Escalation of Violence: 1976-1980
Despite the political opening granted to the public by the Laugerud regime, the mass movement began facing increasing opposition from the wealthy land elites, the business community and elements of the military and security forces. These entities felt increasingly threatened by the mass movement and the government's decision to placate the mass movement. Additionally, a new insurgency started to develop and metastasize in Guatemala, known as the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). Unlike the predominantly Latino insurgency active in the 1960s and the earlier part of the decade, the EGP had its base in the predominantly Mayan northern regions of the country. In 1975, the EGP assassinated a military commissioner and an important large landowner in the Reina Zone named Luis Arenas. As a consequence, the government retaliated with a wave of selective repression. The repression began to escalate in March 1976 with a new counterinsurgency offensive in Quiché Department, in which church and cooperative workers were kidnapped and disappeared. In 1976 and 1977, 68 cooperative workers were killed by government forces in Quiche.
The small-scale counterinsurgency in Quiche was accompanied by an assassination campaign against prominent figures in the mass movement as well as activists and labor union organizers. At the height of the mass movement, workers at the largest Coca-Cola plant in Guatemala City formed a union to press the management for pay raises and organized a series of strikes. During the subsequent strikes, many of the laborers were severely beaten by the Ambulant Military Police and the union leaders were assassinated. In February 1977, two union members were machine gunned to death directly outside of the Coca-Cola plant, after allegedly receiving death threats from the Coca-Cola company's American manager, John C. Trotter. From July 1977 to June 1978, Amnesty International recorded the killings and disappearances of 300 people by paramilitary death squads. In August 1977, the Guatemala City press reported a total of 61 assassinations.
The increasing repression was compounded by the election of Fernando Romeo Lucas García on March 7, 1978. The election of Lucas Garcia led to a full return to the counterinsurgency logic which had prevailed at the beginning of the decade, effectively undoing the reforms and openings that had been made under Laugerud. In the period following the election of Garcia, but prior to his inauguration, the army acquired a sense of autonomy from Laugerud's administration and began to act independently of presidential mandate. This situation was further compounded by the fact that military officials in Guatemala were acutely aware of the situation that was transpiring in Nicaragua, with the weakening of the Somoza regime by an alliance between a similar mass movement and the Sandinista insurgency. Consequently the new administration felt an incentive to eradicate the opposition before it grew in strength. Additionally, as the military establishment strengthened its position and acquired a sense of autonomy in Guatemala, its leadership became increasingly hostile toward the indigenous population, which had emerged as the most vocal demographic in the mass movement.
The ongoing repression escalated dramatically and became less selective following the election of Lucas Garcia, as state security forces and government-organized paramilitaries began to engage in increasingly widespread kidnappings, killings and disappearances to combat and disarticulate the mass movement, often specifically targeting the poor indigenous population. The administrator of a large cemetery in Guatemala City informed the press that in the first half of 1978, more than 760 unidentified bodies had arrived at the cemetery, all apparent victims of death squad violence.
On May 29, 1978, the Guatemalan army carried out a large massacre in the central square of Panzós, Alta Verapaz. In the plaza, a crowd of 700 Kekchi Indians had gathered to protest land exploitation by investors who planned to use the area's mineral wealth, including large nickel and petroleum reserves. When the demonstrators reached the plaza near the town hall, a unit of the elite Guatemalan special forces (Kaibiles) opened fire on the unarmed crowd with Israeli-made Galil assault rifles. As many as 150 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack. This became known as the 'Panzos Massacre.' This became the first in a series of spectacular acts of military violence in the years that followed the election of Lucas Garcia.
On August 4, 1978 high school and university students, along with other popular movement sectors, organized the mass movement's first urban protest of the Lucas García period. The new minister of the interior under President Lucas Garcia, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, promised to break up any protests done without government permission. Having refused to ask for permission, the protesters were met by the Pelotón Modelo (Model Platoon) of the Ambulant Military Police. Employing new anti-riot gear donated by the United States Government, Platoon agents surrounded marchers and tear-gassed them. Students were forced to retreat and dozens of people, mostly school-aged adolescents, were hospitalized.
Overt acts of state violence, such as the massacre at Panzos, the use of force against protesters in the city (resulting in hundreds of deaths by the end of 1978), and increasing attacks by death squads, resulted in the formation of a new sector of the mass movement known as the Democratic Front Against Repression. However, this proved to have no effect on the repressive character of the Lucas government, and by 1979, the repression was approaching the levels that it had been at during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the first ten months of 1979, the Guatemalan press reported 3,252 disappearances, while Amnesty International documented an additional 2,000 killings between mid-1978 and 1980. The daily number of killings by official and unofficial security forces increased from an average of 20 to 30 in 1979 to a conservative estimate of 30 to 40 daily in 1980. Human rights sources estimated 5,000 Guatemalans were killed by the government for "political reasons" in 1980 alone, making it the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere after El Salvador. In a report titled Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder, Amnesty International stated, "Between January and November of 1980, some 3,000 people described by government representatives as "subversives" and "criminals" were either shot on the spot in political assassinations or seized and murdered later; at least 364 others seized in this period have not yet been accounted for."
In early 1980, major multinational firms discovered petroleum deposits estimated to yield up to 4,000,000 barrels worth of oil in the Altiplano. With the acquiescence of major multinational corporations, the security forces began forcibly evicting indigenous peasants from their land, which had been in their possession for centuries. The forced evictions were accompanied by the use of violence, and peasants were killed in the process. On January 31, 1980 a group of displaced K'iche' and Ixil peasant farmers occupied the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants in Uspantán by elements of the Guatemalan Army. In the subsequent police raid, over the protests of the Spanish ambassador, the police attacked the building with incendiary explosives. A fire ensued as police prevented those inside of the embassy from exiting the building. In all, 36 people were killed in the fire. The funeral of the victims (including as yet obscure Rigoberta Menchú's father, Vicente Menchú), attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners, and a new guerrilla group was formed commemorating the date, the Frente patriotico 31 de enero (Patriotic Front of 31 January). The incident has been called "the defining event" of the Guatemalan Civil War. The Guatemalan government issued a statement claiming that its forces had entered the embassy at the request of the Spanish Ambassador, and that the occupiers of the embassy, whom they referred to as "terrorists," had "sacrificed the hostages and immolated themselves afterward." Ambassador Cajal denied the claims of the Guatemalan government and Spain immediately terminated diplomatic relations with Guatemala, calling the action a violation of "the most elementary norms of international law." Relations between Spain and Guatemala were not normalized until September 22, 1984.
The large-scale and increasingly overt selective repression largely succeeded in the objective of dis-articulating the mass movement, as it became blatantly apparent to its constituency that even non-violent resistance to the government would be met with reprisals by the security forces. With the mass movement coming under attack, many abandoned the movement and turned to more aggressive forms of resistance, thus, the armed insurgency began to grow dramatically and increase the scale of its attacks. In addition to the EGP, paramilitary organizations such as the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People (ORPA) as well as groups active in the initial phase of the civil war such as FAR and the PGT also began to reorganize and mobilize against the government, expanding their presence in Guatemala's interior. The insurgent groups also began to elicit foreign support, primarily from Cuba. In October 1980, the (EGP), the (ORPA) and the (FAR) signed a unity agreement as a precondition for Cuban-backing.
The repression and excessive force used by the government against the opposition was such that it became source of contention within Lucas Garcia's administration itself. This contention within the government caused Lucas Garcia's Vice President Francisco Villagrán Kramer to resigned from his position on September 1, 1980. In his resignation, Kramer cited his disapproval of the government's human rights record as one of the primary reasons for his resignation. He then went into voluntary exile in the United States, taking a position in the Legal Department of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Read more about this topic: Guatemalan Civil War