Guatemalan Civil War - Initial Phase of The Civil War: 1960s and Early 1970s

Initial Phase of The Civil War: 1960s and Early 1970s

On 13 November 1960, a group of left-wing junior military officers of the Escuela Politécnica national military academy, revolted against the autocratic government (1958–63) of General Ydigoras Fuentes, who usurped power in 1958, after the assassination of the incumbent Colonel Castillo Armas. The survivors of the failed revolt hid in the hills, and later established communication with the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. Those surviving officers then established an insurgent movement known as the MR-13 (Movimiento Revolucionario 13 Noviembre), named after the date of the officers’ revolt. Through the early phase of the conflict, the MR-13 was a principle component of the insurgent movement in Guatemala.

In 1963, the MR-13 merged with the PGT (Guatemalan Labour Party; composed and led by middle-class intellectuals and students), as part of a consortium which synchronized the activities and movements of the insurgents, known as the FAR or Rebel Armed Forces. The operational base of the insurgency during this period was the mountainous Oriente (East), the southeastern region of the country, comprising Izabal, Puerto Barrios, and Zacapa. The government subsequently initiated a series of rural counterinsurgency operations to dismantle these guerrilla strongholds. In February and March 1964, the Guatemalan Air Force began selectively bombing guerrilla areas in the department of Izabal, which was followed by a series of sweeps in the neighboring province of Zacapa under the code-name "Operation Falcon" in September and October 1965. These operations were supplemented with increased U.S. military assistance. Beginning in 1965, the U.S. government sent Green Berets and CIA advisors to instruct the Guatemalan military in counterinsurgency (anti-guerrilla warfare). In addition, U.S. police and "Public Safety" advisors were dispatched to reorganize the urban security structures. In 1966, soon after President Julio César Méndez Montenegro (1966–70) assumed office, the 5,000-man Guatemalan Army launched its largest yet counterinsurgency campaign in the department of Zacapa. This campaign, dubbed "Operation Guatemala," was put under the supervision of Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio (later president from 1970–74), with guidance and training from the US Army Eighth Special Forces Group. The new counterinsurgency program in the region consisted primarily of the use of scorched-earth tactics as a means of displacement and separating the insurgents from the civilian support base. The counterinsurgency program incorporated the same strategies, doctrine and military hardware that was being used in the Vietnam War at the same time, given the influence of the United States.

The first major phase of the urban counterinsurgency was enacted almost concurrently with the rural offensive, and was directed against the urban PGT. In November 1965, US Public Safety Advisor John P. Longan arrived in Guatemala on temporary loan from his post in Venezuela for the purpose of assisting senior military and police officials in establishing an urban counterinsurgency task-force. This culminated in the creation of a "rapid-response security unit," which began carrying out counterinsurgency operations under the name "Operation Limpieza" (Operation Cleanup). The security unit, put under the command of Colonel Rafael Arriaga Bosque, was given carte blanche to all of information in the databases of the nation's law enforcement agencies. Under Arriaga's direction, this unit successfully combated the weak urban insurrection by the PGT, and began to abduct, torture and kill its key constituents. In March 1966, thirty PGT associates were kidnapped, tortured and killed by the unit, and their bodies placed in sacks and dumped into the sea from helicopters. This was one of the first major instances of forced disappearance in Latin American history. The disappearance of the thirty PGT associates in 1966 marked the beginning of a dramatic increase in state repression.

With the onset of more drastic counterinsurgency measures by the government, Guatemala's human rights situation began to deteriorate. The use of terror by the state security forces, both military and paramilitary, began to escalate to unprecedented levels in both urban areas and in the rural Oriente. Guatemalan intellectuals, students, peasants, workers and residents of poor urban neighborhoods were targeted for attack by government death squads and security forces. Throughout 1966 and the first three months of 1967, within the framework of what military commentators referred to as "el-contra terror", government forces killed an estimated 8,000 civilians accused of subversive activity in Zacapa alone. It is estimated that the Guatemalan security forces murdered a total of up to 15,000 persons between 1967 and 1970. Although brutal, the Guatemalan army's 1966-1970 counterinsurgency operations were highly successful in undermining and subsequently defeating the rural insurgency. The insurgents, lacking a rural base, resorted to concentrated attacks in Guatemala City. These attacks included a series of assassinations against many leading representatives of the military government, U.S. military advisors, and the American ambassador John Gordon Mein, in 1968.

In July 1970, with support from the Army, Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio assumed the presidency, vowing to wipe out the guerrilla movement even "if it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery." Carlos Arana was the first of the string of Institutional Democratic Party military rulers who would dominate Guatemalan politics in the 1970s and 1980s (his predecessor, Julio César Méndez, while dominated by the army, was nominally a civilian). He also served as the ambassador to Nicaragua during the Somoza regime. Despite minimal armed insurgent activity, Osorio imposed a "State of Siege" in November 1970. During the "State of Siege," the Osorio regime activated a curfew that lasted from 9:00PM to 5:00AM, during which time all traffic of vehicles and pedestrians—including ambulances, fire engines, and physicians—was forbidden throughout the national territory. The "State of Siege" was followed by an increase in abductions, tortures, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings by the security forces. Human rights organizations estimate that up to 7,000 people were killed or "disappeared" by the Guatemalan security forces in 1971 alone. In October 1971, over 12,000 students at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala went on a general strike to protest the killing of students by the security forces and called for an end to the "state of siege." On November 27, 1971, the Guatemalan military responded to the upheaval with an extensive raid on the main campus of the university in pursuit of cached weapons and subversive paraphernalia. Eight hundred army personnel, as well as tanks, helicopters and armored cars were mobilized for the raid. In the room to room search of the entire campus that followed, the military found nothing.

The "State of Siege" remained in effect until the end of 1972, when the Osorio regime announced the military defeat of the insurgency. The overall levels of violence and repression began to subside following the end of Osorio's "state of siege," although violence still persisted on a smaller scale and the use of terror by the security forces persisted. Overall, an estimated 42,000 Guatemalans were killed by both the military and government-sponsored paramilitary death squads in the security operations of the Mendez and Arana regimes, between 1966 and 1974. The repression led to the Guatemalan government being recognized by international human rights organizations as one of the world's most repressive regimes. Amnesty International mentioned Guatemala as one of several countries under a human rights state of emergency, while citing "the high incidence of disappearances of Guatemalan citizens" as a major and continuing problem in its 1972-1973 annual report.