Guatemalan Civil War - Background

Background

In 1944, the "October Revolutionaries" took control of the government. They instituted liberal economic reform, benefiting and politically strengthening the civil and labor rights of the urban working class and the peasants. Elsewhere, a group of leftist students, professionals, and liberal-democratic government coalitions were led by Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Decree 900, passed in 1952, ordered the redistribution of fallow land on large estates—threatening the interests of the landowning elite.

As a consequence, the U.S. government ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to launch Operation PBSUCCESS (1953–54) and halt Guatemala's “communist revolt", as perceived by the corporate fruit companies such as United Fruit and the U.S. State Department. The CIA chose right-wing Guatemalan Army Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead an "insurrection" in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Upon deposing the Árbenz Guzmán government, Castillo Armas began to dissolve a decade of social and economic reform and legislative progress, and banned labor unions and left-wing political parties, a disenfranchisement that radicalized left-wing Guatemalans.

A series of military coups d’état followed, featuring fraudulent elections selecting only military personnel as possible candidates. Aggravating the general poverty and political repression motivating the civil war was the socio-economic discrimination and racism practiced against the Guatemala's indigenous peoples, such as the Maya; many later fought in the civil war. Although the dark-skinned native Guatemalans constitute more than half of the national populace, they were landless, whilst the landlord upper classes of the oligarchy, white-skinned descendants of European immigrants to Guatemala, controlled most of the land.