Guatemalan Civil War

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Guatemalan Civil War
Part of: Cold War
date November 13, 1960 to December 29, 1996
location Guatemala
exit End of the civil war
Peace agreement Acuerdo de paz firme y duradera
Parties to the conflict

Flag of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.svg URNG

GuatemalaGuatemala Guatemala

Right death squads

PAC

Commander

Flag of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.svg Marco Antonio Yon Sosa Rolando Morán Leonardo Castillo Johnson
Flag of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.svg
Flag of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.svg

GuatemalaGuatemala José Miguel Ramón Idígoras Fuentes Alfredo Enrique Peralta Azurdia Carlos Arana Osorio Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García Fernando Romeo Lucas García Efraín Ríos Montt Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores
GuatemalaGuatemala
GuatemalaGuatemala
GuatemalaGuatemala
GuatemalaGuatemala
GuatemalaGuatemala
GuatemalaGuatemala

losses
150,000–250,000 dead and disappeared

The Guatemalan civil war was fought in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 between four left-wing guerrilla organizations (merged as Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca , URNG) and the Guatemalan government, which mostly consisted of alternating right-wing military dictatorships . 150,000 to 250,000 people (around two to six percent of the population) fell victim to the conflict, the majority of them from the indigenous population, mostly from the Mayan ethnic groups , who were killed in scheduled massacres by the army and right-wing extremistsparamilitary forces were murdered. At least 100,000 people, the exact number is unknown, fled to neighboring countries. The war officially ended with the signing of the peace treaties by the URNG and the Guatemalan military. Due to the massive violations of human rights against civilians, it is counted among the so-called dirty wars and is sometimes rated as genocide by the local judiciary . One of the causes of the conflict was a military coup under the code name Operation PBSUCCESS , initiated as a secret operation by the US foreign intelligence service CIA in 1954 . As planned, this led to the overthrow of the democratically elected, bourgeois-conservative President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán and resulted in serious domestic political destabilization.

The UN- established truth commission CEH ( Commission for the Elucidation of History ) found in its final report in 1999 that 83% of the victims of the civil war were indigenous people (most of them Maya) and that 93% of the atrocities by the army, three percent by the Rebels and four percent were committed by other groups. On the basis of the CEH report, criminal charges were brought against the Chief of Staff Héctor Mario López in 2000 , who was arrested in June 2011. Efraín Ríos Montt , dictator and president of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983 , was sentenced to 80 years in prison by a local court in 2013 for genocide and crimes against humanity , but the sentence was overturned shortly afterwards. The commission report also made public that throughout the conflict, the US had supported the country's various military rulers despite knowing about their crimes. Thereupon President Bill Clinton turned to the people of Guatemala in 1999 - it was wrong of the USA to support the military and various secret services of Guatemala , which were involved in human rights abuses and the "violent and widespread repression ".

Origins of the Civil War

Since its independence in 1821/39, Guatemala's history has been shaped by military dictatorships and extreme social differences. By 1944, large landowners , who made up around 2% of the population, owned around 70% of the country's arable land.

Land reform and coup supported by US secret operation

After the overthrow of the dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944, President Juan José Arévalo initiated a phase of reform. His successor Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (President from 1950 to 1954) carried out an extensive land reform in which unused large estates , including those of the US food company United Fruit Company (today: Chiquita Brands International ), were distributed to landless or poor farming families. In June 1954, in the so-called Operation PBSUCCESS , a force of around 400 Guatemalan officers and soldiers set up by the US foreign intelligence service CIA carried out a violent military coup . They overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz and installed General Carlos Castillo Armas as dictator . According to files released by the CIA, the Truman Doctrine is said to have played a major role in preventing a suspected or alleged " communist threat" (see below) from Central America to the USA , see also anti-communism and " red fear " ( Red scare). The fact that CIA chief Allen Welsh Dulles also worked as a lawyer and lobbyist for the United Fruit Company also played a role . His brother, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles , had economic interests in the company through the same law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell .

Motivation for the coup

There is still no scientific consensus about the motives that prompted the US government to launch the coup, although in 1997 some of the files in question were published by the CIA. In part, the cause is pointed to the continuation of older, interventionist US doctrines such as the Truman Doctrine , the Monroe Doctrine and the then new, so-called domino theory . In part, the communism hysteria of that time in the USA during the McCarthy era is emphasized, and in part the already mentioned economic self-interests of the Dulles brothers, who were decisive for the action, as well as the previous massive lobbying and manipulative press work by United Fruit, see also below . Although Arbenz himself was a bourgeois conservative, he worked pragmatically as part of his land reform with the Guatemalan Communist Party, which was influential among the agricultural workers. He legalized the Guatemalan Communist Party (Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (PGT), Guatemalan Labor Party). It was represented in parliament by only four of 57 members and did not have a minister in Arbenz 'cabinet, but it had influence in the Ministry of Agriculture, which was concerned with land reform. These connections were used by the CIA as an opportunity to falsely sell the entire secret operation to the American and world public as a "revolution" in which Guatemala, which is supposedly under the control of communism, was "liberated" by patriotic local military. In addition, the democratically elected Arbenz was systematically and falsely denounced as a communist and it was ensured that this was spread via the US media. The role of the CIA or the US government in the process was kept completely secret from the public and only gradually came to the public decades later.

Invention of the “communist threat” and media manipulation

For the design and coordination of the related extensive disinformation - Campaign for appropriate manipulation of the media was Edward Bernays responsible, who is also the inventor of the modern replacement term Public Relations for the discredited word propaganda was. According to the New York Times , Bernays built a private network of agents in Latin America on behalf of the United Fruit Company from 1951 to spread negative information about Arbenz and to discredit it . To this end , he himself launched false reports in major US newspapers, by means of which the actually conservative, former military man Arbenz was stigmatized as a “communist” and thus public opinion in the USA was gradually prepared for the planned coup.

Domestic political destabilization begins

Carlos Castillo Armas, who was actually installed by the CIA as president or dictator, reversed the social reforms - including land reform - of the ousted President Arbenz, but was assassinated in 1957. General José Miguel Ramón Idígoras Fuentes , responsible for numerous massacres and the brutal counterinsurgency of various unrest in the country under the former dictator Ubico , became the new president. The political destabilization of the country by the planned by the CIA and authorized by the US government is widely regarded as one of the causes of the following 36 year civil war.

Development towards civil war

Under the patronage of the president and dictator José Miguel Ramón Idígoras Fuentes, who came to power indirectly as a result of the CIA coup, the government of Guatemala continued to maintain a close working relationship with the CIA. For example, around 1960 , the US Ambassador Lester D. Mallory had around 5,000 mercenaries in exile, organized and paid by the CIA, train for the planned paramilitary invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba on the Finca La Helvetia farm . With this, the CIA wanted to "win back" Cuba from the communists led by Fidel Castro , but it was a catastrophic and embarrassing failure for the CIA and also for the government of President John F. Kennedy . The farm in Retalhuleu was owned by Roberto Alejos Arzú, a close friend of Idígoras.

In response to the increasingly autocratic style of government of Idígoras Fuentes, a group of young officers from the Fuerte de Matamoros barracks rebelled on November 13, 1960 . After this failed, some of them, such as Luis Augusto Turcios Lima and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa , went underground and developed close ties with communist Cuba. This group formed the core of the forces that were in a sustained armed uprising against the government for the next 36 years .

In Guatemala, the common language rule Conflicto armado interno (internal armed conflict) was found for this military conflict . The aspect was consciously emphasized internally , since neither the Guatemalan government wanted to see itself as a puppet of the US government, nor did the insurgents want to allow Cuban influence . The global public took hardly any notice of this “internal armed conflict” in which a total of up to 250,000 people died or were mostly murdered by government forces as uninvolved civilians.

Parties involved and conflict structure

The following four guerrilla groups were the main opponents of the government during the civil war:

  • Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP, Guerrilla Army of the Poor)
  • Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA, Revolutionary Organization of the Armed People)
  • Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR, Armed Forces of Armed Rebels) founded in late 1962
  • Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT, Guatemalan Workers' Party)

These four groups sabotaged the economy and attacked government and military institutions. They merged in 1982 to form the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (National Guatemalan Revolutionary Association, URNG).

The actions of the guerrillas provided the government with a pretext for extensive so-called counterinsurgency measures . Because the guerrilla movement had the basic military-strategic advantages of an underground movement partly supported by the civilian population, see also Asymmetrical Warfare , it was difficult for the regular Guatemalan military to grasp or fight. As in numerous other such conflicts in Latin America , often co-caused by the United States , this resulted in a dirty war in which the military and unofficial paramilitary groups close to the government committed numerous serious massacres and even mass murders of civilians, mostly of the indigenous Maya population. This resulted in considerable, persistent traumatization of the respective survivors and society. The paramilitary Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (PAC), into which part of the indigenous population had been forced , took part in some of the massacres .

At the same time, paramilitary death squads threatened, tortured and murdered citizens they suspected of being involved in left-wing activities. One of these death squads was the Movimiento de Acción Nacionalista Organizado (MANO, German: Hand ). Her symbol was a white hand. She had contacts with the IV. Cuerpo of the Policía Nacional and acted from June 3, 1966 to 1978. Another death squad that acted from 1977 to 1981 was the Ejército Secreto Anticomunista (ESA, Anti-Communist Secret Army).

The height of the murder in the 1980s

In March 1982 Efraín Ríos Montt came to power in a coup . He was deposed in August 1983 by rival military officials for "insanity". Under Montt's rule, the grave human rights violations that ran through the entire conflict reached a climax. Several thousand people, including numerous Ixil natives, were murdered during his 17-month reign as part of large-scale military campaigns, see also the chronology below . A significant part of the massacres carried out by the military and paramilitary forces during the 36-year civil war , according to the Truth Commission, took place during this period. In 2013, Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity after a lengthy trial with many witness hearings. However, the verdict was overturned just 10 days later by the Guatemalan Constitutional Court due to "formal procedural errors" in a narrow majority decision by the judges and a new hearing ordered. Human rights activists had hailed the verdict against Ríos Montt as "historic" internationally. Never before had a former head of state been convicted of genocide by a court in his own country.

Aboriginal massacre

During his tenure, the military carried out extensive operations against the Mayan Ixil indigenous people who were suspected of supporting the guerrilla movement . Around 400 villages were destroyed, over 1,100 residents were killed and over 1,400 women raped. Soldiers cut open the bellies of pregnant women and dismembered their fetuses . At the 2013 trial of Montt, it was found that his government had used "starvation, mass murder , displacement , rape and air bombing as tactics to destroy the Ixil". According to the court, the murder of infants and pregnant women was designed to destroy the Ixil and sexual violence was used as a means of destroying social cohesion .

Rios Montt said of this counterinsurgency tactic in 1982, based on a quote from Mao Zedong ("the revolutionary swims among the people like a fish in water"):

“The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you can't catch the fish, you have to drain the sea. "

US government support for the dictatorship

Because of its anti-communist orientation, Montt's government was militarily and politically supported by the US government under President Ronald Reagan , as was the similarly proceeding military government in neighboring El Salvador . Reagan called Montt a man "of great personal integrity and commitment who faced the challenge of a brutal, foreign-backed guerrilla". Montt has "wrongly a bad reputation for human rights violations" (orig. "A bum rap for human rights violations"). In 1983, the US government ended an embargo on US military equipment that had been imposed by the Carter administration on human rights violations five years earlier . The reason was that Guatemala had made progress under Ríos Montt in the field of human rights.

Apologies from Bill Clinton for US role

The 1999 report of the Truth Commission (Guatemala: Memory of Silence) showed that the United States had provided political, military and secret service support to the country's various military rulers for several decades, despite knowledge of their crimes . President Bill Clinton turned to the people of Guatemala in 1999 - it was wrong of the US to support the "military and various intelligence agencies" of Guatemala, which had participated in human rights abuses and the "violent and widespread repression".

chronology

1960-1969

1970-1979

1980-1989

  • January 31, 1980: The Spanish embassy was occupied by rebels who wanted to protest against an army massacre in Uspantán, El Quiché. When the police stormed the embassy, ​​a fire broke out in which a total of 39 people died.
  • In 1981 the Ronald Reagan administration resumed military cooperation.
  • September 1981: According to the UNHCR , around 40,000 people fled the war to neighboring countries.
  • In February 1982 the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca announced its establishment.
  • On March 7, 1982, General Ángel Aníbal Guevara was elected president-elect.
  • March 22, 1982: The evangelical general Efraín Ríos Montt seizes power.
  • April 1, 1982: With the Plan Nacional de Seguridad y Desarrollo (National Security and Development Plan), the strategy of the defensive villages and PAC is applied under Ríos. These counterinsurgency programs result in over 100,000 international refugees and over a million internally displaced persons .
  • July 1982: The operation plan "Sofía" was a concretization of the operation plan "Plan de campaña Victoria 1982". The military maneuvers focused on actions in the north of El Quiché and were devised in July 1982, as was the case in a note dated July 14, 1982 from Francisco Ángel Castellanos Góngora , the commander of Puerto San José ( Escuintla department ), to the commander of the emergency services of Q. 'umarkaj (Gumarcaj; Santa Cruz del Quiché ) proves. The retired Diplomado de Estado Mayor (DEM) and Colonel of the Infantry Francisco Ángel Castellanos Góngora was struck down by gunshots from masked attackers on July 31, 2006 in a laundry in Guatemala City in the 19th zone and died in hospital. The record says in the text that the “Sofía” plan of operations was drawn up by these commanders in fulfillment of what the Army General Staff ordered them to do. The Army Chief of Staff at the time was Héctor López Fuentes , who in February 2002 told the Ministry of Justice that he had received direct orders from the then President Efraín Ríos Montt and the State Secretary in the Ministry of Defense Humberto Mejía Víctores .

The massacre assigned to the "Sofía" operation plan:

  • On July 7, 1982, the army arrived in the Caserío Puente Alto settlement in the village of El Quetzal, Barillas, in the Huehuetenango department. The men were separated from the women, some women were raped, and about 360 people were murdered.
  • On July 17, 1982, the army came to the village of San Francisco, Nentón, in Huehuetenango Department , called the population for a gathering and murdered 350 people.
  • On July 17, 1982, the army went into the municipality of Plan de Sánchez, closed the entrances and exits and pulled people out of their homes. The women were raped, 368 people were murdered, and the survivors were ordered to bury the bodies. The army withdrew on July 19, 1982.
  • On August 15, 1982, the army arrived in the village of San Francisco Javier, Santa María Nebaj, in the Quiché department and murdered 30 people with firearms and machetes.
  • On September 9, 1982, 150 soldiers accompanied by AC patrols came to the village of Vibitz, Santa María Nebaj and murdered 17 people.
  • On September 14, 1982, the PAC and regular government troops came to the settlement of Agua Fría, in Chicamán, in the department of El Quiché, where they murdered 92 people.
  • On December 7, 1982, a Kaibile unit murdered 252 people in Dos Erres .

Other events in the 1980s:

  • In August 1983, Ríos was pushed away by his defense minister, Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores .
  • In 1983 the PAC and the Wehrdörfer were institutionalized.
  • In June 1984 the "Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo" (GAM; Group for Mutual Aid) was established, which campaigned for the clarification of over 40,000 cases of Desaparecidos .
  • In February 1984 the trade union confederation UNSITRAGUA was founded.
  • In January 1986 Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo became president of the Democracia Cristiana Guatemalteca .
  • From 1986 the Cerezo government had police and economic cooperation with the governments of Helmut Kohl (Germany), Felipe González (Spain), Ronald Reagan (USA), Wilfried Martens (Belgium), Jacques Chirac (France), Bettino Craxi (Italy) and Jaime Lusinchi (Venezuela).
  • In 1986 the UNRG agreed to enter into a dialogue with the Cerezo government.
  • In August 1987 negotiations on peace agreements for Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica took place in Esquipulas (Costa Rica).
  • September 11, 1987 Agreement to found the Comisión Nacional de Reconciliación (National Reconciliation Commission).
  • From October 7th to 9th, 1987, representatives of the UNRG and the government met in Madrid.
  • From 1987 to 1988 the government troops carried out a major attack against the guerrillas and the population.
  • Protest movements appeared more self-confident, landless peasants occupied land.
  • In December 1987 the union alliance Unidad de Acción Sindical y Popular (UASP) was founded. Member organizations were Unión Sindical de Trabajadores de Guatemala (UNSITRAGUA), student organizations and the Comité de Unidad Campesina.
  • From March 18 to April 14, 1988, the Representación Unitaria de la Oposición Guatemalteca (RUOG) traveled to Guatemala despite threats from the government to review the human rights situation. Rigoberta Menchú and Rolando Castillo were arrested at the airport. The two were released after international protests.
  • May 11, 1988 attempted coup by right-wing extremists and civilians
  • On September 10, 1988, the widows' association Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (CONVIGUA) was founded in Guatemala, he applied for admission to the UASP and requested participation in the Diálogo Nacional .
  • On November 22, 1988, 22 residents were murdered in a massacre by government forces special forces in the village of El Aguacate in Chimaltenango.
  • On March 8, 1988, the Diálogo Nacional began , the representatives of the government troops and the Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas (CACIF) boycotted the events. The UNRG was unable to participate due to pressure from the government and government troops. A delegation from RUOG and the Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala (CDHG) traveled temporarily to Guatemala to take part in the dialogue.

1990-1996

  • October 5, 1995: Despite the ongoing negotiations for a peace treaty, soldiers carry out another massacre in the village of Xamal in the Alta Verapaz department .
  • December 29, 1996: Signing of the peace treaty in Guatemala. Under the auspices of the outgoing UN Secretary General Butros Butros-Ghali , representatives of the UNRG and the government Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen sign the Acuerdo de paz firme y duradera (Fixed and Enduring Peace Agreement).
  • April 26, 1998: Juan José Gerardi Conedera is murdered by three officers.

literature

  • Greg Grandin: The last colonial massacre. Latin America in the Cold War , Chicago et al. (University of Chicago Press) 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-30690-2

documentary

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ World: Americas Guatemala 'genocide' probe blames state. In: BBC News . February 25, 1999, accessed December 14, 2011 .
  2. ↑ Toni Keppeler: Suspected butcher in custody. In: the daily newspaper . June 19, 2011. Retrieved June 20, 2011 .
  3. ↑ a b Guatemala's dictator sentenced to 80 years in prison. Die Zeit, May 11, 2013
  4. ↑ a b Guatemala: 80 years imprisonment for former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. orf.at, May 11, 2013
  5. ↑ a b c Guatemala: Bill Clinton's Latest Damn-Near Apology. Mother Jones , March 16, 1999
  6. ↑ Stephen Schlesinger , Stephen Kinzer : Bitter Fruit: the story of the American coup in Guatemala. 2nd rev. and expanded Ed. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. i.a. 2005, ISBN 0-674-01930-X .
  7. ^ The approved CIA documents
  8. ↑ a b c A Banana Republic Once Again? PR Watch, December 27, 2010
  9. ↑ a b c d Ron Chernow: First Among Flacks. Edward L. Bernays created many a public relations image, starting with his own. New York Times, August 16, 1998
  10. ↑ No comment . In: The mirror . No. 35 , 1961 ( online - Jan. 25, 1961 ).
  11. ^ Time , Jan. 6, 1961, Mystery Strip
  12. ↑ Guatemala Civil War 1960–1996. In: GlobalSecurity.org. February 20, 2007, accessed May 14, 2010 .
  13. ↑ Christopher Hitchens : The Case Against Henry Kissinger . In: Harper's Magazine . February 2001, p. 37 ( Online [PDF]). Online ( Memento from August 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ The Current Role of Military Power in Latin America. ( Memento from October 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Invitation text to the day seminar of the educational institute of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Berlin in cooperation with the FDCL, September 8, 2007.
  15. ↑ National Security Archive: Chile: 16,000 Secret Documents Declassified. CIA Forced to Release Hundreds of Records of Covert Operations , Nov. 13, 2000
  16. ↑ Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico , Listado de organizaciones paramilitares anticomunistas, (1962–1981)
  17. ^ Peter Gaupp, San José de Costa Rica: Efraín Ríos Montt in court. In: nzz.ch. February 1, 2013, accessed October 14, 2018 .
  18. ^ The court overturns the judgment against Ríos Montt. RP online, May 21, 2013
  19. ↑ Guatemala: Court overturns ex-dictator Montt. Spiegel online, May 21, 2013
  20. ↑ repealed against Guatemala's ex-dictator. drradio.de, May 21, 2013
  21. ^ Profiles: Guatemala's Efrain Rios Montt. BBC, May 10, 2013
  22. ↑ Cecibel Romero: Former dictator under house arrest. In: the daily newspaper . January 27, 2012. Retrieved January 30, 2012 .
  23. ↑ Tim Johnson: Guatemala court gives 80-year term to ex-dictator Rios Montt. In: The Miami Herald . May 10, 2013, archived from the original on June 29, 2013 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 .
  24. ↑ US-backed Guatemalan former dictator gets life for genocide. In: Russia Today . May 11, 2013; Archived from the original on June 30, 2013 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 .
  25. ^ The American Presidency Project. Remarks in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Following a Meeting With President Jose Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala. 4th December 1982
  26. ↑ Reagan ignores rights violations. The Lakeland Ledger, December 7, 1982
  27. ↑ As Rios Montt Trial Nears End, a Look Back at US Role in Guatemala's Civil War. PBS Newshour, May 10, 2013
  28. ^ Memory of Silence. Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification.
  29. ^ Dieter Nohlen: Elections in the Americas: North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. University Press, 2005, p. 339.
  30. ↑ a b http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/en_qr.pdf
  31. ↑ Matan a coronel retirado. (No longer available online.) In: Prensa Libre . August 1, 2006, formerly in the original ; accessed on March 6, 2018 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.prensalibre.com  
  32. ↑ Plan Sofía confirma autoría de masacres. In: Prensa Libre . March 18, 2007, archived from the original on May 13, 2014 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 .
  33. ^ Guatemala Committee Zurich in May 1989
  34. ↑ Christine Klissenbauer: Danger to Peace? The Xamal massacre . In: The overview , vol. 31 (1995), issue 4, p. 89.
  35. ^ Government of Guatemala Acuerdo de paz firme y duradera.pdf ( Memento of July 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )