JCG-10 Guatemala City
November. 1966
President Julio Cesar Mandez Montenegro thus far has shown himself incapable of striking at the economic and social inequities that imprison Guatemala. The buoyancy that greeted his inauguration in July as Guatemala’s first freely elected president since 1950 is giving way to malaise and doubt that create a mood befitting the capital’s winter chili, Mendez Montenegro’s lack of decision and leadership has permitted the evaporation – perhaps for good – of the “It’s Time for a Change” spirit felt so strongly here only six months ago.
Despite his personal shortcomings it’s hard to fault the president, for one could make a strong case for the premise that no one can govern Guatemala. At the same time, however, the failure of popularly elected government could mean a reversion to the Colonelism that Guatemala’s power structure has tolerated for the sake of superficial peace for much of this century. In July one heard frequent sighs for the return of the “good old days” of Col. Enrique Peralta Azurdia, Mendez Montenegro’s relatively benign military predecessor, Now however, as it becomes daily more obvious that Mendez Montenegro has all the dynamism or yesterday’s tortilla, the dissidents long for the good old days of Jorge Urbico, a certified, card-carrying military despot who stood for no nonsense whatsoever.
And, as he founders, events are forcing Mendez Montenegro into many or the excesses, which created the public climate that made his election possible. Guatemala has been living under a “state of siege” since Nov. 3, with bans on political activity and suspension on constitutional guarantees against arrests without warrants and or the right of habeas corpus. Gatherings of more than four persons must be approved by the police, even if the event is or no more political significance than a birthday party or bar mitzvah. Anyone who arrives on the streets at night is supposed to turn on the dome light or his car (few do). Modified press censorship is in effect. Newspapers are free to print only what the government releases concerning the dual rights against Communist guerrillas and rightist extremists. One weekly, El Estuatudiante (The Student), which was sympathetic to the Communist insurgents, was closed altogether. The censorship is resulting in public confusion and wildly bouncing bolas, a Spanish word for “ball” which Guatemalans use as a colloquialism for rumor. A coup plot the weekend of Nov. 12-13, for example, resulted in the arrest of a vice-minister of defense and a military zone commander. All the public saw in print for several days was that “military officers” dad been detained for “political activity.”
Mendez Montenegro’s most commendable feat to date has been survival. And for this achievement he owes a vote of thanks to the group that many persons thought would have tossed him out of office by now – the Guatemalan Army.
A New Army?
At kilometer 213 of the Guatemala City-Puerto Barrios highway in early November Communist guerrillas spread in groups for half a mile along the rim of a deep draw sprang an ambush on a motorized army patrol, The Communists had the advantage of surprise and position, and their first shots brought the lead vehicle screeching to a stop.
Yet the trap failed. Responding quickly through the din or heavy weapons fire the army killed two guerrillas while losing only one man itself.
The army’s performance in such a situation borders on the extraordinary. And the outcome is all the more remarkable because the army, prior to July, seldom drew serious blood in its clashes with the FuerzasArmadas Rebeldes – the Rebel Armed Forces, or FAR – Military wing of the Communist insurgency.
For Instance, in an almost identical ambush in March 120 kilometers west on the same highway the FAR killed 13 of 14 soldiers and reduced their rive vehicles to burning hulks without a casualty.
The credit for the army’s about-face goes to hard-eyed Col. Carlos Arana, a fortyish-man with an air of confidence in himself and in what he is doing. Col. Arana took command of the FAR-infested Zacapa military zone In July soon after Mendez Montenegro took office. His predecessor had a reputation for fiscal corruption and military inaptitude. Col. Arana, after a barracks cleansing of the tired Old Soldiers he inherited, got down to business forthwith. Aided closely by U. S. Army counterinsurgency experts, he gave his 1500-man force (largest of any Guatemalan military zone) a two-month cram course in anti-guerrilla tactics.
Since mid-September Arana has been on the offensive. Patrols aided by U.S. supplied helicopters and observer aircraft daily churn through the foreboding Sierra de las Minas range, safe territory for the FAR since it began operations in a junior officers’ revolt in 1961.
There are no exact measures for success or failure in guerrilla war, only isolated straws in the wind. And those that have blown past lately look favorable for Col. Arana.
In October an army patrol surprised a PAR encampment and killed 16 persons, its biggest one-day bag to date. In November another patrol burst into a just vacated camp high in the Sierra and seized hundreds of tins of food from a supply cache.
The military has cut down on the stupidities that cost casualties in the past. In the costly March ambush, for instance, the patrol convoy was driving almost bumper-to-bumper, with soldiers sleeping in the trucks as they returned from an early-morning assignment. They were slaughtered. In the November ambush, which the army won, the vehicles were spaced 100 meters apart, their tops coated with wire mesh to ward off grenade attacks. And the soldiers rode at their machine guns.
The FAR’s response has been to increase its terroristic activity, mainly nuisance bombings of homes and autos in jittery Zacapa City, capital of the department of the same name. Arana is high on the list for assassination. In one night blasts ripped apart his homes both in Zacapa and in Guatemala City, without injury to anyone. The first time we left his office together he surprised me with the ease in which he swept up hat and carbine in a single motion. The weapon stays between his knees when he rides around Zacapa in his jeep, trailed closely by two others laden with guards. If Arana fears the FAR it doesn’t show, for he goes where he wishes in Zacapa.
Significantly, the FAR has brought its direct military operations to a standstill. The abortive patrol ambush was its first attempted show of force in more than a month.
Colonel Carlos Arana (right) with U.S. Major Fred F. Woerner, Acclon Civica adviser.
Ample military targets exist throughout Zacapa for guerrilla raids, but the FAR isn’t stirring itself. Every night officers lounge in the brightly lit Casino Militar in the city, the open door onto the street an invitation for a grenade. No grenade has come.
The Sierra de las Minas, FAR lair.
Security at the military base on the outskirts of town is mixed. Soldiers cluster at the machine gun post at the gate, but a vendor’s stand is directly in the field of fire. Women on questionable missions lounged in the guard house every time I went into the post – including one visit at 4:30 A.M. Guards are seldom seen on the base perimeter, secured only by a wire fence that could easily be breached by a raiding party. The base headquarters building is within easy mortar range of anyone desiring to lob in a few shots from the broads flat river bad 300 yards away to the east, outside the fence.
The FAR, however wastes its time on such juvenile stunts as painting derogatory slogans on bridges near the post and in the middle of the nearest paved highway. The army now doesn’t even bother to paint over these childish prattlings.
Arana’s staff officers say the increased patrol activity of the past few months has kept the FAR so off balance that it in unable to mass attack units. The FAR is unwilling to strike unless it is sure of winning, and thus wants numerical superiority over any patrol or outpost it chooses as a target. And the army’s Increased punch has made the guerrilla chieftains more cautious.
The FAR’s recent sluggishness, and its lack of growth during its five years of existences indeed have some U.S. Military persons here convinced it has more voice than muscle. “The mouse that roared,” is one term used. Col, Paralta insisted throughout his regime that the FAR was a minor problem unworthy of army attention – view not shared by the Zacapa campesinos who were the subject of its terrorism when they wouldn’t join its ranks. The Peralta, government took the view that there was nothing in the Sierra da las Minas that it particularly wanted and that the loss of an occasional patrol was no cause for alarm. The unwillingness to send patrols in the Sierra, however, ended with Arana’s arrival.
Another factor in the FAR’s current military troubles was the death, in an apparently accidental auto crash in September, of Luis Agosto Turcios Lima, former army officer who had commanded the guerrillas in the field. A stolen car in which Turcios was riding overturned and burned outside Guatemala City. A woman companion died with him; another woman sitting in the rear seat was horribly burned.
El Mano Blanco (The White Hand), a rightist terrorist group, claimed credit for the death. It said an undercover agent who infiltrated Turcios’ group was riding in the car. The agent supposedly pulled a gun and was attempting to force Turcios to drive to an isolate spot to meet other El Mano Blanco members when the guerrilla let the car go out of control. According to this version the secret agent scrambled out of the car unhurt, El Mano Blancos however, has not produced sufficient evidence to convince anyone it had a role. Some 300 persons paid homage to Turcios at a public burial ceremony, ignoring the police and army intelligence agents who snapped away with cameras, recording faces for their files.
The new FAR commander is slightly built Julio Cesar Macias Mayora, 23, onetime law student at the University of San Carlos, and former leader of the leftist United Front of Guatemalan Students. Macias Mayora’s cover name in the FAR is “Cesar Montes,” and that is how he signs public announcements and is identified in the Guatemalan press. He is the first non-military man to command FAR; prior to Turcios the boss was Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, who now runs his separate (and smaller) 13th of November Movement in the adjoining I3abal department, (For a discussion of the beginnings of the Communist insurgency movement, the split between Turcios and Yon Sosa, and their ideological differences see JCG-5: Guatemala A Mortar and ThreePestles.)
The headquarters-building bulletin board at the Zacapa military bass pictures guerrilla leaders under the caption, “Know Your Enemy.” An X is scratched over Turcios’ face, and “RIP” written above it. Macias Mayora’s picture and biography are in the collection.
From a military viewpoint, Col, Arana’s most significant decision has been that he cannot eliminate the Communist guerrillas with rifles, jeeps and helicopters, regardless of the amount of men and firepower he brings to bear on Zacapa. Indeed, the decision is perhaps the most important one made by the Guatemalan army during its entire blotched history.
Resultantly, the army has expanded its ambitious and apparently sincere campaign to become so involved in development projects from village to national level that the guerrillas will be cut off at their foundation.
The program – Accion Civica – or civic action – just might be working. Arana says that Zacapa campesinos for the first time arm volunteering information on FAR movements and encampments.
One November morning I sat in Arana’s office while soldiers a few hundred yards away piled boxes of meat, eggs and green vegetables, drawn from military mass supplies, into a truck. Later the same day I saw these goods in a nutrition clinic in the tiny aldea (village) of Usumatlan, where Marta Alicia Peneda Hechos, a pretty 22-year-old teacher, gives 30 malnourished toddlers the balanced meals they never taste at home. The clinic had been open only a few weeks; Srita. Paneda at the time didn’t know who was to pay her, or how much, or when; only that she had been asked to sat up the clinic. (On a subsequent visit she said she was on the army payroll,)
Teacher Marta Alicia Peneda Hechos and one of the youngsters fed through Accion Civica program.
FAR members regularly terrorize campesinos living near the hot, incredibly dusty aldea of Guayabal a few kilometers from Zacapa. In early November guerrillas shot a man at the bank of the river that is the town’s sole water supply. Yet a detachment of eight enlisted men and a lieutenant work unmolested – and unarmed – in Guayabal drilling an Accion Civica water well, one of some 200 that have gone into Zacapa the past two years.
Campasinos sitting on a rail fence and watching (to them) the marvels of the drilling rig smiled and waved when Col, Arana came out for a surprise visit. Several of the barefoot men, woven straw hats in hand, stepped from the crowd to shake hands with the Colonel and the departmental governor, a smiling, self-conscious man in an open neck sport shirt.
Uniformed but unarmed Guatemalan soldiers work on well-drilling rig in aldea of Guayabal.
“There are probably some FAR members in that crowd,” said Sam Fullilove, water expert for the Agency for International Development (AID), who gives technical advice to the crew. “But these soldiers are the safest people in Guatemala. The FAR won’t hurt them because they are helping the people, and the people would throw the guerrillas out of the state if anything happened.”
The drilling rig is one of three now at work in Zacapa. They are furnished to Accion Civica through AID, The Guatemalan Army pays drilling costs; villagers are required to house and feed the soldiers during the two weeks required to put in a well. The out-of-pocket cost to the government (not counting the $35,000 initial investment for the average rig) is around $200 for each well.
Through Accion Civic& the Guatemalan army is trying to empty a storehouse of ill will it accumulated in the past century, even among the politically apathetic campesinos who couldn’t care lest, whether the central government is run by colonels, used-car salesman or professors.
Consider “recruiting” Guatemalan style. Flying squads of soldiers sail off plazas of country towns on market day and “enlist” anyone 18 -years or over who has not served his supposedly obligatory two years. (Guatemalans point out that the forcible recruits almost invariably are Indiana who compose 70 percent of the population; the mixed-blood ladinos, the economically dominant minority. seldom find themselves in the ranks.) The $10-per-month recruits allegedly are taught to read and write; few are, however, and the illiteracy rate among enlisted man is variously estimated at 70 to 80 percent. There is no ”professional” corps of non-commissioned officers; the only re-enlistments accepted are of soldiers who learn a skill – typing, truck driving, mechanical work – and remain on as a higher -paid “specialist,” subject to military discipline, but able to resign without advance notice at any time.
The frustrations inherent in fighting a guerrilla war against an unseen enemy that hides among the campesinos has goaded the army into repeated atrocities during the past five years.
Prior to Arana, the Zacapa command’s unwritten rule was, “When you have any doubts about a prisoner, shoot him.” On one occasions according to a reliable informant, an entire roomful of suspected guerrillas was machine-gunned in Puerto Barrios after fruitless attempts at interrogation. “I got sick,” this man reported, “I couldn’t stand to watch, or look at the bodies. I told the officer, ‘This is no damned way to fight a war.’ He replied, ‘At least they won’t kill any more of my soldiers.’”
Many of these incidents are explicable from a military viewpoint. The political situation is such that an army patrol that finds two University of San Carlos students walking in the Sierra de las Minas can conclude they are not on an innocent Sunday outing. Yet they are unarmed and carry nothing to link them with the FAR. (The FAR maintains supply dumps of arms and uniforms for the benefit of city students who “commute” to war on weekends via bus and motorcycle,) To arrest them would be judicially futile. They are shot.
It is fortunate from the army’s viewpoint that the FAR is guilty of the same acts. Village alcaldes – equivalent to mayors – have been bloodily and summarily slain in the presence of their families. Santa Rosalia (which has an Accion Civica well) alone has lost two alcaldes since summer; the villagers invite soldiers who drilled the well back for weddings and fiestas. When Accion Civica appeared in San Pablo, oldest and one of the most remote aIdeas of Zacapa, a town so tired, so beaten, that the dogs bark at strangers without even rising from the dust, the FAR lined up villagers in the plaza and harangued them for hours about the danger of accepting army aid. The FAR regularly impresses campasinos into work gangs to carry supplies – food and munitions – into its hideaway camps in the Sierra. Lastly, the FAR’s ”recruiting” is even more brutal than that of the army. Units go into villages and announce a “quota” of two or three men”. If no volunteers come forth, the alcalde is shot. The FAR seldom has to ask for “volunteers” a second time.
The army’s current keen interest in Accion Civica is the result of a combination of factors. One was the assignment, in July, of Col. Arana to Zacapas center of FAR activity. At the same time he prepared for his military crackdown against the Communists, he made Captain Marco Antonio Castellanos his fulltime director of Accion Civica programs, first such commander to do so. Col. Rafael Arriaga Bosque, the defense minister, also passed the word along that he expected his zone commander to be more active in this fields and appointed Col. Rene Mendoza, a staff officer, to the job of coordinator.
The other factor is five years of U. S. efforts to persuade the army that it should utilize its capabilities to work on projects that make the soldier a “brother of the people as well as their protector.” A U.S. Army civic action training team first came to Guatemala in 1960 but the program it recommended never gained momentum. With Guatemalan cooperation, the U. S. tried again in 1962 and this time met with more success, perhaps because a U.S. officer, Maj. Carl L. Krueger, was assigned to the Military Mission with the full-time task of Accion Civica.
The current U.S. advisor for the program, Maj. Frederick F. Woerner Jr., a Philadelphian, has an enthusiasm for Accion Civica that rubs off on his Guatemalan counterparts. Woerner is uniquely fitted for his assignment. He was graduated both from Penn Charter, a Quaker school in Philadelphia, and West Point. He is a combat veteran (more than 50 patrols in Vietnam as a U. S. adviser), and a scholar (a master’s degree in Latin American history from the University of Arizona, under an Army area specialty plan).
Bustling through the Guatemalan campo (country) in a jeep and civilian clothes, chatting in fluent Spanish with an alcalde here, a social worker there, a missionary of any one of a dozen faiths at the next stop, Woerner could easily be mistaken for one of the scores of private and governmental-civilian aid people in the country.
But Woerner isn’t. He is a soldier, and to him Accion Civica is a military mission – and one that must truly benefit the Guatemalan people if it is to succeed.
“Accion Civica is a channel through which the army can display to the people that it is a part of Guatemalan life, and not in a negative sense,” Woerner says. “Once the people learn they can turn to the army for help and rely upon it, they are the army’s friends.”
Elemental political and military truths are involved in what the army is doing. Simply, the army must convince the campesinos it can do more for them than can the guerrillas. To fight an effective war the army also must rely upon intelligence furnished by the campesinos, the one class in Guatemala that has daily elbow-to-elbow contact with the FAR, willingly or unwillingly. The campesino’s natural instinct, in Guatemala as elsewhere, is to avoid involvement in a war in which he has no personal interest or visible immediate stakes. That he is now volunteering information on the FAR is a major breakthrough for the army indeed perhaps the most significant accomplishment since the guerrilla insurgency began.
Accion Civica poses a dilemma for the FAR. Harass or kill soldiers working on the projects, and risk alienating people who WANT water, no matter who drills the wells. Leave the soldiers alone, and the army gains psychological ground. The well teams make attractive targets. For the nine men in a detachment there is only one weapon, the .45-oaliber pistol which the commander, a lieutenant, is required to carry by army regulations. The drilling sites are almost without exception in aldeas where the FAR is active, for Accion Civica’s present policy is to begin projects where they can wean support away from the insurgents (previously projects were used as a “reward” for anti-FAR aldeas). To date not a single Accion Civica worker has been harmed. Sam Fullilove, the AID’s water man, drives alone at night on roads onto which even the army won’t venture. Although Maj. Weerners jeep bears Guatemalan army license plates, he, too, goes where he wishes without interference or escort.
Quaker missionary Paul McKay (right) and Maj. Woerner talk with Elliseo Samora Mendez, aldea of San Mateo Milpas Altas, about Accion Civica road project.
Accion Civica has diverse bedpartners. Consider the mountain-looked aldea of San Mateo Milpas Altas (Saint Matthew of the High Meadows, an appropriate name for the cloud-shrouded farmlands surrounding the community), whose residents for 60 years sought to build a road connecting to the highway to the market center of Antigua, Guatemala. Californian Paul McKay, of the American Friends Service Committee’s Voluntary International Service Assignments (VISA) came to San Mateo 25 months ago and helped village activists revive the road idea. No work had been done for some 20 years, a road slide which killed a man being considered a “bad omen” by the villagers. The Guatemalan highways department furnished a surveyor to map a route. AID purchased a bulldozer which Accion Civica assigned to San Mateo. Villagers taxed themselves to maintain the bulldozer and to pay the driver overtime so he would work on weekends, when volunteer labor gangs are at their peaks McKay’s wife, Mary, helps village women bake high-protein biscuits with some of the Food for Peace rations which the men draw in return for their volunteer work. The ‘ residents of Son Mateo, Indians gradually drifting into a more modern ladino society, are acutely aware of the Army’s role, and that their cherished read would be impossible except for Accion Civica. Explains Woerner: “Were it not for Accion Civica, this road would not have been built, for the highways department doesn’t have enough equipment to do such projects.”
Accion Civica furnished this bulldozer to help…
San Mateo villagers cleave a road… to their isolated aldea.
The San Mateo project, through accident rather than design, is regaining for the government the support of previously disillusioned persons. In the early 1950s San Mateo residents got help from the Communist-tainted government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in building a water system. When the military bounced Arbenz in 1954 village leaders were jailed and beaten – not because they were Communists, but because they had dealt with the regime in power. The FAR poses no problem in San Mateo or surrounding aldeas, nor is it likely to do so.
The variety of Accion Civica projects is gradually expanding as the military develops an appreciation of its strategic value.
- In a Zacapa village an Army dentist yanked 478 teeth in a single morning during a “medical journey” of military physicians and nurses organized by Accion Civics. “Practically every campesino in Guatemala lives with the incessant misery of chronic toothache,” remarks Woerner. “They line up silently and uncomplainingly for extractions even when no deadening injection is available.” Persons with acute medical complaints are forwarded to federal social security or public health service hospitals. The army doctors, however, can do much to relieve the minor aches and pains encountered in aldeas which never in their history have had medical facilities.
- Army trucks rumble into the countryside daily to bring hot lunches (high-protein buns and milk) to more than 330,000 school children. In addition to countering the malnutrition so common in Guatemalan youngsters this program encourages school attendance. The buns are baked in army kitchens and are distributed by uniformed but unarmed soldiers.
- Army printing presses turn out the educational materials used to teach more than 100,000 persons annually how to read and write.
- An army engineer battalion is building an all-weather road to the sparsely occupied Paten region in Guatemala’s north, which makes up one-third the country’s land area and contains rich stands of rare hard woods and chicle. Once the road network is completed the government plans an intensive colonization project to relieve the land-crowding of the Pacific coast and central highlands regions. Access now is solely by air.
Public relations is a major aim of Accion Civica, both to advertise the army’s role and to persuade other villagers to initiate projects which soldiers can assist. The army is also careful to enlist the partnership of another agency – federal or local – in its projects, so as to encourage wide participation, and to prevent any claims that it is “trying to take over the country” by displacing established functionaries.
The program is by no means perfect. Accion Civica equipment provided through AID has been delayed for months in port warehouses, snarled by the Guatemalan bureaucracy. An agricultural official complained of a runaround when he volunteered to give farming lessons to soldiers at the Zacapa bass. Thirty-five men appeared the first day of an intended two-month course. The second day a different batch came, and the third day still another. When the official made inquiries he said he was told, “We can’t spare the same man every day because their first duty is as soldiers.” The program died. And, because of the guerrilla activity, the army is reluctant to release dynamite needed in Accion Civica roadbuilding projects because of fear it will fall into FAR hands. Because of this the San Mateo road faces delay.
Captain Maroc Antonio Castellanos, Col. Arana’s Accion Civica aide, visits with campasinos of Santa Rosalia where FAR has killed two alcaldos since summer.
But a start has been made, Programs similar to Accion Civica are credited with reducing guerrilla activity in Peru and Colombia, and Guatemala is hopeful its “new army” can do the same.
The intimate contact of U.S, advisers with the Guatemalans, both militarily and in the Accion Civica program, has led to FAR charges that Special Forces troops (the Green Berets) are fighting in the field. The FAR in mid-summer claimed also that 50 or so Cuban exiles are supplementing the Guatemalan Army. The allegations are emphatically and convincingly denied by all responsible sources, military and civilian. U.S. military personnel are absolutely forbidden to go on patrols, or even to carry weapons. On the other hand, there arecounterinsurgency experts here, for that is the type of advice the Guatemalans need. Lt. Col. Lunsford Thying, chief of the army section of the military group, formerly taught at the Army’s Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, which produces Green Berets, and fought in the field against Communist guerrillas in Colombia. But he avows he has yet to go on a combat mission with the Guatemalan soldiers who he is helping to train, nor does he expect ever to do so.
Arana’s success in coping with the FAR, the personal enhancement that goes with his command of a vital military zone, his political acumen in pushing the Accion Civica program, the natural ambitions of a first-rate commander who lives in a world predominantly filled by second- and third-raters, all these factors tend to raise questions about his future role in national affairs.
Last spring, when the military government of Col. Peralta was debating whether to permit the free elections which resulted in Mendez Montenegro gaining the presidency, Arana was suddenly shipped to Washington as a military attache. Reliable (and non-U.S. sources say the transfer was prompted by suspicions a military faction was planning a coup.
Arana is reluctant to talk for publication about his political views. The Robin Hoodish portraits of the FAR printed in some U.S. media irritate him, and he thinks the American public his been left generally unaware of the Communistic nature of the guerrilla movement. He also feels there are internal complexities in Guatemalan politics not subject to the easy, pat solutions offered by outsiders. An indication of Arana’s thinking can be gleaned from a reading list he recommended to me at 2 o’clock one morning as basic “for anyone who wants to BEGIN to understand Guatemala”:
- “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a spurious but widely circulated “master plan for Jewish domination of the world.”
- “View from the Fourth Floor,” by Earl Smith, former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, which asserts that Communist influences in the State Department permitted Fidel Castro’s rise to power.
- “Who Killed Kennedy?” by a Latin American leftist journalist who claims that “Wall Street” caused the President’s death because he threatened its financial domination of the United States and the countries in which U.S. investors have interests.
A person with whom I discussed this “reading list” detected a possibly significant subtlety: Each of the volumes listed deals with a conspiracy. “Plotting is a national hobby here,” he said. Guatemalans, as is the case with so many other Latin Americans, feel the world is one vast conspiracy and this convinces them the only way to the top is through a plot. Maybe I’m reading something into the list that isn’t there, but it’s interesting anyway.”
The Guatemalan military, despite its domination of the country for much of this century, actually offers few avenues for competent commanders. The nation boasts a first-rate military school, the Politechnica, which turns out its officer corps. However, the promotion system is hidebound: Every three years an officer is pushed up a rank. Only gross incompetence (“murder, rape or mayhem,” says one cynic) can stop the process; no degree of brilliance can speed it up. So the lieutenants go into the army, bright and ambitious, and find themselves in a professional trap. After a couple of years the less dedicated grow a paunch and buy a pair of sunglasses and settle back to await the inevitable colonelcy. Resultantly the army is glutted with colonels, 400 of them at a recent count. The surplus is so acute that colonels actually command platoons, a first lieutenant’s job in other western armies: in the Zacapa zone a colonel works as a supply sergeant. The colonels cultivate and protect their privileges with the determination of a master rose gardener: those assigned to comfortable Guatemala City, for example, draw a cost of living allowance equivalent to one-third their $250 monthly salary. But in Zacapa, the only area where there is actual fighting, there is no provision for combat pay.
For ambitious men caught in the strait-jacket of the military system coups and plots are the only escape. Tick them off: 1944 – Junior officers overthrow Jorge Urbico. 1954 – Officers overthrow Jacobo Arbenz. 1963 – Officers overthrow Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. Military man held the presidency in unbroken skein from 1944 until Peralta yielded the rains of government to Mendez Montenegro on July 1 of this year. Intra-military suspicions are still strong. For instance, the army maintains a sizable detachment of soldiers at Guatemala City’s Aurora Airport to keep an eye on the air force. In 1963 the air force, acting days ahead of a carefully planned army revolt, rebelled against Ydigoras and strafed Guatemala City. Troops occupied the landing strips while the planes were still in the air, and the pilots had to take refuge in El Salvador. The army got rid of Ydigoras in short order by sending a tank to his home on Avenida Reforma and whopping a single cannon round through the gate. Then the army began negotiations for retrieval of the national air force. The pilots sat tight in ‘El Salvador-planes on the runway—until they got a promise of amnesty. Then they flow home. El Salvador is still attempting to collect the bill for refueling.
- S. observers here are convinced that IF Arana shuns politics and sticks to his role as military commander and continues to emphasize his Accion Civica work, he ultimately can contain, if not control, the FAR. With Arana as an adversary, the FAR and its student adherents are learning that guerrilla warfare isn’t a lark in the mountains. And once the influx of part time volunteers is stemmed, and the camposinos treat the guerrillas hostilely rather than passively, the FAR is doomed.
The Far Right
In the meantime, the Mendez Montenegro government is cracking down on an element felt to be a more immediate threat than the FAR the extremes right.
On Nov. 3 police arrested 13 members of the Movimiente de Liberacion Nacional—MLN, or National Liberation Movement, an ironic use of a name formerly reserved for Communist insurgents both In Latin America and Asia – in raids that included the confiscation of 90 sticks of dynamite, materials for making Molotov cocktails, and assorted rifles and pistols.
The MLN is the respectable” conservative party here, on a par with the Partido Independiente Democratica – PID, or Independent Democratic Party. Both ran candidates in the March presidential election, the MLN man trailing slightly behind the PID’s colonel candidate. The PID accepted its less in relatively good grace; the MLN, however, bowed its back and has nothing but incessant opposition for Mendez Montenegro.
One result was a proliferation of right-wing terroristic bands, ostensibly organized as an underground counterpoise to the FAR’s urban units. The MLN leadership consistently denies any connection with the bands, and indeed it would be hard to prove a direct link. However, there is undoubtedly a community of membership, and persons who are in the MLN are sympathetic with and give funds to the groups. The MLN also displays a curious self-consciousness when the terrorist groups are mentioned. In November a loader of Mendez Montenegro’s Partido Revolucionario was assassinated in the department of Chiquimula. The PR a few days later blamed the killing on one of the terrorist groups. The denial was issued in the name of the MLN.
There are three major rightist terrorist groups, all with the general aim of harassing Communists, leftists liberals and other “unfriendlies” in Guatemala City, and in Zacapa and Chiquimula:
EL MAIO BLANCO (The White Hand) is the largest, the oldest, and probably the most powerful. Its ranks include Guatemalan business elites with activists drawn from the younger elements. Its tactics include every dirty trick in the book, including some learned from the FAR.
Consider the Guatemala City businessman, a leftist, who owns a large home, drives a late-model American car (for which he paid a 100 percent import duty, effectively doubling its price), and who has profited handsomely from the existing system. Yet some ideological quirk made him a FAR sympathizer.
El Mano Blanco’s view of this man is a simplistic one: “He goes to Mexico, to the Yugoslav Embassy, and brings back money for the FAR. We know he does this, but we can’t prove it in court. So we send him a note: The trips end, or you die, He flees the country. Another note goes to his family: He returns or YOU die. He returns. He is now politically inactive.”
Similar notes have “defused” an inestimable number of FAR and Communist sympathizers. El Mano Blanco states its reasons forthrightfully (although at the same time maintaining anonymity for its members): “You morteamericanos should cut out this idealistic talk about ‘social justice’ for Guatemala. We have a Communist guerrilla problem on our hands, and it cannot be handled effectively under existing law. Get out of our way for a years and we’ll settle things.”
El Mano Blanco also shows up in guerrilla-troubled rural areas in the form of private campesino armies organized and armed by rich finqueros. MLN members in Guatemala City say pitched battles have been fought against the FAR, a claim I was unable to substantiate in the campo. However, one does hear subdued talk of aldea militias which have bushwhacked FAR units whose harassments became tiresome. To attach these groups to El Mano Blanco does a disservice to the independence of the Guatemalan campesino, who was settling his local problems at machete-point long before he was drawn into national politics.
El Mano Blanco points to Cuba as an instance in which “patriots” ignored Communist subversion and infiltration fur so long that the country was a Soviet satellite before there was general public awareness of what was happening. As is the case with any vigilante group, El Mano Blanco tends to think in terms or black and white; its members are seemingly unable to differentiate between liberal reformists (of which there are many in the Mendez Montenegro government) and Communists. It views itself as an essential adjunct to the police and the army, because its unofficial nature permits a certain freedom of action (i.e., the constitution be damned).
An even rougher group, composed of college age youths, is known simply as “CRAG.” What the initials stand for is a local mystery for it uses no further identification in its propaganda and public manifestoes.
A particular target of CRAG has been El Estudiante a far left weekly newspaper that on Nov. 3 was banned by the government. El Estudiante viewed the FAR as a group of glorious freedom-fighters, regularly accused the army of unthinkable (and unlikely) horrors, and fawned over Turcios and his successor Macias Mayora, as reincarnations of Simon Bolivar. In September CRAG members dressed as policemen went into El Estudiante’s office and confiscated an entire issue. When the editor complained to police the government professed ignorance of any raid. The next week CRAG blew down El Estudiante’s office door with a bomb. There were no injuries and scant damages, but the frightened editor took a leave of absence. CRAG has matched the FAR bomb for bomb in the last six weeks in ”noise” incidents at homes of adherents of right and left factions.
Another rightist group, the FRENTE NACIONAL de RESISTENCIA – National Resistance Front – assigned itself the task of press intimidation. In November it announced its intent “to execute without clemency” editors and reporters of three daily newspapers, two leftist organs, and two radio stations it considers unfriendly to conservatives. The media reported the threat without comment; nothing had been done to carry it out by late November, and no press members displayed any signs of fear.
It was the emergence of the rightist groups, rather than any fear of the PAR, that prompted Mendez Montenegro to declare the state of siege on Nov. 3. The arrests of the MLN members came the same day. At first the government made no announcements. The national police chief simply displayed the collection of armaments and terrorist devices found at the home of an MLN official. Families of the seized men, in protesting the arrests, supplied the identies. Included was the MLN president, Manuel Villacorta Vielmann, a vice-presidential candidate in the March election, and several members of the Sandoval industrialist family, long prominent in MLN activities. All were ultimately produced in court under a provision of Guatemalan criminal law that requires the “exhibition” of prisoners so that the judge and family can assure themselves they are not being mistreated.
Coup rumors are as common as street peddlers and shoeshine boys in Guatemala City, but persons in the government are convinced that the MLN was on the verge of attempting to topple the Mendez Montenegro government in mid-September with certain military support. According to this report, the MLN counted on material support from the Somoza family of Nicaragua and from Guatemalan military exiles in Honduras and El Salvador. Nothing happened, and the November arrests effectively isolated the MLN hierarchy. Ten days later the government arrested a deputy defense minister, Col. Adolfo Callejas, and another colonel who commands the Quezaltenango military zone, reputedly the military participants in the plot. Other sources say that Nicaraguan president Tacho Somazo wrote off the NLN in disgust after September, deciding that it was too narrowly based to hope to take over the government, and that any intervention on his part, however covert, would bring Uncle Sam crashing down on his head. (Central American dictators respect the U.S.’s pocketbook, even if they frown on the U. S. ’s policies – in this instance, fondness for Mendez Montenegro as a popularly elected president). The Guatemalan rightists expected help from Honduras and El Salvador on the assumption that success of the guerrillas – or even of a liberal government – would “contaminate” the adjacent countries, Mendez Montenegro did active lobbying to persuade his neighbors that aid to the rightists would be unwise. In late October General Oswald Lopez Arellano, the president of Honduras, stopped briefly in Guatemala City enroute home from a visit to Mexico and talked with Mendez Montenegro at an airport luncheon at which he reportedly gave assurances that he would have no part of a coup.
The “thinking” conservatives are now said to have decided against any move against Mendez Montenegro on the assumption that a coup would polarize the right and left in the country and possibly create a vacuum which would lead to a Communist takeover. The army hierarchy goes out of its way to affirm its support of Mendez Montenegro. Col. Rafael Arriaga Bosque, the defense minister, issued a statement on Oct. 29 reaffirming the army’s “inviolable decision in support of the constitutional government,” and said that it had an obligation “to guarantee the maintenance of the democratic institutions of the country.”
In this framework, ironically, the left and right extremists have the same goal but for different ends. The FAR, through its terrorist activities, hopes to provoke a rightist coup, an act that certainly would regain for the left much of the support it lost after Mendez Montenegro’s election. El Mano Blanco thinks its fear campaign will (a) demonstrate that Mendez Montenegro in incapable of maintaining order in the country, and (b) convince the public that tougher, sub-constitutional methods are necessary to squelch the Communists. So the dull thuds of homemade bombs reverberate through the Guatemalan night, and the clatter of machine guns marks non-injurious but unsettling forays against political headquarters.
The grimness of the subversive terror haunting Guatemala didn’t come home to me until the night of Nov. 4. Until then, Guatemalan politics were an impersonal matter, the results of which I could view with professional detachment. My attitude changed slightly earlier that evening when I went to Maj. Woerner’s home in Guatemala City for a dinner party. His pretty Bolivian-born wife, Jean, with no sign of excitement, related how earlier in the day she had seen two pistol-bearing men force a chauffeur from a parked sedan and drive away.
The FAR relies upon stolen cars for transportation in its terror raids. Three days previously, for instance, five youths in olive-drab uniforms, armed with submachine guns, took $32,000 from a liquor wholesaler. Later the FAR sent out press releases announcing the “recuperation” of the funds by its “tactical units 4 and 12.”
During dinner a barely audible thud was heard across the babble of conversation. “A bomb,” someone called, “but not very close nor very big.” There was scarcely a ripple in the table talk.
And, a couple of hours later, Guatemalan terror came close indeed.
After midnight Woerner and his wife offered to take me downtown. The major was in civilian clothes and driving his personal auto, which bear Guatemalan license plates. The interior light was on, a requirement of the “state of siege.”
We came through an underpass on the fringe of downtown near a soccer stadium and passed a compact sedan which suddenly slowed. There was a muffled shot perhaps 50 feet behind us, and then a shrill whistle. Woerner slowed. We had seen no signs of a roadblock. The whistle continued. We debated on whether to stop.
“No, sir,” decided Woerner, and he began to turn left around a circle leading to downtown. And then a second blast exploded close behind the car. “Get down,”, Woerner said to his wife and me. We already were, and the major crouched lower under the wheel and accelerated rapidly away from the ambush.
We found later the shot had plowed into the car at a slant from the rear just behind where Woerner sat and continued forward into the front door. A foot higher, and it would have smashed through his head. Later, the Guatemalan Army said a patrol went off duty at the underpass half an hour before the incident. The FAR in the past has used the spot for sniping and grenade-tossing former President Peralta narrowly missed death there in 1965. The army said the whistle apparently was a signal to a sniper lying in the median strip of the boulevard that a suitable target was approaching.
Who fired the shot? A drunken soldier, as suggested by one embassy official? A FAR unit looking for a car to steal? A random terror incident? Scattershooting by one of the rightist groups?
We don’t know, although the location’s past history gives the shooting the earmarks of a PAR act. But Woerner drove home with the ugly gouge of a bullet in his car and a thoroughly shaken wife at his side, while an equally shaken journalist found his fingers temporarily unable to put an account of the incident on paper.
The Unfortunate President
Considering his troubles from the left and the right, and the existence of a coup-conscious military subject to rapid changes of mood, it would be comforting for Mendez Montenegro were he able to find friends in his official family. He can’t. What he does have is a firecracker under his desk in the form none other than his own vice-president, Clementine Marroquin Rojas.
Mendez Montenegro inherited Marroquin Rojas as a running mate after the gunshot death in Octobers 1965, of his brother, Mario, who had already been named the Partido Revolucionario’s presidential candidate. “Whether Mario Mendez Montenegro killed himself or was murdered is still debated; the present government vouches for murder, but says it cannot clear the case until it questions former police officials who are now in exile,) The liberal PR originally took conservative Marroquin Ro as (for lack of a more concise adjective) to give balance to its ticket. The PR also wanted the support of Marroquin Rojas’ newspapers La Hora. There is talk that money changed hands. If so, Marroquin Rojas wasn’t bought – he was rented, and Mendez Montenegro’s lease has expired.
As vice president, Marroquin Rojas has no official duties, even ceremonial ones. Soon after taking office he ran a notice in La Hora stating as mucho and said he did not want to be pestered with job-seekers or favor-hunters because he had neither jobs nor favors to offer. Political scientists have written volume after volume about the boredoms of the American vice-presidency. Marroquin has no such problems. He whiles away HIS time writing editorials for La Hora. And what editorials. They race on for double-column after double-column, six to eight a day, the strength of his opinions surpassed only by the strength of his prose. Sometimes, as if by afterthoughts he tosses off-a couple of more columns for his son’s newspaper, El Impacto. And both newspapers frequently run articles signed by initials only but which have vice-presidential flavor.
Writing has an acknowledged therapeutic value for bored persons. The trouble is that Marroquin Rojas spends a considerable amount of time taking printed potshots at Mendez Montenegro.
Vice President Marroquin Rojas scornfully asks why President Mendez Montenegro doesn’t unleash the army for a “final solution,” to the Communist guerrilla problem.
Vice President Marroauin Rojas warns direly of the “dangerous course” taken by President Mendez Montenegro on a tax reform bill.
Vice President Marroquin Rojas discusses at length the possibility that there are Communists in the government of which he is second-ranking member, and asks out loud whether Mendez Montenegro has done anything to dissuade the Honduranean president from permitting a coup to be launched from his country.
When Marroquin Rojas is truly excited (his condition three to six days weekly) his column bristles with scatological slang so rank that it embarasses even a nation known for its salty conversation. His ideas on solving Guatemala’s problem have a certain Goldwaterian charm: He’d out the government payroll by half and deport all economists a class he considers responsible for (a) spending and (b) taxes.
Because he writes so much, the law of averages occasionally brings Marroquin Rojas dead onto target. For instance, he thinks Guatemalan aspirations for control of British Honduras after the British depart to be sheer tomfoolery. But 24 hours later he says something so patently absurd – typified by his carefree use of the word “Communist” in discussing liberal opponents of the moments – that the laughter drowns out the cries of rage.
His constantly changing opinions render Marroquin Rojas incapable of political classification. He held cabinet posts in previous administrations; he reputedly has substantial following in rural areas outside Guatemala City; he doesn’t think Adolf Hitler was quite the monster everyone else thought him to be; he frequently takes whacks at the United States for its economic interests in Latin America. “Eccentric ”and “egocentric” are two of the kinder words people use in discussing the partially deaf, 69-year-old editor.
The existence of Marroquin Rojas would be enough to unnerve any president. (Pause for a moment and consider Lyndon Johnson’s reaction were he to pick up his Washington Post some morning and read attacks on his poverty program and Vietnam policy signed by Hubert Humphrey.) But Mendez Montenegro doesn’t respond. He is truly a reluctant dragon, totally lacking in the personalistic charisma which Latin Americans so love in a leader.
When Peralta. (Mendez Montenegro’s predecessor) got mad at somebody he sent him to jail or out of the country,” a Guatemalan official said the other day. When Mendez Montenegro gets mad he takes a drink, and another drink, and too often another and another drink.
When in these moods Mendez Montenegro ghost-walks through public appearances with the unhappiness of his face only partially hidden behind sunglasses.
Mendez Montenegro’s indecisiveness is perhaps best shown in his handling of a sweeping tax reform measure brought forth by his Minister of Hacienda, Albert Fuentes Mohr.
Fuentes Mohr is a professional economist, perhaps the best in all of Guatemala (and most certainly the one for whom Marroquin Rojas is most willing to buy a one-way bus ticket to Paraguay.) He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Canada’s McGill University. He spent the last eight years working in the Central American economic integration program, abandoning the post of regional representative to the European Common Market in favor of his own country’s needs when the new government came into power.
“Fuentes Mohr is the long-ball hitter in this administration,” says an admiring U.S. diplomat. “If anyone is ever to become a prime mover in the sense that he really MOVES things, it’ll be Alberto.”
Despite the fact that it is a farming nation dominated by large fincas (plantations) Guatemala derives only two percent of its annual revenues from real estate levies. Its rates are the lowest in all of Latin America.
Fuentes Mohr proposed sharp increases. The owner of a finca valued at $100,000 now pays only $300 a year; the new schedule called for $1,415. A million dollar finca (and there are many) pays $3000; Fuentes Mohr called for $19,415.
Similar reforms were suggested for other categories. Guatemalan law is so lenient, so sieved with loopholes, that a man who earns $20,000 a year can pay less than $100 in taxes – if he even bothers to file a return, The federal government levies such a vast variety of taxes that the collection machinery is hopelessly tangled in its own red tape. Two U.S. Internal Revenue Service experts spent months studying the Guatemalan tax setup in 1963 and found almost nothing worthy of commendation. The report, given to the Ministry of Hacienda which Fuentes Mohr now heads, said rates for many of the taxes (documentary stamp, transactions, and gifts and estate) are so low “that effective” collection enforcement action with respect to an overwhelming majority of taxpayers is prohibitively expensive in relation to the potential results.” The IRS experts discovered to their dismay that “the revenue office has little collection authority except to solicit voluntary payments of accounts … The present failure or inability to explore bank records, and frustrations when taxpayers do not furnish records, encourages contempt for the laws of the national government.” Guatemalan landowners are permitted to estimate their property’s value for tax purposes, and their figures are rarely checked. In the IRS study, 36 parcels were appraised by a professional; 35 of them had been undervalued by an average of 30 percent. Twenty percent of the real estate in the country was said to be missing altogether from tax rolls. Guatemalan law permits a $15,000 exemption on agricultural income, encouraging splitting (on paper) of lands between family members to stay below the limit. A minimum of reforms in collection methods, the IRS told Hacienda, would “conversatively” increase tax revenues 20 to 25 percent.
Fuentes Mohr’s reforms were designed to eliminate some of the evils cited by the IRS, and were within the spirit of the Charter of Punta de Este, guideline for the Alliance for Progress: “…to reform laws in order to extract more from those who have more; to punish severely the evasion of taxes; to redistribute the national income in favor of those sectors most needy…”
Fuentes Mohr foresaw three results if the tax bill passed:
- The national government would have enough funds to begin building the schools, hospitals, and roads so desperately needed by Guatemala.
- The finqueros would be obligated to either make their land productive or to sell it, the latter course making possible land reform without the necessity of expropriations of privately owned property.
- Fair tax administration would increase public respect for the government, now treated as somewhat of a joke. Evasion would be less prevalent if persons knew everyone else was paying.
Well, Fuentes Mohr made his plan public, and brick walls began falling on Fuentes Mohr.
The business sector, thr,)ugh something * called “The Committee for Civic Defense of the National Interests,” said there was a “curious coincidence” in terms of the plans and those of the Communist Manifesto.
The Chamber of Commerce said Fuentes Mohr was attempting to destroy the “only truly productive ”portion of Guatemala society.
A group of lawyers counter-proposed the firing of one-third to one-half of all public employees, negating the need for new governmental revenues.
Astoundingly, however, Mendez Montenegro has uttered not a single word in defense of the tax reform program. His avoidance has been so deliberate that the Guatemalan press, which at first talked about the “administration’s proposals” now refers to “the Fuentes Mohr plan.” Opponents are quite happy to permit the president to disown the plan, for by linking it solely to Fuentes Mohr they can (a) avoid a direct clash with Mendez Montenegro and (b) give him an avenue for judicious political escape.
And the business sector has moved swiftly into the breach with proposals of its own that would increase taxes on smaller fincas by twice-wider margin than Fuentes Mohr, while hiking upper-bracket levies far less sharply. For a $100,000 finca, for example, the rate would be $600 annually, compared to $1,415 under Fuentes Mohr’s plan, and to $300 under the current schedule.
Fuentes Mohr has fought back as best he can. Various aldea and neighborhood councils, as well as labor and campesino groups, have passed supporting resolutions. In newspaper ads (paid for by the Ministry of Hacienda) he has given breakdowns of the existing schedules, his proposals, and that of the business sector, and cited chapter and verse of the ‘Charter of Punta de Este in an attempt to refute the “Communist Manifesto” accusation.
But the Man in the National Palace remains silent.
After many conferences with legislators and business leaders, Mendez Montenegro permitted the plan to be deferred for “further study” by the Council of State, a legislative advisory group in which the influence of Fuentes Mohr and the Partido Revolucionario are diluted by broad representation. Its fate at this writing is uncertain but gloomy.
Mendez Montenegro’s aloofness from battle can be explained, yet it cannot be realistically defended.
Initially, Mendez Montenegro never particularly wanted to become president, and the PR had to do considerable cajoling to persuade him to run for the office after his brother’s death. The deciding factors were devotion to Mario, and the realization that the political goals to which his brother devoted a lifetime could be lost were not capable leadership found for the PR. Now, however, Mendez Montenegro obviously would just as soon return to his law teaching at the University of San Carlos.
Persons in the Guatemalan government say that any attempt at strong personal leadership, even shy of demagoguery would upset Guatemala’s delicate power balance. “If Mendez Montenegro forces an issue, and loses it, he also loses the National Palace,” said one man.
Added another: “Mendez Montenegro is trying to accustom the people to living under a popular government. He is interim. The next president – when the newness has worn off popular government will produce the change.”
Nonetheless, the middle-echelon Guatemalan officials who do the daily work of government appear eager for more inspiration than that afforded by Mendez Montenegro, The you-are-on-your-own treatment meted Fuentes Mohr cannot help but contribute to bureaucratic caution at a time when Guatemala veritably shrieks for innovation.
Yet Mendez Montenegro continues as a man whose sole aim is survival in office, rather than accomplishment in office.
Received in New York December 6. 1966.
©1966 Joseph C. Goulden, Jr.
Mr. Goulden is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from The Philadelphia Inquirer.Permission to publish this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer.
