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Overview
This fascinating study of the 'guerrilla generation' is based on in-depth interviews with both guerrilla comandantes and political and military leaders of the time. Dirk Kruijt analyses the dreams and achievements, the successes and failures, the utopias and dystopias of an entire Central American generation and its leaders. Guerrillas ranges widely, from the guerrilla movement's origins in poverty, oppression and exclusion; its tactics in warfare; the ill-fated experiment with Sandinista government in Nicaragua; to the subsequent 'normalization' of guerrilla movements within democratic societies. The story told here is vital for understanding contemporary social movements in Latin America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136960 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 509 KB |
About the Author
Dirk Kruijt is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at Utrecht University, and has previously served as an adviser at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at several embassies in Latin America and the Caribbean. His previous books include 'Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America' (Zed Books 2008) and, with Kees Koonings, 'Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities' (Zed Books 2015).
Read an Excerpt
Guerrillas
War and Peace in Central America
By Dirk Kruijt
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Dirk KruijtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-262-7
CHAPTER 1
Dictators and Civil Wars
In its concentration of culturally and ethnically fragmented nations, Central America is to the Americas what the Balkans is to Europe. Enduring social and political divisions, which have tormented the Central American countries for centuries, will form the backdrop of the present study. In pre-Columbian times this region comprised, along with the Yucatan peninsula and Chiapas (both now part of Mexico), the heartland of the Maya peoples whose fascinating civilization once intrigued the conquistadors. After the Spanish conquest, the vanquished indigenous peoples of the region were incorporated into the lower strata of their respective colonial societies. Guatemala in particular bears the scars of the ethnic segregation that was imposed by colonial and post-colonial rulers. Under Spanish colonial administration, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica were unified under the Captaincy General of Guatemala. In 1823 they declared independence from Spain and Mexico, constituting a federal republic, the United Provinces of Central America. Until the present, a vague though unmistakeable nostalgia has prevailed in the five Central American countries – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica – about a common destiny. In contrast to the situation in other countries of Latin America, most citizens of these five countries retain a dual identity: as citizens of their particular nations and as Central Americans.
From a political standpoint, the original federation of the United Provinces of Central America was extremely unstable. It collapsed when Honduras left the federation in 1838. Two years later, Honduran president Francisco Morazán tried to reunite the fractured states. The Union dissolved again and a series of civil wars, secessions and reconquests followed. Independent republics, federations and confederations comprising three, four or five former provinces were first established and then dissolved during a span of several decades in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1850s the five republics formed a military alliance to resist an invasion of Nicaragua led by US adventurer William Walker. Small armies were formed under the command of local potentates who pressed the peons of the indigenous villages into military service, sometimes within private militias, sometimes under the banner of the national armed forces. This kind of activity occurred in all of the Central American republics except for Costa Rica, governed by civilian presidents and maintaining a small army limited to 1,000 enlisted men. In the other Central American countries, however, a long succession of dictators, militia leaders, civilian–military juntas, war heroes, guerrilla leaders, separatist colonels and republican liberals served as president for longer or shorter terms of office. Military commanders were especially predominant as heads of state or leaders of violent revolution. In the early 1920s Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua made the last attempt to form a Central American federation. In the meantime, Chiapas was incorporated into Mexico, the Guanacaste peninsula was transferred from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, and the English acquired British Honduras (later Belize) from Guatemala.
Costa Rica in many respects constitutes an exception to the turbulence and instability that plagued its Central American neighbours. After a short civil war in 1948, victorious president José Figueres formally abolished the national army. In the decades that followed, the country evolved into a relatively prosperous and democratic welfare state with high standards of education and public health. Sadly, however, the long-standing tradition of harsh dictatorship and bitter repression continued in the other Central American countries throughout most of the twentieth century. Brutal repression, mass poverty, ethnic cleavages (most notably in Guatemala), large-scale social exclusion and religious division have been the characteristics of the other member states of the former federation. These societal fissures constituted fertile ground for the resentment and despair that eventually found expression in revolutionary movements. Again with the exception of Costa Rica, the countries of the Central American region were organized during the 160 years following independence as oligarchic economies whose cohesion was maintained by means of repression rather than participation. El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were strongly divided societies where an economy of poverty and a society of exclusion were maintained by long periods of military rule.
The guerrilla movements of the 1960s and 1970s were thus launched in a context of transgenerational resentment against a seemingly eternal regime of military domination and dictatorship, within societies permeated with repression and fear. When guerrilla groups emerged as armed actors it was against military-controlled regimes that fought back by means of organized brutality and indiscriminate terror in counterinsurgency campaigns directed against small bands of rebel fighters and their actual or potential bases of support – the rural peasants and their ethnic and economic organizations. Within a few years, the military governments were at war against a very considerable segment of their populations, whom they defined as 'terrorists' and 'communists'. Repression of dissent and indiscriminate persecution of the peasant population would later be accompanied by urban terror campaigns, organized against 'communists, future communists and potential communists': politicians, journalists, intellectuals, priests, student and union leaders, and those who led popular organizations. Political murders of those who were part of this broadly defined network of enemies became quite common, resulting in what might be termed a banality of bloodshed among dissenting activists.
El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were in the last part of the twentieth century centres of low-intensity warfare and counterinsurgency operations. From 1970 until 1994, parallel and partially interrelated civil wars were fought in these three countries. The numbers of dead and disappeared, along with the internal and external refugees created because of the wars, are very high in relation to the countries' total populations. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan truth commissions (Comisión de la Verdad, 1993; CEH, 1999) provide minimum estimates of 70,000 and 150,000 deaths respectively. The total death count for Nicaragua, including both the guerrilla campaigns of the late 1970s and the Contra War in the 1980s, is 110,000. That means a minimum of 330,000 deaths out of a total population in the three countries of some 15 million people in the early 1980s. These prolonged civil wars had a devastating impact on national and regional societies. Torres-Rivas, author of the analytical first volume of the report of the Guatemalan Truth Commission, remarks that the army's counterinsurgency offensive of 1980–83 'did not annihilate the guerrillas but forced their retreat while physically destroying 440 indigenous villages, murdering 75,000 campesinos, and displacing 100,000 to 500,000 people' (1993a: 125).
The Central American economies were, even in comparison with those of other Latin American countries, characterized by a stark contrast between a small number of the very rich and masses of the desperately poor, and displayed features of a harsh and unmitigated capitalism reminiscent of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The labour force was brutally exploited and trade unions as well as organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of workers and peasants were fiercely repressed. In terms of poverty and exclusion, Central America was a vast area of misfortune, suffering and economic hardship. Symbiotic relationships between economic oligarchies and military regimes were a distinctive feature of the socio-political order of the region, creating societies of repression and fear. Law and order were generally represented by death squads or militarized police who, weekly or monthly death lists in hand, marched into villages to restore respect for de facto law and reactionary order. Calls for unions, social reform and revolutionary justice were silenced by bloody gunfire. In the 1930s social revolts in both El Salvador and Nicaragua ended in massacres and led to the return of dictatorial regimes that ruthlessly repressed any social change or reformist movement for the next forty years. After decades of anachronistic dictatorship in Guatemala, the successive democratic governments of Arévalo and Árbenz between 1944 and 1954 seemed to herald a future of economic progress and political participation. Nevertheless, the announcement by the Árbenz government of progressive social policies and of a land reform that envisioned the expropriation of US properties led to a CIA-organized coup against his government, which was followed by thirty-five years of dictatorship and civil strife. The combination of shattered hopes, political backwardness, and the brutal repression of the military regimes, along with the perceived impossibility of peaceful and democratic change, are all part of the economic, social and political context of the emergence of the guerrilla comandantes who would later lead frentes, and of the soldiers who followed their orders.
In the next two sections of this chapter this socio-political background will be examined in more depth. The next section presents an overview of the socio-economic situation in each of the three countries. This is followed by a description of the Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan societies of repression and fear. The chapter then concludes with a short chronology of the Central American civil wars that were fought in the last half of the twentieth century.
Poverty and Exclusion
Nicaragua's surface area is 130,000 sq. km, Guatemala's is 110,000 sq. km and El Salvador's is 21,000 sq. km. All three countries are small in terms of size and population. Upon gaining independence in 1823, Central America's total population did not exceed 1.25 million persons. By the outbreak of the First World War the region had 5 million inhabitants. In the early 1980s Guatemala City had a population of 1.2 million (15 per cent of the national population), San Salvador 500,000 (10 per cent of the national population), and Managua 650,000 (21 per cent of the national population). The capital cities of these countries are the centres of each nation's economic, social, cultural and political activity. During the civil war decades, Nicaragua was the most urbanized of the three countries, followed by El Salvador (see Appendix 2). Guatemala, on the other hand, preserved its rural character. Between 1960 and 1980 the population per km grew from 10 to 20 in Nicaragua, from 36 to 67 in Guatemala, and from 116 to 226 in densely populated El Salvador (Vilas, 1994: 16).
In all three countries, tiny oligarchic elites, consisting of a relatively small number of families related by blood and marriage, exercised economic power through ownership of vast tracts of rural land, large-scale coffee and sugar production, banking and financial services, and construction companies. Central America has never been an industrial stronghold and thus never developed a large, highly organized urban-industrial proletariat. Dunkerley (1988: 207) has provided rough estimates of an urban-industrial proletariat in the 1960s and the 1970s: El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua had an apparently stable proletariat, oscillating between 9.3 and 11.6 per cent of the economically active population (EAP) between 1962 and 1975. Unemployment estimates in the early 1970s are 13 per cent in El Salvador and Guatemala and 19 per cent in Nicaragua. International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates of the total unemployment affecting the EAP during the 1980s are more than 20 per cent in Nicaragua, more than a third in Guatemala and 42 per cent in El Salvador. The professionals and public employees of the urban middle classes had their own colegios and trade unions (of schoolteachers and medical personnel, for instance). Organization among the peasant population, the older generation of which still remembered the bloody repression of the campesino unions in the 1930s, was 'discouraged' by the authorities. Those who persisted in their efforts were reminded to avoid dangerous associations by vigilant militarized police forces in all three countries.
The Human Development Index (HDI) profiles of the UNDP reports classify El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, together with Bolivia, Haiti and Honduras, as the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. In Table 1.1. poverty data for the mid-war period, before the HDI profiles had been published, are summarized. One telling indicator of rural poverty is that, in 1975, 41 per cent of El Salvador's rural families were landless and 34 per cent of rural families had farms smaller than 1 hectare. In 1979, 55 per cent of Guatemala's farms were smaller than 1.5 hectares; collectively, these farms comprised a mere 4 per cent of the nation's rural area. In 1976, 61 per cent of the farms were smaller than 7 hectares and these 61 per cent accounted for 4 per cent of the national farmland (Dunkerley, 1988: 183). It is also important to remember that in the decades preceding the conflicts, and during the conflicts themselves, the relatively attractive option of escaping to the formal and informal job market in Mexico and the USA did not yet exist.
The present-day pattern of urban poverty that characterizes the urban and metropolitan cityscape in the form of barriadas, tugurios or barrios populares was largely unknown before the early 1960s in Central America. From that time forward the scarred landscape of urban poverty became evident in each of the capital cities. Mixco, a shanty town inhabited by poor rural-to-urban migrants, arose on the outskirts of Guatemala. Managua was similarly swollen by the ranks of very poor rural peasants. Newly formed slums cropped up in San Salvador's poor inner city, which abutted the well-to-do middle-class suburbs. The effects of this concentration of urban poverty were not strictly limited to the physical landscape of these cities. The presence of densely populated urban pockets of poverty also had political consequences.
Rural poverty had been a reality from time immemorial but had always remained relatively hidden; the reality of urban poverty within the shadows of the seat of national government, however, was impossible to deny. The middle classes and especially the urban student population of the national and the private (Jesuit) universities in the capitals were confronted on a daily basis with the presence of large and generally unorganized contingents of second-class citizens who were victims of poverty, exclusion and discrimination.
Societies of Repression and Fear
Guatemala
With only two exceptions, Guatemala was governed by military putschists or military presidents from the 1920s to the mid-1980s. The despotic presidencies of General Estrada and General Ubico in the 1920s and 1930s served as models for the character in El Señor Presidente (1946), the widely acclaimed novel by Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose son Rodrigo would become the comandante-en-jefe of one of the three Guatemalan guerrilla movements. The decade of democratic government enjoyed by Guatemala between 1944 and 1954 ended with a coup against President Árbenz after the landholdings of the United Fruit Company were threatened by confiscation and 'communism'. Árbenz had indeed legalized the Communist Party (the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores [PGT]) in 1952 but the party never had more than a couple of hundred members at that time. From 1954 to 1985, Guatemala's head of state was, with a single exception, always an army officer. This one exception was the formally civilian government of Méndez Montenegro (1966–70), during which the military established a level of repression that would endure for several decades after making a secret pact with the old guard of fiercely anti-communist colonels. Using the threat of a communist overthrow as a pretext, the military institutions began to acquire disproportionate power in relation to the public sector, political parties and social movements, a dynamic that gradually led to a hybrid civilian–military regime of violence and repression. An alliance between the military and the civilian political leadership became the modus operandi of any new government, whether constitutional or imposed. General Gramajo, who later served as minister of defence in the civilian cabinet of democratically elected President Cerezo in the late-1980s, described the situation as follows:
And afterwards there were the president–generals who were elected, either fraudulently or otherwise. But in any case it was no big deal, because any fraud committed was at the expense of some other general. Any political party that wanted to take part in the political process had to have a general as their candidate. We thus came to the point where there was a knot – a knot where all differences between the military, political and administrative hierarchies were nothing more than one indistinguishable tangle.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Guerrillas by Dirk Kruijt. Copyright © 2008 Dirk Kruijt. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Edelberto Torres - RivasIntroduction: Guerrillas and Comandantes
1. Dictators and Civil Wars
2. Genesis of a Guerrilla Generation
3. Inside the Guerrilla
4. Utopia and Dystopia, Nicaragua (1979 - 1990)
5. Negotiations, Peace and Post - War Integration
6. Legacies and Ambivalences
Appendix I: Politico - Military Organizations
Appendix II: Demographic Data
Appendix III: List of Interviews
Notes
Bibliography
Index