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Revolution in Guatemala: Peasants and Politics Under the Arbenz Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert Wasserstrom
Robert Wasserstrom
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The statement above, by the former rector of the National University of Mexico, which serves as an epigraph to this essay, expresses a position, the very point of view to which most sophisticated students of Indian affairs in Latin America are today accustomed to subscribe. During the past twenty-five years, social scientists throughout the world have asked themselves and one another why poverty, disease and illiteracy persist in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Despite concerted efforts to promote general prosperity and improve public welfare, despite the expenditure of huge sums by national and international agencies, the problem is unresolved. In order to explain this paradox, they argue that underdeveloped countries do not possess the economic and political institutions which, in Western Europe and the United States, facilitate the growth of industry and the expansion of commerce. As a result, it is said, these countries find them selves largely incapable of ‘self-sustained’ economic development, of solving their demographic problems, of accumulating the capital which might permit them a greater degree of economic freedom.

Type
Latin America
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 1975 , pp. 443 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975

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References

1 Horowitz, I.L., ‘Electoral Politics, Urbanization, and Social Development in Latin America’, in Horowitz, I.L., Castro, Josué de, and Gerassi, John (eds.), Latin American Radicalism (New York, 1970), pp. 141–3.Google Scholar

2 Gamio, Manuel, Forjando Patria (Mexico, D. F., 1916), p. 170.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 138.

4 Tannenbaum, Frank, Mexico, The Struggle for Peace and Bread (New York, 1950), p. 15Google Scholar; cf. The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1929)Google Scholar; Peace by Revolution (New York, 1933)Google Scholar; Whither Latin Americal (New York, 1934)Google Scholar; Ten Keys to Latin America (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

5 Casanova, Pablo González, Democracy in Mexico (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Beltrán, Gonzalo Aguirre, Regiones de Refugio (México, D.F., 1967)Google Scholar; Marroquln, Alejandro, Balance del Indigenismo (Mexico, D.F., 1972).Google Scholar

6 La Revolución Guatemalteca (México, D.F., 1955)Google Scholar

7 See Barnett, R.J., Intervention and Revolution (New York, 1968), pp. 229–31.Google Scholar

8 Despite their isolation and apparent passivity, however, highland Indians had rebelled against Ladino rule in the past when taxes or labor drafts became unduly oppressive. See, for example, Contreras, J.Daniel, Una Rebelión Indigena en el Partido de Totonicapan en 1920 (Guatemala, 1968).Google Scholar

9 Silvert, K., A Study in Government (New Orleans, 1954), p. 7Google Scholar. Although these men accounted for a sizable proportion of the population (17 per cent) and earned 55 per cent of the country's total income, their average per capita yearly earnings on the eve of the revolution remained substantially below that of Guatemala';s finqueros, who constituted only 1.14 percent of the population.

10 ‘Guatemala y el Imperio Bananero’, Cuadernos Americanos, Vol. LXXIV, No. 2 (México, D.F., 1954), p. 22.Google Scholar

11 This figure, as we shall see, was based on UFCO's declaration that its landholdings were worth $600,000.

12 Aragón, Cardoza y, op. cit., p. 30.Google Scholar

13 Guatemala: Monografia sociológica (México, D.F., 1965), p. 262.Google Scholar

14 For information concerning the labor movement in Guatemala, see Bishop, E.W., The Guatemalan Labor Movement, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1959Google Scholar; Ronald, Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, 1944–54 (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

15 See Gonzälez, Otto-Raül, ‘Revisión de Algunos Proyectos de Reforma Agraria en Guatemala’, Revista de Guatemala, Vol. III, No. 3 (Guatemala, 1951)Google Scholar.

16 Schneider, , op. cit., p. 62.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 66.

18 According to Bishop, for example, the CTG in 1951 ‘had 190 affiliates including 11 departmental federations and 180 unions’.

20 Actually, Castillo Flores had originally been a member of STEG, and had served as a minor official in the CTG. In May 1950, however, he broke with Gutierrez when the CTG refused to organize peasants who were not engaged in finca labor.

20 Schneider quotes the Sixth Plenum of the PCG on this subject as follows: “The political vanguard of the working class … ought to take advantage of the class contradictions which will become more acute through Agrarian Reform, and the democratic-bourgeois revolution, in order to accentuate the fight against imperialism, to fight capitalism, to make its evils apparent to the working class and the most exploited and poor peasants.’ See Schneider, , op. cit., p. 77.Google Scholar

21 June 22, 1952.

22 The New York Times, October 25,1952. These figures become more significant when it is recalled that Guatemala earned only Si 1.7 million in foreign exchange in 1952 and that at the same time it faced an outstanding external debt of 148 million which had accumulated over the years.

23 January 28, 1952, p. 7.

24 Toledo, Monteforte, op. cit., p. 417.Google Scholar

25 For example, The New York Times of August 5,1953 reported that the American embassy was actively courting the friendship of high-ranking army officers. On November 8, 1953, the same newspaper noted the arrival in Guatemala of a new American ambassador who, it was rumored, would organize resistance to the government's agrarian policy.

26 The New York Times, January 10, 1954.

27 It is, of course, important to recall that the Guatemalan army refused to distribute arms to peasants and rural laborers during the revolutionary period. At the same time, however, we must consider the possibility that political antagonisms within rural communities might well have prevented even an armed peasantry from acting in concert to defend the Arbenz government. It is precisely this possibility which forms the basis of the following discussion.

28 See Tumin, Melvin, Caste and Class in a Peasant Society (Princeton, 1952).Google Scholar

29 Ibid., pp. 14–15.

30 Ibid., p. 13.

31 Gillin, John, ‘San Luis Jilotepeque: 1944–55’, in Adams, R.N. (ed.), Political Change in Guatemalan Indian Communities (New Orleans, 1957)Google Scholar; San Luis Jilotepeque (Guatemala, 1958).Google Scholar

32 Gillin, , ‘San Luis Jilotepeque: 1944–55’, p. 25.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 26. In an article entitled ‘Ambiguities in Guatemala’ (Foreign Affairs, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, 1956)Google Scholar, Gillin and Silvert interpret these events in a slightly different fashion:‘The excesses of local leaders seem to have been almost entirely inspired by outside “agitators”. The desire for land was deeply imbedded in the ethos of both Indians and poor Ladinos alike in 1942, but as late as 1948 the methods contemplated locally to obtain wider distribution of it were entirely gradualistic and “democratic”. Objectively, it can only be regarded as unfortunate that the Arbenz regime failed to maintain the pattern of orderly education in political participation on the local level which had begun so auspiciously during the first years of the Arevalo administration.’ The presence of such agitators in San Luis, however, has not been documented in any published source.

34 Compare, for example, Siverts' accounts of the Tzeltal community of Oxchuc in Chiapas Mexico. See Siverts, Henning, Oxchuc (Mexico, D.F., 1969).Google Scholar

35 Reina, Ruben, ‘Chinautla: 1944–53’, in Adams, (ed.), Political Change in Guatemalan Indian Communities; ‘Chinautla, a Guatemalan Indian Community’, New Orleans, Middle American Research Institute Publication No. 24, 1960, pp. 55–130Google Scholar; The Law of the Saints (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

36 Reina, , The Law of the Saints, pp. 32, 47.Google Scholar

37 Reina, , ‘Chinautla, A Guatemalan Indian Community’, p. 77.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. 78.

39 Adams, Richard, ‘Magdalena Milpas Altas: 1951–1952’, in Adams, (ed.), Political Change in Guatemalan Indian Communities.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., p. 15.

41 Newbold, Stokes (Richard Adams), ‘Receptivity to Communist Fomented Agitation in Rural Guatemala’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. V, No. 4, 1957.Google Scholar

42 Adams, , op. cit., p. 17.Google Scholar

43 Guatemala, , 1965.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., p. 37.

45 Mendelson declines to identify this party, but we may assume that it was a local section of PAR, PRG or (less probably) a surviving branch of the FPL.

46 Ibid., p. 42.

47 Nash, Manning, Machine Age Maya (Chicago, 1967, original edition, 1958).Google Scholar

48 Ibid., pp. 30–1.

49 Ibid., p. 85.

50 Note, however, that Nash dates the beginnings of Cantel's unión campesina and the local PRG to the first years of the revolutionary period. In so doing, he contradicts other writers, who trace the agrarian movement and the founding of the PRG to the period 1948–52.

51 Nash, , op. cit., p. 133.Google Scholar

52 Nash (p. 133) writes that, ‘The men representing the union were in favor of the municipal government doing everything by law, according to the constitution of the new government.This meant that they urged bypassing the elders in reaching community decisions; nominating for top posts on the basis of party affiliation and party program rather than on age and previous service; and severance from the religious wing of the hierarchy, since they felt that religion should be separate from the state.’

53 For comparative purposes, Wagley';s information from Santiago Chimaltenango has also been included. See Wagley, Charles, Santiago Chimaltenango (Guatemala, 1957).Google Scholar

54 Instituto Indigenista Nacional, Chuarrancho, Publicación Especial No. 2 (Guatemala, 1948)Google Scholar; San Juan Sacatepequez, Publicación Especial No. 3, (Guatemala, 1948).Google Scholar

55 Gillin, John, San Luis Jilotepeque, Guatemala, 1958Google Scholar, cited in Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, Las Closes Societies en las Sociedades Agrarias (Mexico, 1969).Google Scholar

56 Gillin, John, ‘Ethos and Cultural Aspects of Personality’, in Tax, Sol, (ed.), Heritage of Conquest (Glencoe, III., 1952), p. 109.Google Scholar

57 Tumin, Melvin, ‘Cultura, clase y casta en Guatemala: una nueva evaluación’, in Seminario de Integración Social Guatemalteca, Integración Social en Guatemala, Vol. II (Guatemala, 1959), pp. 104–7.Google Scholar

58 Frank Cancian has made a similar point in regard to the religious system of Zinacantan, a Tzotzil municipio in Chiapas, Mexico. For a discussion of social stratification and its relation to wealth, see his Economics and Prestige in a Maya Community (Stanford, 1965).Google Scholar

59 Gillin, , op. cit., p. 49.Google Scholar

60 Stavenhagen, , op. cit., p. 44.Google Scholar

61 Toledo, Mario Monteforte, op. cit., pp. 419, 421.Google Scholar

62 Davis, Shelton, Land of Our Ancestors, Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1970.Google Scholar

64 In the years preceding the revolution, it was common for the president to issue special decrees in which such lands were awarded to friends or loyal members of the army. For a number of these decretos, the interested reader may consult the Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Juridicas y Societies de Guatemala, Epoca VI, Nos. 9–12,1960Google Scholar. This number, which is entitled 444 Anos de Legislación Agraria, 1513–1957, is entirely devoted to questions of land tenure and agrarian law.

64 For a general discussion of this phenomenon in Mexico and Java, see Wolf, Eric, ‘Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. XIII, No. I, 1957.Google Scholar

65 Facultad de Ciencias Juridicas, op. cit., p. 728.Google Scholar

66 The activities of uniones campesinas throughout Guatemala werenot after all directed entirely against the private holdings of wealthy landowners. Many men owed their economic well-being not only to the amount of land which they Actually possessed but also to the quantity of municipal land which had passed into their control. In the area around Antigua, for example, the IIN reported in 1948 that as many as 180 hectares of valuable milpa lands were being rented in munidpalidades like Magdalena Milpas Altas by the local government to indigenous landowners who were also strongly represented in the cabildo. Partly in order to rectify improprieties of this sort, the reform law permitted residents of ‘agrarian communities’ to denounce municipal lands before local agrarian committees, which were empowered to transfer these lands from municipalities to individual campesinos. In fact, the large number of committees which functioned in areas where few, if any, fincas were expropriated leads us to conclude that such organizations concerned themselves primarily with the issue of municipal lands. This interpretation, incidentally, lends support to Stavenhagen's contention that social relations within communities of this sort are essentially relations of social class. It is confirmed, too, by the fact that this situation prevailed with equal frequency in Indian areas and in areas of the country occupied by mixed Indian and Ladino populations.

67 Toledo, Monteforte, op. cit., p. 417.Google Scholar

68 Marroquin, Alejandro, op. cit., p. 132.Google Scholar

69 Tax, Sol, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Washington, D.C., 1953).Google Scholar

70 Tax, Sol, ‘World View and Social Relations in Guatemala’, in Heath, Dwight and Adams, Richard (eds.), Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America (New York, 1965), p. 494 (original 1941).Google Scholar

71 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, ‘Classes, Colonialism and Acculturation’, in Horowitz, I.L. (ed.), Masses in Latin America (New York, 1970), p. 242.Google Scholar

72 Tumin, , op. cit., p. 103Google Scholar; see also Tax, Penny Capitalism, for a discussion of land tenure in Panajachel.

73 Tax, , ‘World View and Social Relations in Guatemala’, p. 500.Google Scholar

74 For a discussion of the historical bases of cultural syncretism in Latin America, see Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964)Google Scholar; Ricard, Robert, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, Berkeley, 1966.Google Scholar

75 See, for example, Cuenca, Max Ricardo, ‘La Reforma Agraria Democratica en Guatemala’, Revista de Guatemala, Serie V, Vol. VII, No.3, 1947, pp. 45 ff.Google Scholar