On August 8, 1983, after two hours of shooting that left at least eight dead and 20 injured, President Efrain Rios Montt was forced to surrender the National Palace to his own minister of defense, Brigadier General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores. The army high command reclaimed control of the national government and, it hoped, of the military itself.
Next year, 1984, will mark the 30th anniversary of military rule in Guatemala. In 1954 the Guatemalan army and its business allies took control of the country's government in a coup funded and directed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Since then the military has "preserved democracy" and Western ideals by killing tens of thousands of civilians, driving as many more into Mexican refugee camps, crushing the rural development movement, destroying the labor unions, controlling elections, and, more recently, nullifying the national constitution and disbanding the national congress. All the while it has enjoyed the fruits of widespread corruption. Now for the first time since its three-decade tenure began, the Guatemalan military is experiencing serious rifts within its ranks.
It is easy to get caught up in the intrigue of the battle for power in Guatemalan politics. It is more difficult to realize that all the political activity, including elections when they occur, has very little meaning for 70 per cent of the country's population. This is an often deadly game that has been going on for years among the elite of the country who reside mainly in Guatemala City. Rarely have changes in political control translated into more just policies for the rural peasant class. Many Guatemalan peasants have said that there are no political changes in their country, only new masks.
According to a study by Oxfam America, more than 75 per cent of Guatemala's inhabitants live off the land, and roughly 60 per cent are Indians. More than three million of this nation's seven million people speak one of 22 Mayan languages. Most of these people are subsistence farmers in the central and western highlands who supplement the harvest from their small plots of land with wages from seasonal migratory labor on lowland coffee and cotton plantations.
In 1979 the Inter-American Development Bank found that 59 per cent of Guatemala's national earnings went to the top five percent of the population. In much of the rural area, 60 percent of all children die before the age of five. An additional 25 percent die before reaching the age of 15. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 50 percent of Guatemalan Indian children have access to an elementary school education, and only one percent of those ever go to high school.
In 1976 Guatemala was rocked by a devastating earthquake that left 23,000 dead and more than one million homeless. In response, religious and humanitarian groups from around the world came to help rebuild Guatemala. The relief efforts soon turned to more systematic community development. Local committees were established to discuss the felt needs of the people and possible solutions. It was in this setting that the traditionally fatalistic worldview of many Indians began changing as they came to believe that fate often wears a human face. The concept of social justice began to grow within their worldview.
General Romeo Lucas Garcia became president at the time this new consciousness began to take effect. The status quo was threatened by peasant communities organizing for change. On May 29,1978, more than 1,000 Kekchi peasants marched on the town of Panzos, Alta Verapaz, to obtain information from the town mayor about three missing peasant leaders and land titles that they had been promised by the government. They were answered by gunfire from 150 soldiers sent there by local landowners. More than 100 peasants were killed and hauled away in dump trucks to be buried in pre-dug graves. Disappearances of individuals and massacres of village populations grew in frequency and scale, until by 1982 the death toll from actions by the army and private death squads had risen to more than 20,000.
The horrible nightmare of political violence in Guatemala, particularly since 1978, continued during Rios Montt's 16-month reign. Rios Montt took control on March 23, 1982, by ousting the general in power in what has become known as the "young officers' coup." This marked the beginning of the serious power struggle within the Guatemalan military.
The young officers are mid-level officers who support a counterinsurgency policy often more hard-line than that of their superiors. They believe, however, that they have been made to take the brunt of the front-line counterinsurgency action, while the senior officers remain behind the lines engaged in fiscal corruption.
At that same time in March, 1982, the old guard of the army high command was plotting a coup together with Leonel Sisniega Otero, second in command of the ultraconservative MLN party (the National Liberation Movement and self-declared "party of organized violence"). The young officers group pre-emptively made their move and quickly drew widespread support from officers in the rural counterinsurgency bases. They peacefully took control of the National Palace and chose as the leader of the new governing junta Brigadier General Jose Efrain Rios Montt, the officer they had known as their instructor at the military academy.
The military atrocities continued in the highland villages, even under Rios Montt, who claimed to be a born-again Christian. A popular theory was that Rios Montt was either a fraud or a willing pawn using his evangelical image to improve Guatemala's tarnished reputation abroad. But these arguments are not supported by the facts. Rios Montt was sincere in his Christian commitment and his public professions. And it is precisely in light of his fundamentalist convictions that Rios Montt's actions and policies make tragic sense.
Rios Montt was an elder in the Guatemalan Church of the Word (El Verbo), which grew out of the mission efforts of Gospel Outreach in Eureka, California. El Verbo places a great deal of emphasis on authority, both ecclesial and civil, based upon its interpretation of Romans 13:1. This belief strongly reinforced what Rios Montt had long been practicing in the military.
It is not surprising that the hallmark of Rios Montt's presidency was the requirement of unwavering respect for authority by all Guatemalans. He expected to be the ultimate civil authority among his people. He answered real and imagined dissent with armed invasions, kidnappings, secret courts, and firing squads. His self-elevation as the chief moral and civil leader led to his nickname "Ayatollah Rios Montt" and ultimately resulted in his downfall. By the end, he had alienated not only the highland Indians but the Catholic middle and upper classes and the military itself.
On March 21, 1983, Rios Montt unwittingly made a very revealing confession. "What interests us," he said, "is reconciliation. Reconciliation is the fruit of peace. We know that we have endured 20 years of civil war." Rios Montt's vision for peace was either completely disingenuous or disturbingly unenlightened in relation to the roots and ongoing causes of the Guatemalan civil war.
He sent his armies throughout the country to allegedly make peace by waging war. The result was not reconciliation but increased hatred resulting from the slaying of more than 5,000 Indians and the forced flight of 70,000 refugees.
Speaking about civil leaders ruling in righteousness and justice, the prophet Isaiah said, "The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever" (Isaiah 32:17). The war in Guatemala has long been rooted in the desire of the poor for justice and the dignity of working their own land.
For 30 years the military has tried to impose peace through force, but it has never worked. The attempt to impose peace through repression has led to the further alienation of the Guatemalan people in a spiraling cycle of violence.
Rios Montt, like other military leaders before him, made fighting subversion rather than fighting the causes of subversion the primary task. His sense of authority and order could tolerate no dissent even in the name of justice. The result of this approach was a dismal failure, and each new wave of the civil war has been more violent than the one before.
Rios Montt's belief in authority and hierarchical order extended beyond the military campaigns into many areas of civilian life. In nearly all the highland villages, civil patrols were formed by the army, and in the major conflict areas refugee detention centers called "model villages" were created. In both instances the national government was paternalistically and strategically regimenting the Indian people "for their own good." The contradiction of aid being offered by the same army that had destroyed their villages and killed their families did not go unnoticed by the people.
Alienation also grew in the cities. Rios Montt continually harangued the people concerning matters of individual morality and tried imposing on civilian bureaucrats the discipline expected within the ranks of the military. Many citizens were offended by his exhortations, feeling that he was making unfair assumptions about their private lives and that it was not the place of the president to make such comments anyway.
Above all, resentment grew from the feeling that Rios Montt was imposing his evangelical beliefs on a country that is predominantly Catholic. The resulting strain on Guatemalan ecumenical relations, which have never been very good, is now likely to take years to overcome.
Rios Montt ran into problems with the military on two fronts. The first was the growing concern by fellow officers that he had overextended the military in civilian affairs and that he had become an increasing liability in civilian-military relations. Rios Montt had placed too many officers in civilian government posts, thus exposing the military to blame for all the country's problems, including the failing economy. At the same time his attempted reform through slogans and bumper stickers—as in the "I will not lie, I will not steal, I will not cheat" campaign for public employees—alienated too many civilians.
The second problem was the increasing discontent with his failure to abide by established, through corrupt, conventions of power sharing. The right-wing political parties and the military high command had always been the powerbrokers, and now Rios Montt was allowing the young officers to have an influential role in the top rungs of government. These established leaders were also angered by Rios Montt's belief that he had been placed in power by God, and that he apparently considered himself entitled to a full four years in office.
The inevitable solution was to oust Rios Montt. Little more than a year after he took office, Guatemala was again rife with plots to overthrow the government. The eccentric Rios Montt had lost the support of the young officers. A large group of them wanted to replace him with an officer or civilian who would continue the strong counterinsurgency campaign while relating more positively to the civilian sector. A smaller group, including the son of Sisniega Otero, wanted to place in power someone from the MLN. When neither plot got off the ground as intended on August 7, 1983, the old guard of the high command, led by Mejia Victores, moved in early on the morning of August 8 and ousted Rios Montt.
The high command is now back in power, but by the end of August, 1983, at least two attempts to unseat Mejia Victores already had occurred. The power struggle is yet to be resolved.
With Rios Montt out, the big question now is what to expect from the new Guatemalan head of state, General Mejia Victores. Based upon the record of his tenure as minister of defense under Rios Montt, there is little room for optimism. In his first months in power, Mejia has taken the Guatemalan situation from bad to worse.
The facade of legality for government actions that Rios Montt considered important has been thrown aside by Mejia Victores in favor of covert security measures and secret death squads (which had never fully disappeared under Rios Montt). Between August 8 and September 30,1983, the Guatemala press reported the disappearance of more than 80 individuals. In one week, September 19 to 26, 43 individuals were reported killed. Admitting no past wrong on the part of the military in the area of human rights, Mejia said on August 27 that it is the "subversives" who are violating human rights in Guatemala and that the government would not yield to them.
In September security forces began carrying out house-to-house searches throughout Guatemala City under "Operation Octopus." During the first six days of the operation, 2,200 persons were detained. More than 3,500 prisoners are being held in El Povon, the men's penitentiary in Guatemala City, built to house 800 inmates. A great deal of concern has arisen among Guatemalan lawyers that many of the hundreds of individuals detained under Rios Montt but not submitted to the special tribunals, who therefore do not have a record, may be secretly killed.
In addition to continuing the military campaigns and civil patrols in the countryside, Mejia Victores has organized "school patrols" to force children to report any suspicious activity to the army, even if it involves their families. In the army refugee camps in Alta Verapaz, the refugees are being given ideology classes for up to 10 hours a day. Only three and a half miles from Nebaj, El Quiche, where the government now claims to have the full support of the people, the army continues bombing the hillsides.
While Mejia has vowed to continue Rios Montt's policy of making the fight against subversion his number-one task at home, in foreign policy he has made clear that he completely rejects Rios Montt's policy of neutrality in the Central American conflict. On the day of the coup, Mejia declared that he fully supports the Reagan administration's aggressive policy toward Nicaragua, a country he described as a threat "to the entire continent." He added that "when the appropriate time comes, we will defend Central American interests." On October 1, Mejia presided over a meeting of Central American defense ministers, Nicaragua excluded, to resurrect the regional Central American Defense Council (CONDECA) first created in 1963 to facilitate the consolidation of military power in the region.
Though Rios Montt's time in power has ended, the Guatemalan army, now led by Mejia Victores, is about to enter its fourth decade of control over the government and people of Guatemala. If democracy still means government by the people, it is clearly a form of government that has not played a part in the experience of the Guatemalan people since 1954.
Dana Martin, who had been a lay missionary in Guatemala from 1978 to 1981, was on the staff of the Washington Office on Latin America when this article appeared.
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