Guatemala « World Without Genocide

Guatemala

What

In 1960, left-wing military officers led a failed revolt against the Guatemalan autocratic military government in efforts for reform, beginning a 36-year civil war. Over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during this time, nearly 85% of whom were indigenous Mayans. [1] Over 40,000 people were forcibly disappeared, and public executions were common. Nearly all human rights violations were perpetrated by the government and military forces.

Where

Guatemala is located in Central America and is roughly the size of Tennessee, with almost 2.5 times that state’s population. It is bordered by Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

When

Coup d’état

In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz was democratically elected as president of Guatemala. He was politically liberal, and he initiated plans for indigenous people to have access to land. Under previous government leadership, Guatemalan and multinational corporations had set aside prime farmlands for their own use, including the American corporation United Fruit Company, which controlled nearly half of Guatemala’s farmland. [2] But the Arbenz government began a program to buy back this land to give to peasants to own and use.

Carlos Castillo Armas

The Arbenz government moved to nationalize United Fruit Company. His leadership, and this action in particular, were seen as a communist threat for failing to back American capitalist interests in the country. In 1954, U.S.-backed forces, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, ousted Arbenz from power and declared Castillo to be president of Guatemala. Castillo soon reversed land reforms that had benefited poor farmers and he removed voting rights for illiterate Guatemalans. [3]

Famous revolutionary Che Guevara was in Guatemala when Arbenz was overthrown. That day marked a turning point in Guatemala and the beginning of bloody revolution across Latin America. Over the next four decades, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns, and civil wars.

Military Rule

In 1966, civilian rule was restored to Guatemala when Cesar Mendez was elected president. However, Mendez acted as a puppet of the military and was responsible for 10,000 civilian assassinations during his presidency, which lasted until 1970. [4]

Military-backed Carlos Arana was elected in 1970. This marked the beginning of a decade of direct military rule in Guatemala, which resulted in escalating violence against guerrilla groups and indigenous communities who continued to fight for indigenous rights. Arana placed the country under a state of siege and gave the military even more control over civilians. He exterminated ‘habitual criminals,’ guerrillas, and opposition leaders by using death squads made up of military or police members. [5] Subsequent administrations continued to act with the same brutality – and with impunity.

In 1982, General Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a military coup. He annulled the 1965 constitution, dissolved Congress, and suspended political parties. [6] Montt pledged to fight corruption, disband death squads, and end the guerrilla war, but none of these promises were kept. The same year, the guerrilla movement formed the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG).

A protester compares Efrain Rios Montt to Hitler

Montt formed organizations called “civilian defense patrols” in rural indigenous regions to aid the military in reclaiming guerrilla territory. The crackdown by the patrols marked one of the most violent periods during the war, and large numbers of indigenous civilians were killed. Montt also enacted a scorched-earth policy against URNG, the guerilla movement, exterminating Mayans and burning their villages to the ground. [7] He famously told The New York Times, “We have no scorched-earth policy; we have a policy of scorched Communists.” [8] President Ronald Reagan supported the hardline military regime and even said Montt was “getting a bum rap on human rights.” [9]

During this time, approximately “200,000 people were killed or disappeared, 1.5 million were displaced, and over 150,000 were driven to seek refuge in Mexico.” [10] Reports also showed that over 90% of this violence was perpetrated by the state and over 80% of the victims were Mayan. [11]

A new constitution focusing more on human rights was approved in May 1985, and Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was elected that December. He was the first true civilian president of Guatemala in fifteen years. [12] Hopes of reforms and an end to the war were soon dashed, however, when Arevalo failed to contain the military. The URNG re-emerged after Arevalo took office and death squads formed once again.

In 1994, peace talks between URNG rebels and the government began under President Ramiro De Leon Carpio, a former human rights ombudsman. But negotiations were not finalized for another two years. In December of 1996, President Alvaro Arzu and URNG leaders finally signed peace accords, ending the 36-year conflict. [13]

How

The military used murder, torture, eviction of people from their land, forced disappearances, and rape in their battle against civilians. The Guatemalan government targeted indigenous communities because they were considered to be recruiting grounds for guerrillas. Four to five areas where the government felt indigenous people were capable of organizing were specifically targeted. The government goal was to completely wipe out the people in these areas.

The government also forcibly ‘disappeared’ over 40,000 Guatemalans, including 5,000 children. Students, intellectuals, priests, leftists, and anyone who opposed the government or military was taken from their homes or right off the street, never to be seen again. They were tortured, executed, and disposed of, often in mass graves. Some graves have been exhumed, but tens of thousands of Guatemalans still do not know what happened to their family members or where their remains are.

U.S. Involvement

President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman’s attempt at land redistribution

The United States was complicit in supporting a genocidal government from the beginning of the war, and the American corporation United Fruit Company was just as responsible for starting the 36-year war. United Fruit Company controlled nearly half of Guatemala’s farmland but used very little of it. President Jacobo Arbenz initiated land reform policies that set out to purchase, at fair prices, the idle land owned by the United Fruit Company and to redistribute it to peasants and indigenous farmers. [14]

United Fruit launched a propaganda campaign to convince the U.S. government and its people that Arbenz was a communist dictator. A 1953 New York Times article described Guatemala as “operating under increasingly severe Communist-inspired pressure to rid the country of United States companies.” [15] United Fruit also had allies in high places. Allen Dulles, who served on the board of directors at United Fruit, was the director of the CIA and oversaw the coup. His brother, John Foster Dulles, another board member, was Secretary of State at the time. Virtually every major official involved in plotting the coup had a family member or business connection to United Fruit, and in 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to arm, fund, and train the 480 men who would overthrow the government the next year. [16]

The US continued to provide funding to the government until President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 and cut off military aid because of human rights abuses. [17] However, existing contracts were exempt from the ban and money continued to flow into the hands of the government. The subsequent Reagan administration increased aid, citing human rights improvements. This was clearly not the case, as the 1980s was one of the deadliest periods of the genocide. By 1986, Reagan increased economic aid to Guatemala to $104 million, up from $11 million in 1980. Nearly all of the aid was going to the rural highlands where Mayans were most targeted. [18]

Response

Despite the overwhelming role of the U.S. government in Guatemala, media coverage during the genocide failed to touch on the issue. The genocide itself did not receive much coverage by the U.S. press, and when stories did appear, they often portrayed a different reality. In the midst of the Cold War, the guerrilla movement was an easy target, and guerilla fighters were often labeled as dangerous communists and were even falsely blamed as the perpetrators of massacres carried out by the government. [19]

By the mid-1990s the international community was more aware of the human rights abuses occurring in Guatemala and put pressure on the government to end the war. In 1994, the United Nations became involved in brokering a peace deal between the government and the guerrillas, and on December 29, 1996, the Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace was signed by the URNG and the Guatemalan government.

Justice Process

Claudia Paz y Paz. Image by EneasMX | Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) | License

In 2010, Guatemala elected Claudia Paz y Paz as attorney general. She was the first woman to hold the position and was responsible for beginning the justice process against perpetrators of the genocide. On January 26, 2012, Paz y Paz indicted former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt for genocide for his role in the ‘scorched earth’ campaign in the 1980s. He was the first head of state to face genocide charges in his own country. He was also accused of torture, forced disappearances, state terrorism, mass rapes, and crimes against humanity. [20] Paz y Paz was instrumental in getting rape to be charged as a war crime, giving a voice to the estimated 100,000 women who were raped during the genocide. [21]

Ixil women celebrate after Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide. Image by Trocaire | Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) | License

In May 2013, Montt was found guilty of genocide for his role in the massacres of more than 1,700 indigenous Ixil Mayans. However, ten days later Guatemala’s Constitutional Court annulled the conviction and ordered a retrial. The next year, the Constitutional Court forced Paz y Paz out of her position seven months before her term expired, preventing her from overseeing the retrial of Montt. The retrial eventually began behind closed doors, but Montt died in April 2018 before a verdict was reached.

Paz y Paz was responsible for arresting military officials and members of Guatemala’s most powerful gangs on accusations of war crimes. She extradited drug traffickers to the US who had previously enjoyed impunity for years. Her term symbolized a new kind of justice for Central America and earned her enemies throughout her country. She still faces threats to her safety today. (She received the 2016 ‘Outstanding Upstander’ award from World Without Genocide. See photo from the ceremony here).

The removal of Paz y Paz marked a step backward for a country that has been plagued by violence and corruption within the government. It is suspected that overturning Montt’s conviction and removing Paz y Paz was done to hide testimony implicating then-President Otto Perez Molina, a former army commander, in the genocide. [22]

Guatemala has made some progress in prosecuting human rights and corruption cases with the help of the UN-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The Attorney General’s Office and CICIG are prosecuting over a dozen members of Guatemala’s Congress and former president Otto Perez Molina. Convictions of military officers for crimes against humanity for sexual violence and sexual slavery were also upheld in 2017. [23] However, there has been a backlash against CICIG’s work in fighting corruption, and the Guatemalan Congress voted to change prison sentences so the president and members of Congress could avoid prison if they are convicted of crimes for which they are currently under investigation.

In September of 2019, President Jimmy Morales chose not to renew or extend the CICIG mandate. This means, as of May 2020, it is unclear as to whether the 60-plus cases will continue to be prosecuted. [24]

Today

Violence and extortion by criminal organizations continues to be a major problem in Guatemala, due to criminals’ high level of impunity. [25] Only around 4% of all murders end in the perpetrator’s conviction, and Guatemala has the world’s third–highest rate of femicide, the murder of women especially by a male partner or ex-partner. [26] Gang-related and other violence has forced many Guatemalans, including unaccompanied youth, to seek asylum in the United States.

In August of 2018, a preliminary version of the “Life and Family Protection Bill” was passed by Congress. This bill criminalizes abortion in Guatemala through extended sentences, opening up miscarriages to prosecution, and criminalizing the “promotion of abortion” (including distribution of reproductive information). The bill is also extremely regressive for LGBTQ rights, limiting marriage to unions only between those who are men and women at birth. [27] However, in 2019, Guatemala’s first openly gay congressman, Aldo Davila, was elected and has remained outspoken that he will challenge the law. [28]

In 2019, the United States, under the Trump administration, put economic pressure on Guatemala to sign the Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA). Under this agreement, Guatemala was declared a safe-third country, meaning that the United States could send asylum seekers directly to Guatemala to seek asylum there first, instead of the US. [29] However, in March 2020 the ACA was temporarily suspended by Guatemala due to Covid-19 and the risk from traveling. [30]

Also in 2019, President Trump cut aid to the Northern Triangle Countries—including Guatemala. In an initiative that began in 2014, the US Congress had approved $615 million in aid to these countries annually. Due to this recent mandate, it is now reduced to zero. [31]

Future

Right-wing candidate Alejandro Giammattei won in Guatemala’s 2019 presidential elections. Giammattei has been outspoken against abortion and LGBTQ rights. [32] In the upcoming months of his presidency, it will be seen if he imposes limitations on freedom of the press, similar to actions of his predecessor Morales. [33] The impact of U.S. aid cuts and the burden of the US-Guatemala ACA agreement will also affect the Guatemalan economy. Finally, whether cases raised by the CICIG will be prosecuted remains up in the air.