GUATEMALA: CIVIL

la vida
no vale
WAR
nada

BACKGROUND
Most countries in Central and South America were
colonies of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires.

For close to 300 years, Guatemala, once the center

of the Mayan civilization, was ruled by the Spanish
who were more focused on policies that furthered
their imperial objectives than development of the
colony and the colonized subjects.

 Even after the Guatemalans secured their

independence from the Spanish rule in 1821,
successive generations of Guatemalans who were in
power pursued policies that resulted in
concentration of wealth in the hands of their
friends and relatives.

Within the Guatemalan context, wealth is created

primarily by producing coffee and sugar, so access
to land resources translates into wealth and power.
By the mid 1940s, 70% of all land in Guatemala was
owned by 3% of landowners.

1944-1954: REFORMS
IMPLEMENTED
BYto POPULAR
GOVERNMENTS
Due
the grossly inequitable
distribution of wealth in
Guatemala, there was growing resentment among the
majority of the Guatemalans against the regressive and
corrupt policies of the governments.

In 1944, a left-wing academic and intellectual named

Juan Jos Arvalo won elections and came to power.
Arvalo implemented social reforms, including
minimum wage laws, increased educational funding,
near-universal suffrage (excluding illiterate women),
and labor reforms.

 Arvalo, was succeeded by Jacobo rbenz Guzmn, who

continued Arvalos policies aimed at creating a more
equitable and just society. In 1952, he passed Decree 900,
which ordered the redistribution of land, thereby threatening
the interests of the landowning elite.

1954: CIA BACKED COUP

An US company, United Fruit Company, was one of the
largest landowners in Guatemala and lost a lot of land
as a result of Decree 900. United Fruit Company had
strong ties with high Eisenhower administration
officers. Brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles
who were Secretary of State and CIA director,
respectively, were in the Board of Directors of the
United Fruit Company.

The U.S. government ordered the CIA to halt

Guatemala's "communist revolt." In American
intellectual circles, there were many adherents to the
domino theory that speculated that if one country in

 The CIA engineered an armed coup in Guatemala that

deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan
President Jacobo rbenz and installed the military
dictatorship of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the first
in a series of U.S.-backed dictators who ruled
Guatemala.

Upon deposing the rbenz Guzmn 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.
He also returned all the confiscated land to the United
Fruit and the elite landlords.

1960-1996:
GUATEMALAN CIVIL WAR
The Guatemalan Civil War began in 1960 as a
grassroots effort by the majority poor in Guatemala to
protest poverty, oppression, and foreign corporations
taking the land of indigenous farmers.
The war was fought between guerilla insurgent groups
and the military-controlled Guatemalan government
(aided by the U.S. government).

As well as fighting between government forces and

rebel groups, the conflict included, much more
significantly, a large-scale, coordinated campaign of
one-sided violence by the Guatemalan state against

 The fighting lasted for thirty-six years (1960-1996)

and claimed approximately 200,000 lives.
It was marked by bloody violence, restrictions of civil
freedoms, ethnic persecution, torture, kidnapping,
wholesale massacres, murder of civilians, and the
disappearance of 40,000-50,000 people.

Theres a common phrase that Guatemalans often

use: en Guatemala, la vida no vale nada, which
means in Guatemala, life is worth nothing.

1996-PRESENT DAY:
AFTERMATH OF THE CIVIL
WAR
The long civil war ultimately ended with UN brokered
peace accord signed in 1996, but it left the county war
torn and devastated. It took a severe toll on Mayan
families living in the rural Western Highlands.
The vast majority of the dead or missing were
indigenous Mayans who bore the brunt of the
Guatemalan militarys violence.
More than a million people were displaced from their
land, families were broken and destroyed, and they
were driven into poverty.
The land stolen from native farmers had been
reapportioned and surviving Mayans were left without