Guatemala

The problems besetting Guatemala are those of a nation half of whose population, the 4 million Mayan Indians, do not share any sense of identity with the other, white Spanish-American half. The gross income per head of population in 1987 was only $870. Power resided with the army and the coffee-growing elite. For a century, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth, four caudil-los ruled the country. The first hope for the poor and illiterate majority came in 1944 with a small middle-class revolution supported by sections of the army. Free elections brought to power Juan Jose Arevalo (1945-51) and Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1951-4). Forced labour was abolished, social reforms were initiated and extended to the Indians, a labour code and land reforms were started. Arevalo had opened government to the left and Arbenz accelerated the process, thereby thoroughly alarming the land-owning aristocracy and Washington, which believed that communism was gaining the upper hand. US-owned companies and land belonging to the United Fruit Company were nationalised, and more nationalisation was threatened. The Communist Party was legalised.

With the help of the CIA, Arbenz was overthrown in 1954. The clock was turned back; the old oligarchy and the United Fruit Company regained their influence, with the army now again the real power in the land. There were thousands of killings and the Marxist labour movement was wiped out. Corrupt and inefficient military-run regimes became the despair of the American advisers, who could see no alternative other than the communists. In 1960, Guatemala became the staging post for the invasion of Cuba. After another military coup in 1963, the military remained in control of Guatemala until 1982. The repression of guerrillas and leftist opponents was particularly bloody - the civil war killed 120,000. The sheer extent of the abuse of human rights was unequalled in degree even by the low standards of Central America. Labour leaders, university teachers and political opponents just ‘disappeared’; 40,000 are estimated to have died in this way. By the early 1980s the army chiefs fought each other for the spoils of office - and this was the army that had received substantial US military aid. Amnesty in 1982 accused the Guatemalan government of massacring 2,600 people, and that was an underestimate.

Guatemalan politics are subject to a cycle of hope and disillusionment. In 1986 Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo was inaugurated as a popular reforming president. The hope was that he would end the brutal excesses of the generals who had dominated Guatemala for three decades and under whose authority the security forces had murdered an estimated 65,000 civilians. But the reforms did not last. The military soon began to exert their power again. Death squads resumed their murderous missions, killing student leaders, trade unionists and human-rights advocates. Guatemala became a profitable transit point for Colombian cocaine on its way to the cities of the US. Almost half the population was unemployed and inflation was high; civilian government in

1990  was losing control and making little effort to check violence, crime or corruption. In January

1991  Jorge Serrano Ellas became president and assumed the burdens of trying to end violence and restore the economy.