Guatemala in the 1980s: Guatemalan Civil War, Politics, Economics, and Democracy (1990)

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The Guatemalan Civil War ran from 1960 to 1996. It was mostly fought between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups supported chiefly by ethnic Mayan indigenous people and Ladino peasants, who together make up the rural poor. The government forces of Guatemala have been condemned for committing genocide against the Mayan population of Guatemala during the civil war and for widespread human rights violations against civilians. After some leftist governments during the 1940s, conservative governments and anti-communist regimes gained power during the 1950s. Continuing social discontent gave rise in the 1960s to a series of armed leftist groups emerging from the large poor classes of indigenous and peasants. In 1966 for the first time, the Guatemalan security forces used forced disappearances against the opposition, with the number of disappeared reaching into the tens of thousands by the end of the war. In 1970 the first of many military rulers representing the Institutional Democratic Party took office, and repression increased. During the 1980s, the Guatemalan military assumed almost absolute government power for five years. It had successfully infiltrated and eliminated enemies in every socio-political institution of the nation, including the political, social, and intellectual classes. In the final stage of the civil war, the military developed a parallel, semi-visible, low profile but high-effect, control of Guatemala's national life. The conflict consisted of both fighting between the government's forces and rebel groups, as well as a large-scale campaign of one-sided violence by the government against the Guatemalan civilian population, including indigenous activists, suspected government opponents, returning refugees, critical academics and students, left-leaning politicians, trade unionists, journalists, and street children. Up to 200,000 people died or went missing during the war, including 40,000 to 50,000 people who were "disappeared". In 2009 Guatemalan courts sentenced Felipe Cusanero as the first person convicted of the crime of ordering forced disappearances. In 2013 the former dictator Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide for the killing of more than 1,700 indigenous Ixil Mayans during his 1982-83 rule. He was the first former head of state to be tried for genocide by his country's judicial system. In 1944, the "October Revolutionaries" took control of the government. They instituted liberal economic reform, benefiting and politically strengthening the civil and labor rights of the urban working class and the peasants. Elsewhere, a group of leftist students, professionals, and liberal-democratic government coalitions were led by Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Decree 900, passed in 1952, ordered the redistribution of fallow land on large estates, threatening the interests of the landowning elite. As a consequence, the U.S. government ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to launch Operation PBSUCCESS (1953--54) and halt Guatemala's "communist revolt", as perceived by the corporate fruit companies such as United Fruit and the U.S. State Department. The CIA chose right-wing Guatemalan Army Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead an "insurrection" in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Upon deposing the Árbenz Guzmán government, Castillo Armas began to dissolve a decade of social and economic reform and legislative progress, and banned labor unions and left-wing political parties, a disfranchisement that radicalized left-wing Guatemalans. A series of military coups d'état followed, featuring fraudulent elections in which only military personnel were candidates. Aggravating the general poverty and political repression motivating the civil war was the widespread socio-economic discrimination and racism practiced against the Guatemala's indigenous peoples, such as the Maya; many later fought in the civil war. Although the indigenous Guatemalans constitute more than half of the national populace, they were landless, having been dispossessed of their lands since colonial times. The landlord upper classes of the oligarchy, generally descendants of Spanish and other European immigrants to Guatemala, although often with some mestizo ancestry as well, controlled most of the land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War Image By chensiyuan (chensiyuan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons