Guatemala - History
The history of Guatemala is a tale of two societies in which more than one-half the people still lived within the Indian culture in the 1980s. It is also a tale of intermittent conflict, insurgency, and retaliation first brought about by patterns of Spanish conquest over four and one-half centuries ago. The Spaniards and the Indians did not live in separate worlds, but neither have their cultures successfully fused. Modern Guatemala remained characterized by the legacies of the unintegrated and unequal development of these two societies.
As in other parts of the New World, the central feature of Spanish settlement was the establishment of large landed estates and various systems of forced Indian labor for cultivating them. During the three centuries of the colonial period. these estates slowly spread along the fertile mountain valleys and across the more level stretches of the upland plateaus. The land tenure patterns in Guatemala have been and remain among the most unequal in Latin America. The lot of the Indian peasant had improved only marginally since the pattern of Spanish settlement was crystallized in the seventeenth century. Relationships between landholders and tenants or itinerant wage laborers have been exploitive, and reform efforts have been vigorously resisted by those holding effective political and economic power. It was not until the decade between 1944 and 1954 that the first concerted effort was made by the government to reconstruct economic relationships to the benefit of workers and peasants.
The Mayan civilization flourished throughout much of Guatemala and the surrounding region long before the Spanish arrived, but it was already in decline when the Mayans were defeated by Pedro de Alvarado in 1523-24. For several centuries a center of Mayan culture, one of the most advanced pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World, the area that is now Guatemala became the seat of Spanish government for all of Central America. The first colonial capital, Ciudad Vieja, was ruined by floods and an earthquake in 1542. Survivors founded Antigua, the second capital, in 1543. Antigua was destroyed by two earthquakes in 1773. The remnants of its Spanish colonial architecture have been preserved as a national monument. The third capital, Guatemala City, was founded in 1776.
Guatemala gained independence from Spain on September 15, 1821; it briefly became part of the Mexican Empire, and then for a period belonged to a federation called the United Provinces of Central America. After independence it was initially the seat of the short-lived Federation of Central America. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid -twentieth. Guatemalan politics was dominated by a succession of four caudillos (dictators). The first of these, José Rafael Carrera, an illiterate peasant who was rigorously Roman Catholic and a political reactionary, rose to power in 1837 — two years before the collapse of the Central American federation — and continued to be the dominant figure in Guatemalan politics until his death in 1865. From the mid-19th century until the mid-1980s, the country passed through a series of insurgencies (particularly beginning in the 1960s), coups, and stretches of military rule with only occasional periods of representative government.
The second caudillo, Justo Rufino Barrios, whose regime lasted from 1873 to 1885, was known to many as the “ Great Reformer". He stripped the Catholic church of many privileges. began an extensive public works program. introduced electricity in the capital, extended railroad lines, and established a national school system and a civil code. He also abolished the Indian communal landholding system and introduced private property rights into the Indian villages.
The dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) was notable for its corruption and its favoritism toward the privileged classes and foreign capital. Dictatorial rule was resumed in 1931 with the accession to power of Jorge Ubico. He refilled the treasury coffers, balanced the budget, restored the nation's international credit, and built more roads and hospitals than all of his predecessors combined. He also executed or exiled his potential enemies.
Ruling through repression in favor of the economic elite. Ubico, described as a policeman at heart, set the stage for what he dreaded most: rebellion and dramatic social change. An opposition movement begun by university students was ultimately joined by professionals, urban workers. and others. and the incessant clamor in the streets led to Ubico's resignation in 1944. An election later that year produced a resounding victory for a distinguished scholar and reformist, Juan José Arévalo.
Arévalo's term was characterized by the beginnings of economic planning, the extension of labor rights, and the establishment of a social welfare system. But it was his successor, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. elected in 1950, who succeeded in extending social reforms to the rural sector. His agrarian reform law of 1952 was hardly radical by modern international standards; but it was radical in the Guatemalan context, and it was offensive, in particular, to the United Fruit Company — the largest landowner in the country. Between 1949 and 1954 communist influence, especially in the capital and the fertile farming region of Escuintla, slowly but steadily increased. Guatemalan workers, hitherto unorganized and powerless. responded with alacrity to the leadership of communist union organizers. Although Arbenz almost certainly was not a communist and appointed no communist to either cabinet or subcabinet posts. he did allow communists a relatively free hand in labor relations and state education. The United Fruit Company categorized Arbenz' reform measures as communist, and by late 1953 senior United States officials were publicly asserting that Arbenz was a communist and privately seeking his overthrow.
In 1954 a small invasion force, which had been organized and financed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, entered the country. Because the Guatemalan Army refused to fight, Arbenz resigned and soon thereafter went into exile. The subsequent counter-revolutionary regime rolled back many of the reforms of the previous decade. Most of the land that had been distributed to Indian peasants was returned to ladino estate owners, and labor and student groups and reformist political parties were systematically repressed.
As of mid-1983 all but one of the governments since the counter revolution of 1954 had been headed by military men, and the one civilian allowed to serve a term, in the 1960s, was kept on a short leash. These governments created and maintained a vacuum in the political center by eliminating, often by assassination, leaders not only of left-wing and communist groups but also of moderately reformist parties, along with labor leaders, intellectuals. Catholic clergy, and other reform -minded individuals. A counterinsurgency campaign in the mid -1960s that was directed against a few hundred guerrillas in the rural areas resulted in the deaths of several thousand Indian peasants as well. Renewed cycles of insurgency and counterinsurgency continued to plague society in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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