Civil war years

Castillo Armas emerged from the resulting military junta as provisional president, and a plebiscite made his status official. He extirpated communist influence, quashed agrarian reform, and broke labour and peasant unions with considerable violence, but he himself was brought down by an assassin’s bullet in July 1957. For the next nine years military men ruled with scant respect for the Congress or elections. During these regimes, the thwarting of social reforms promised by the revolution of 1944 made restive elements of the population increasingly receptive to guerrilla resistance. Fidel Castro’s victory over a military government in Cuba in 1959 also inspired the Guatemalan rebels, leading to a vicious cycle of violence and repression particularly in the countryside that would last for the next 36 years.

Prospects for a return to civilian rule appeared promising in early 1966. An orderly election on March 6, 1966, gave Julio César Méndez Montenegro, a law professor and the candidate of the moderate Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario; PR), an unexpectedly large plurality of votes over the candidate of the military regime, though not the absolute majority required for election. Congress elected him, but the understanding with the military officers that had to be reached before a civilian government could take office undermined his authority. Hopes for reform, therefore, were largely frustrated, and the energies of the administration were consumed in attempts to control the increasing violence and terrorism. Military and paramilitary operations such as those conducted by Col. Carlos Arana Osorio substantially eliminated the rural guerrillas, but urban guerrilla and terrorist activity worsened.

Arana Osorio, the “law-and-order” candidate, won the election of 1970 and immediately restored military control. His major activity was “pacification” of the country by the extermination of “habitual criminals” and leftist guerrillas. Assassination of opposition leaders of the democratic left by so-called death squads, often linked to the military and the police, gave rise to the conviction that Arana was attempting to eliminate all opponents, whether left, right, or centre. With dissent eliminated or hushed, the country experienced a period of relative quiet. As the election of 1974 approached, optimists could find some reason to hope that a new basis had been laid for reform. The coalition of opposition parties chose Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, a leading officer of the progressive wing of the military forces, to contend with Gen. Kjell Laugerud García, a nonpolitical military officer representing the coalition of rightist parties.

When returns showed Ríos Montt winning an absolute majority, the government abruptly suspended election reports, brazenly manipulated the results, and finally announced that Laugerud García had won a plurality of votes. The government-controlled National Congress promptly elected him. Deprived of moral force, Laugerud García took office as the protégé of Arana. He faced problems of inflation, a series of volcanic eruptions, and division and consequent weakening of his main political support, the right-wing National Liberation Movement. He met a renewal of leftist violence and terror with the same repressive measures that Arana had applied. In 1977 the United States, under Pres. Jimmy Carter, cut off military assistance to Guatemala because of its violation of human rights.

The pattern of electoral manipulation set in 1974 persisted in subsequent elections. Gen. Romeo Lucas García, declared the winner in 1978 after another suspect count, presided over a regime that essentially continued that of Laugerud. Both administrations confronted the country’s problems with resources greatly reduced from the devastating earthquake of February 1976, which left more than 20,000 people dead and 1,000,000 homeless.

A major factor in both administrations was the discovery of oil in northern Guatemala. Because the deposit was thought to extend across Belize (formerly British Honduras until 1973) to the continental shelf, resolution of persistent, conflicting boundary and territorial claims was sought. On March 11, 1981, Guatemala, Great Britain, and Belize reached preliminary agreement, but a final settlement was not reached, and in September 1981 Great Britain granted independence to Belize over Guatemala’s protest. The discovery of oil was also thought by some to be behind government violence in the largely Indigenous-populated regions of the north. The devastation that occurred there drove thousands of Indigenous people into Mexico, suggesting that the administration might be clearing lands for others to appropriate. As a result, Indigenous people moved in unprecedented numbers into the guerrilla movements.

In the elections of March 1982, the government coalition candidate was declared the winner. On March 23, however, young army officers seized the government and installed a junta headed by Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, who had been denied the presidency in 1974.

Ríos Montt dissolved the junta and pledged to rout corruption, disband the notorious death squads, and end the guerrilla war. The new leader failed to follow through on his promises, however, and conditions in Guatemala worsened. Ríos Montt’s economic policies were not effective, and the political violence that he had promised to end was soon renewed with even greater intensity, again forcing many peasants to flee into Mexico and driving others into guerrilla camps, thus fueling the insurgency. A Protestant in a largely Roman Catholic country, Ríos Montt never gained wide political support.

In August 1983 Ríos Montt was overthrown by Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, who promised a quick return to the democratic process. Violence continued in the countryside, however, and the United States, seeking human rights improvements, restricted economic aid to the new regime. Military aid had been curtailed since 1977. Elections for a constituent assembly were held in July 1984, and the parties of the centre pulled about one-third of the vote, indicating a growing but still fearful movement away from government by terror. International condemnation of the government’s human rights record provided encouragement to civilian opposition.

A new constitution, bringing greater emphasis to human rights guarantees, was approved in May 1985, and presidential elections held the following December produced a landslide victory for the centrist Guatemalan Christian Democratic Party leader, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, who received some 68 percent of the vote. It was the first election of a civilian president in Guatemala in 15 years.

Hopes that Cerezo’s election could support human rights reforms and end the civil war were quickly dashed, as once again a civilian president failed to contain the military. The United States increased aid in the 1980s in an effort to sustain the government against guerrilla attack. There was a resurgence of death squad activity, particularly in the capital. The various bands of Marxist guerrillas, largely checked in the time of Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores, found a new unity in the formation of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (Unidad Revolucionario Nacional Guatemalteco; URNG). A series of attempted military coups were put down by the defense minister, Gen. Héctor Alejandro Gramajo. Labour and peasant unrest also increased during the Cerezo presidency. Some painful economic progress was made, but the insurgency and violence continued to grow in intensity into the 1990s. Because of the deteriorating human rights situation, U.S. military aid, which had been restored, was again suspended in December 1990.