Fifty years after coup, Guatemala struggles
CHICHICASTE, Guatemala -- Lucas Cuc, a 76-year-old Mayan peasant, recalls the terrifying news spreading like wildfire across this country's coffee plantations: The Russians were coming.
It was the early 1950s, the height of the Cold War. And President Jacobo Arbenz had embarked on a sweeping land reform plan, raising suspicions in Washington that he harbored communist sympathies.
"Everything was going well. But then people started saying the government was bringing in the Russians," said Cuc, who was enlisted by Arbenz's government to distribute land to fellow peasants in this impoverished farming village 100 miles northeast of the Guatemalan capital. "They said it would be the same as with the Spanish colonizers, that they would steal our women."
In reality, what Cuc and others probably heard was CIA propaganda, judging from recently declassified CIA documents that describe the agency's actions to undermine Arbenz's leftist regime. The CIA later stepped up the pressure, secretly funneling arms to rebels. Surrounded and alone, Arbenz resigned in 1954.
Tomorrow, Guatemala marks 50 years since the collapse of Arbenz's regime. Critics say the US intervention set the stage for the country's downward spiral into 36 years of civil war between leftist guerrillas and the army and prevented Guatemala from developing economically.
The coup, which CIA documents describe as a major success, was used as the agency's guide for future interventions in Latin America, including the toppling in 1973 of the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
"What happened in 1954 was a major political rupture in Guatemala, the consequences of which we are still trying to overcome," Vice President Eduardo Stein said in a recent interview inside the ornate presidential palace.
He contended that the coup created the conditions for the birth of a guerrilla movement and the country's eventual descent into the civil war, during which 200,000 people died.
"We had extreme poverty in Guatemala for decades, but no guerrilla movement had been organized before, until political exclusion was formalized by law," he said.
Fifty years later, Guatemala is still reeling from the effects of the war, as well as decades of military regimes, which preserved power in the hands of a tiny elite. The 1996 peace accords put an end to the fighting and aimed to address the country's deep-rooted social inequalities.
The government committed itself to distribute land to impoverished peasants, scale back the military, and end discrimination against the Mayan majority, which accounts for 55 percent of the country's 13 million people. In return, the leftist guerrillas agreed to lay down their arms.
But eight years later, the accords are a long way from implementation. The justice system is in shambles. And former members of the elite presidential guard and ex-soldiers have sought to block their prosecution for war crimes by spreading a climate of terror. The groups are blamed for more than a dozen murders of human rights activists over the past four years.
Guatemala, meanwhile, remains one of the most inequitable societies in this hemisphere. Just 3 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the land, according to United Nations estimates. And 55 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, a majority of them Mayans, according to UN figures.
Still, there may be cause for optimism. President Oscar Berger, a wealthy landowner who took office in January, has already gone further than any of his predecessors in advancing the peace accords. He named several prominent Mayan activists, including Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu, to key posts.
In addition, he appointed Frank La Rue, the country's most vocal human rights lawyer, as director of the Presidential Office for Human Rights. La Rue is best known for his efforts to bring genocide charges against retired Army General Efrain Rios Montt, accused of ordering the massacre of thousands of Mayan civilians after seizing power in a coup in 1982.
La Rue has been instrumental in persuading the government to accept responsibility for more than 400 massacres committed during the war, including two cases that went before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in April.
"Usually the governments have gone to court to try to deny the accusations. This was just the opposite," he said during an interview in his heavily guarded office in Guatemala City.
But Berger's boldest move was the decision to reduce the size of the military by almost half. All military bases except those in border areas are expected to be closed by Wednesday.
Berger has also made history by going after his predecessor, former President Alfonso Portillo, and other former top officials for alleged corruption. Portillo fled to Mexico in February, apparently to escape trial on money-laundering charges.
However, Berger has shown less interest in pushing through one of the most pressing elements of the peace accords: agrarian reform. The collapse of the world coffee market since 1998 has decimated one of the country's main industries, prompting thousands of farm workers to seize land to feed their families.
Unlike Portillo, who ignored the invasions, Berger has deployed police to evict the squatters, burning down their houses and destroying their crops. Peasant groups fought back by paralyzing the country with a general strike June 8.
Cuc, the Mayan farmer, was among several hundred squatters evicted last month from land they seized on three coffee plantations around Chichicaste. "They destroyed everything," he said.
