edited by Cosme Viscovich Palomo, Mario López Villatoro (secretary of relations), and Lionel Sisniega Otero (CEUA general secretary).²¹ In the pages of the Bulletin, Catholic anticommunists shared their conviction that Arbenz had imperiled the nation and its citizens’ natural rights. They charged that he had violated the Constitution by forcing them into exile and censuring their political meetings. They called the students, faculty, and administrators who supported Arbenz communist dupes and wrote that the Association of University Students (AEU) was filled with liars. From exile, the CEUAGE pledged to be “a strong nucleus of men imbued with the feelings of Nation, Home, Religion, and Liberty, who [would] try to win for their pueblo the conquest of real democracy.”²² This conquest would demand “great sacrifices, painful work, enormous doses of civic will, a lot of patriotism and honor and more honor.”²³ In no uncertain terms, the CEUA’s promise evoked the responsibilities of student nationalism.

The group debuted its Plan de Tegucigalpa in the Christmas Eve edition of the Bulletin. It circulated quickly in a pamphlet. The U.S. Library of Congress catalogued one copy before the end of the year. In March 1954, some students traveled to Caracas to present the plan at the Tenth Inter-American Conference.²⁴ The Plan’s focus on education reflected the interests of its authors, who were all students and young professionals. In many ways, its educational ideals were not so different from those of the Revolution. Echoing the neo-Lamarckism that informed indigenismo in previous decades, the CEUA prioritized building strength of character. Guatemalan youth “marched blindly” because of a defective educational system. Their personalities were undeveloped, demonstrated by “the skittishness, the fickle spirit, the instability of purpose, the inconsistency of moral values, [and] the lack of constancy in the achievement of the highest ideals.”²⁵ The Plan remedied this by providing an education that attended to the growth of the personality as much as the intellect. It included free and mandatory primary education, a literacy campaign, art schools, and centers for rural instruction. Under the Plan, the purpose of the university was to “enlighten” and “restore” the pueblo of Guatemala, complementing the government’s role as moral guide.²⁶ Again, this was quite like the role of the university in the revolutionary governments.

There were some marked departures from the Revolution’s educational philosophy. A long section entitled “University Autonomy” proposed a budget that eliminated university fundraising from the manufacture and sale of liquor (a significant source of income, especially during the Huelga de Dolores). For the moral compass of anticommunist San Carlistas, it was “a great contradiction that, to a large extent, our greatest cultural institution lives on death.” They added that a basic function of the university ought to be to “combat, by all means at its disposal, the destruction of the alcoholic scourge . . . a prelude to crime and prostitution, determinant factor in vagrancy and misery and an imponderable burden on society.”²⁷ Under the Plan, the government of Guatemala would become a representative democracy led by the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. This resonated with the platform of the Movimiento Estudiantil Profesional (MEP) nearby in Mexico, established by the Episcopate and Mexican Catholic Action between 1945 and 1947.²⁸ CEUA students likely met the MEP at one of the many anticommunist congresses held throughout the region, perhaps at the Congreso Contra la Intervención Soviética en América Latina, held in Mexico City at the end of May 1954 and advertised on the cover of the Boletín.

Like their peers who had helped to draft the 1945 Constitution, CEUA students were concerned about Guatemala’s large indigenous population. The Plan called for a “government of the pueblo, by the pueblo, for the pueblo” and “attendant to the idiosyncrasies of Guatemala.”²⁹ Like newspaper editors a decade earlier, the CEUA explained how centuries of repression had left indigenous communities “isolated, fearful, distrustful, and suspicious of the ladinos.” As a result, the nation formed into two distinct societies, preventing the construction of a “healthy and organically capable pueblo.”³⁰ The CEUA students explained:

FIGURE 4. Cover of the Boletín del CEUAGE, May 22, 1954. Collection of Lionel Sisniega Otero. Archivo Histórico, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).

For centuries, for the entire History of Guatemala, there has been a foolish zeal among the men of the government to undervalue the autochthonous, the traditional [típico], that which is our essence—the very soul of the Nation—in exchange for ideas and systems that are hardly compatible with the peculiarities of the environment, obliging Guatemala’s people to take erroneous routes that, disfiguring the physiognomy of the pueblo, have prevented her from standing up in front before the world and proclaiming aloud: “This is Guatemala.”³¹

Instead of celebrating Guatemala’s indigenous culture, most statesmen had championed foreign ideas at the pueblo’s expense. The toll was exacted upon the very physical body of the nation, disfiguring the body politic by forsaking its indigenous essence. In other words, national unity was necessary for progress and the fight against communism. Only once foreign ideologies had been expunged could Guatemala be herself. The CEUA wrote, “now is the time for us to stop being vessels for imported thoughts, for strange forms and exotic ideologies . . . we remember that we are Guatemalans, and that, with mighty national sentiment, founded in the true presence of the fusing [of] indios and ladinos, Guatemala stands tall [and] will follow its path.” Whether a sincere or strategic appeal, the students sought an authentic nationalism that was “[n]either the extreme right nor the extreme left [but rather] the heart of Guatemala.”³²

Guatemala, a nation figured as female, was the progeny of the indigenous and the ladino. In kaleidoscopic language reminiscent of Mexican pedagogue José Vasconcelos’s cosmic race, the CEUA students went on to predict, “like the sexes, the two halves of one destiny will come together to generate the future, and then, the genius of the Guatemalan people will shine.” Then, the students added, “Guatemala will be herself.”³³ The Plan detailed specialized institutions for guidance in “cultural, social, and economic improvement” in order to develop “what [the indios] have that is useful.”³⁴ It offered an education system with curriculum taught by indigenous teachers, attentive to the needs and customs of each region.³⁵ Educational centers (colonias escolares) would be built to increase access to education for indigenous communities.³⁶ The autonomous university was protected under the Plan, for without it, “scientific speculation stagnates, spiritual disquiet goes up in smoke, and the founts of knowledge and desire for knowledge run dry.” Only USAC could confer degrees and the doors to the university would be open to anyone who could fulfill the prerequisites of enrollment, “regardless of sex, color, nationality, citizenship, political or religious creed, and economic or social position.”³⁷ Whether ladino or indigenous, the Plan affirmed each citizen’s right to education alongside their responsibility to seek self-improvement. In sum, its education reforms were moderate.

The Plan’s land reforms were also moderate. The Plan rejected the land expropriations of Arbenz’s Agrarian Reform and proposed that the seized property be returned to its previous owners. But it also advocated what the CEUA called a “humanized” version of the modern trade system with fixed minimum export prices, greater domestic investment in industrialized agriculture, and the provision of low-interest loans for campesinos. This would increase the number of landowners while avoiding “the minifundio trap,” because, the CEUA claimed, maximizing private property was the most effective way to generate wealth as well as “the most just way to achieve the primary aims of life.”³⁸ For the CEUA, the primary aims of life were national economic productivity and individual material advancement. Finally, the Plan returned property rights to the Catholic Church and permitted religious instruction in public schools.³⁹

As I mentioned above, a small Army of the Liberation invaded from Honduras under the command of Castillo Armas in June 1954, dealing the final blow to the Arbenz government after months of covert propaganda campaigns and diplomatic and economic isolation. On June 27, Arbenz announced his resignation on the national radio station TGW. He began: “We all know how they have bombed and bombarded cities, sacrificing women, children, the elderly, and defenseless citizens. We all know the viciousness with which they have assassinated representatives of the workers and campesinos in the communities that they have occupied.” After reinforcing gendered, raced, and aged ideas of victimhood, he identified the vicious assailant as “North American mercenaries.” He explicitly denounced how the opposition used communism as a pretext to avenge “the financial interests of the frutera [United Fruit Company] and . . . other North American monopolies” that were threatened by the Agrarian Reform. Arbenz went on to outline the role of the United States in the invasion and the treason of Castillo Armas, and then he ceded his presidential powers to Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz of the armed forces. The counterrevolution had won. Supporters of the revolutionary government, including many students, labor organizers, and, famously, Che Guevara, sought refuge in the embassies of Argentina and Mexico until the governments of Juan Perón and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines assured their safe passage. Many San Carlistas, including Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Manuel Colom Argueta, Adolfo Mijangos López, and Francisco Villagrán Kramer, went into exile.⁴⁰

Like the revolutionaries in 1944, the counterrevolutionaries rewarded their university-based supporters with positions in the government. Some older CEUA students held positions in the presidential secretariat, including the offices of secretary general of the president (Ricardo Quiñonez), private secretary (Carlos Recinos), and secretary of publicity and propaganda (Luis Coronado Lira). Young CEUA leaders Mario Sandoval Alarcón and Lionel Sisniega Otero served in junior positions in the president’s cabinet. Other CEUA students worked in ministries of the Interior, Public Health, and Public Education, and the Foreign Ministry. Jorge Skinner Klee led the Constituent Assembly and José Torón Barrios directed TGW, the national radio station.⁴¹