Luis Augusto Turcios Lima

Luis Augusto Turcios Lima (born November 23, 1941 in Guatemala City ; † October 2, 1966 ibid) was a Guatemalan professional officer of the Ejército de Guatemala ( Armed Forces of Guatemala ) and later, alongside Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, the most influential guerrilla leader and comandante ( major ) of the left-wing Fuerzas Armas Rebeldes (FAR). He died in the early morning hours of October 2, 1966 under circumstances that have not yet been clarified in a traffic accident on Avenida Roosevelt in Guatemala City.

Childhood, adolescence and military training

All that is known about his father , a watchmaker by the name of Turcios, is that he was born in 1947 by his wife, Lilian Turcios Lima, b. 1923, divorced. The couple had three children, of whom Luis Augusto was the oldest. After the divorce, the mother lived single with the three children and worked as an office worker.

Turcios joined the Escuela Politécnica Guatemala at the age of 15 as a cadete ( cadet ) and completed his training with the appointment of subteniente ( lieutenant ). According to his mother, Doña Lilian, who was interviewed by the Guatemalan daily La Prensa Libre in July 2009 , her son did not join the army out of a special predilection for the military, but for her and her two younger siblings because of the relatively good people To be able to support salary better. Presumably in 1959/60 he attended a ranger course at the US military academy Fort Benning . These courses were international and lasted a good eight weeks in this epoch, in which the participants were also instructed in small-scale war methods.

The coup movement of November 13, 1960

After his return from the USA, Turcios and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa joined a putschist group of senior officers, the Compañia del Niño Jesús ( Baby Jesus Society ). The secret society's political goal was the overthrow of the government of President General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes . Ydígoras, voluntarily or under US pressure, tolerated the presence of Cuban exile groups in the Huehuetenango region who, with the help of the CIA, were preparing the overthrow of the government of Fidel Castro ( Operation Mongoose ). The coup plotters saw in tolerating these activities a betrayal of both national and Latin American interests.

Allegedly up to 120 officers were involved in the conspiracy, but, as far as is known, the military intelligence service G-2 had at least rudimentary knowledge of the coup, after which only a good 45 of the rebels originally involved took part in the operation. It was led by Captain Arturo Chur del Cid in the fortress of Matamoros, Colonel Rafael Sesam Pereira in Zacapa and Colonel Eduardo Llerena Müller in Puerto Barrios .

The coup was put down by Ydígoras in three days with the help of loyal officers and the use of tanks and the air force. While Yon Sosa fled to Honduras, Turcios sought asylum in El Salvador .

The creation of the MR-13

Apparently in the spring of 1961 Yon and Turcios returned to Guatemala and contacted the Guatemalan Communist Party, the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (PGT). However, this only had a certain following in the working class and intellectual circles in the capital ; it had no influence on the broad mass of the rural population. At this point in time, the ex-officers in the PGT apparently saw only civil support for their original goal of overthrowing the Ydigora government through a military uprising.

A radicalization Yons and Turcios entered after their comrade Alejandro de León had been arrested at one of these exploratory meetings by the police and killed in custody. The guerrilla movement founded by Yon and Turcios therefore originally bore the name Movimiento Guerrillero Alejandro de León , but was renamed Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (MR-13) (MR-13) in 1962 or 1963 , the name being reminiscent of the coup of November 13, 1960 .

Apparently from 1963 onwards, Yon and Turcios oriented themselves towards a Castristian concept and the so-called Foco theory Che Guevara . The conditions for a second revolution in Latin America based on the Cuban model appeared to be better in Guatemala than in any other country in Latin America: Extreme poverty and economic backwardness, unequal educational opportunities and a military dictatorship. However, it was overlooked that the broad masses, especially the indigenous rural population, rejected practically any contact with the mestizo middle and upper classes, regardless of their political orientation, due to their experiences from the colonial era .

The foundation of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR)

On February 6, 1962, under Yons and Turcio's leadership, the MR-13 began guerrilla fighting in three divisions in northeast Guatemala in the regions of Zacapa , El Progreso and Izabal . The number of guerrillas could only be estimated at the time. Lamberg suspects that the MR-13 never had more than 60 combatants operating at the same time.

The first phase of the fight apparently only lasted a few weeks, then the guerrillas returned, u. a. decimated by desertions, returned to the capital and participated in student protests against Idígora's government. Yon's strategic goal had apparently been to persuade sympathetic circles of the military to carry out another coup and to bring the government down. The student unrest, in which the PGT was also involved, formed the nucleus for a new edition of the guerrillas, which from the outset was to be characterized by tendencies of division, especially between an Orthodox-Marxist wing under Turcios and a Trotskyist wing under Yon.

In March 1962 there were three guerrilla groups, the Movimiento Revolucionario 20 de Octubre (MR-20) of the PGT under the leadership of Colonel Paz Tejada, the Movimiento Revolucionario 12 de Octubre of the student group AEU and the remnants of the MR-13. The first two groups were wiped out by the army in March. Lamberg suspects that the PGT's participation in the guerrillas was always only of a tactical nature, so that if Ydígoras were overthrown, representatives of their own guerrilla group could be sent to a government junta to be formed.

Apparently at the beginning of 1963, the remnants of the three movements formed the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), which operated in three zones:

- Zone 1 ( Frente Alaric Bennett ) in the Izabal region under Yon Sosa,

- Zone 2 ( Frente de la Granadilla ) in the Zacapa - Chicimula region under the former officers Luis Trejo Esquivel and Bernal Hernández,

- Zone 3 ( Frente Guerrillero Edgar Ibarra , FGEI) southwest of Lake Izabal under Turcios.

Apparently, operations against the army and police did not start until the end of 1963. In the meantime, however, the domestic political situation had worsened, as a right-wing extremist group of officers led by Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, with the support of the USA, overthrew the Ydigora government in March 1963.

The split of the FAR

As far as is known, at the end of 1963 the FAR began to split into two wings, a more or less Orthodox-Marxist one around Turcios and the PGT and a Trotskyist one under Yon. While Turcios and the PGT favored a so-called national-democratic solution, in which the rule of a progressive bourgeoisie was sought first and the guerrillas served a purely political purpose, Yon and his Mexican Trotskyist advisers propagated a socialist revolution, whose sponsors the peasants and not the guerrillas should be.

The split ended in early 1965, but apparently did not affect the personal relationship between Turcios and Yon Sosa. Turcios took part in the Conferencia Tricontinental , which took place in Havana in January 1966 , but the conflicts between the supporters of the PGT / FAR and Yon Sosas were in no way discussed on the Guatemalan side; however, according to Lambeg, Castro criticized the Trotskyist tendency “extensively and in a strictly orthodox style”.

It is unclear what political position Turcios took from March 1966, when the liberal Julio César Méndez Montenegro won the presidential elections. During the election campaign, the PGT supported Méndez, which the FAR allegedly interpreted as treason; on the other hand, Turcios is said to have joined the PGT himself in June or July 1966.

The report from the US television team

After Turcios, Yon, and other members of the guerrilla had already been interviewed by the Mexican political scientist Adolfo Gilly in early 1965 , whose report appeared in the Monthly Review in May of the same year . Independent Socialist Magazine was published, Turcios was visited in April 1966 in the Sierra de las Minas by a US television team, which consisted of journalists Robert Rogers and Ted Yates, and cameraman Richard Norling and sound engineer Al Hoagland. The meeting had allegedly been prepared in the capital for five weeks. The team was accepted by the FAR near Zacapa.

In interviews with the team, Turcios named the People's Republic of China , Algeria , Cuba and Vietnam as political role models, and referred to Mao Tse-tung and Ché Guevara as personal models . According to Rogers and Yates, the group at that time consisted of a good 50 people, of whom a good two thirds were campesinos ; there was also an American who sympathized with the guerrilla. It is unclear whether the team's recordings were ever broadcast or archived. The report was published in print in 1968 in Donald Robinson's anthology The dirty wars .

death

In the early morning hours of October 2, 1966, Turcios had an accident at the wheel of an Austin Mini Cooper at kilometer 11 on Avenida Roosevelt on the outskirts of Guatemala City. In the car there was also the 18-year-old student Silvia Yvonne Flores Letona and a second, unknown woman. While Turcios died at the scene of the accident, Flores Letona passed away on the way to the hospital. The second passenger suffered burns and abrasions.

There are two versions of the accident. According to Guatemalan press reports, the car hit an obstacle on the road and overturned. According to a report from Radio Havana , an explosion inside the vehicle was the reason for the accident. Turcio's mother still assumed in 2009 that the accident was caused by a bomb: Yo sé que le pusierion una bomba en el carro ( I know that a bomb was placed in his car ). At Turcio's funeral, there were allegedly 1500 mourners present, including FAR members in combat uniforms with openly worn weapons.

In the same month, the Guatemalan army, which has since been trained by military advisers from the Green Berets , began an offensive against the FAR. Turcio's successor as comandante of the FAR was his deputy Julio César Macías alias César Montes .

literature

• Pablo Monsanto: Somos los jóvenes rebeldes. Guatemala insurgente , Ciudad Guatemala (F&G Editores) 2013. ISBN 978-9929-552-83-8
• Fritz René Allemann : Power and impotence of the guerrillas. R. Piper & Co., Munich 1974, ISBN 3-492-02006-2 .
• Jean Lartéguy : Guerrillas or the fourth death of Che Guevara. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968.
• Richard Gott: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY 1971.
• Julio César Macías: Wed Camino: La Guerrilla. La apasionante autobiografía del legendario combatiente centroamericano “César Montes”. Presentación de Carlos Montemayor, Mexico, DF 1998.
• Robert F. Lamberg: The guerrillas in Latin America. Theory and Practice of a Revolutionary Model. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-423-04116-1 .
• Robert H. Holden: Armies Without Nations. Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960. New York 2004.
• Robert Rogers, Ted Yates: Again - “Bandits” in Guatemala. In: Donald Robinson (Ed.): The dirty wars. New York 1968, pp. 173-180.
• H. Rosada-Grenados: Soldados en el poder: Proyecto militar en Guatemala (1944–1990). Amsterdam 1999.
• Adolfo Gilly: The Guerrilla Movement in Guatemala. In: Monthly Review. Independent Socialist Magazine. May 1965, pp. 9-40.
• Major Otto Lewitzka: Ranger training in the USA. In: Troop Practice. 5, 1959, pp. 359-363.
• Wolfgang Schreyer : The kidnapping , in: Wolfgang Schreyer: The kidnapping. Erzählungen , Halle / Leipzig (Mitteldeutscher Verlag) 3rd ed. 1979, pp. 157–277.

Web links

• Photo of Turcios, location and time unknown, approx. 1964 [1]
• Luis Turcios, Leader of the Leftist Guerrilla Forces in Guatemala, is Killed in an Auto Crash at 24. In: New York Times. October 4, 1966, [2]
• Julieta Sandoval: La madre del insurgente. ( The mother of the insurgent. ) In: Semenario de Prensa Libre. No. 264 July 26, 2009, [3]
• Title page of "La Prensa Libre" with the news of Turcio's accidental death [4]