Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0149/01493.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 28KB | 456 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01493}
$Pretitle{278}
$Title{Guatemala
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Jan Knippers Black and Martin C. Needler}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{guatemala
colonial
indians
indian
spanish
mayan
de
central
first
new}
$Date{1983}
$Log{Mayan Temple*0149303.scf
Spanish Architectural Styles*0149304.scf
}
Country:     Guatemala
Book:        Guatemala, A Country Study
Author:      Jan Knippers Black and Martin C. Needler
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1983

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

     The history of Guatemala is a tale of two societies in which more than
one-half the people still lived within the Indian culture in the 1980s. It is
also a tale of intermittent conflict, insurgency, and retaliation first
brought about by patterns of Spanish conquest over four and one-half
centuries ago. The Spaniards and the Indians did not live in separate worlds,
but neither have their cultures successfully fused. Modern Guatemala remained
characterized by the legacies of the unintegrated and unequal development of
these two societies.

     As in other parts of the New World, the central feature of Spanish
settlement was the establishment of large landed estates and various systems
of forced Indian labor for cultivating them. During the three centuries of the
colonial period, these estates slowly spread along the fertile mountain
valleys and across the more level stretches of the upland plateaus.

     The land tenure patterns in Guatemala have been and remain among the most
unequal in Latin America. The lot of the Indian peasant has improved only
marginally since the pattern of Spanish settlement was crystallized in the
seventeenth century. Relationships between landholders and tenants or
itinerant wage laborers have been exploitive, and reform efforts have been
vigorously resisted by those holding effective political and economic power.
It was not until the decade between 1944 and 1954 that the first concerted
effort was made by the government to reconstruct economic relationships to the
benefit of workers and peasants.

     For several centuries a center of Mayan culture, one of the  most
advanced pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World, the area that is now
Guatemala became the seat of Spanish government for all of Central America.
After independence it was initially the seat of the short-lived Federation of
Central America.

     From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Guatemalan politics
was dominated by a succession of four caudillos (dictators). The first of
these, Jose Rafael Carrera, an illiterate peasant who was rigorously Roman
Catholic and a political reactionary, rose to power in 1837-two years before
the collapse of the Central American federation-and continued to be the
dominant figure in Guatemalan politics until his death in 1865.

     The second caudillo, Justo Rufino Barrios, whose regime lasted from 1873
to 1885, was known to many as the "Great Reformer." He stripped the Catholic
church of many privileges, began an extensive public works program,
introduced electricity in the capital, extended railroad lines, and
established a national school system and a civil code. He also abolished the
Indian communal landholding system and introduced private property rights into
the Indian villages.

     The dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) was notable for
its corruption and its favoritism toward the privileged classes and foreign
capital. Dictatorial rule was resumed in 1931 with the accession to power of
Jorge Ubico. He refilled the treasury coffers, balanced the budget, restored
the nation's international credit, and built more roads and hospitals than all
of his predecessors combined. He also executed or exiled his potential
enemies.

     Ruling through repression in favor of the economic elite, Ubico,
described as a policeman at heart, set the stage for what he dreaded most:
rebellion and dramatic social change. An opposition movement begun by
university students was ultimately joined by professionals, urban workers, and
others, and the incessant clamor in the streets led to Ubico's resignation in
1944. An election later that year produced a resounding victory for a
distinguished scholar and reformist, Juan Jose Arevalo.

     Arevalo's term was characterized by the beginnings of economic planning,
the extension of labor rights, and the establishment of a social welfare
system. But it was his successor, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, elected in
1950, who succeeded in extending social reforms to the rural sector. His
agrarian reform law of 1952 was hardly radical by modern international
standards; but it was radical in the Guatemalan context, and it was offensive,
in particular, to the United Fruit Company-the largest landowner in the
country. Between 1949 and 1954 communist influence, especially in the capital
and the fertile farming region of Escuintla, slowly but steadily increased.
Guatemalan workers, hitherto unorganized and powerless, responded with
alacrity to the leadership of communist union organizers. Although Arbenz
almost certainly was not a communist and appointed no communist to either
cabinet or subcabinet posts, he did allow communists a relatively free hand in
labor relations and state education. The United Fruit Company categorized
Arbenz' reform measures as communist, and by late 1953 senior United States
officials were publicly asserting that Arbenz was a communist and privately
seeking his overthrow.

     In 1954 a small invasion force, which had been organized and financed by
the United States Central Intelligence Agency, entered the country. Because
the Guatemalan Army refused to fight, Arbenz resigned and soon thereafter went
into exile. The subsequent counter-revolutionary regime rolled back many of
the reforms of the previous decade. Most of the land that had been distributed
to Indian peasants was returned to ladino estate owners, and labor and student
groups and reformist political parties were systematically repressed.

     As of mid-1983 all but one of the governments since the counter
revolution of 1954 had been headed by military men, and the one civilian
allowed to serve a term, in the 1960s, was kept on a short leash. These
governments created and maintained a vacuum in the political center by
eliminating, often by assassination, leaders not only of left-wing and
communist groups but also of moderately reformist parties, along with labor
leaders, intellectuals, Catholic clergy, and other reform-minded individuals.
A counterinsurgency campaign in the mid-1960s that was directed against a few
hundred guerrillas in the rural areas resulted in the deaths of several
thousand Indian peasants as well. Renewed cycles of insurgency and
counterinsurgency continued to plague the society in the late 1970s and early
1980s.

Preconquest Guatemala

[See Mayan Temple: Courtesy Embassy of Guatemala, Washington DC.]

     The present-day boundaries of Guatemala date only from 1838. During the
colonial period and the early days of independence, the captaincy general of
Guatemala consisted of the present-day republics of Central America-Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica-plus the present-day Mexican
state of Chiapas (see fig. 1; fig. 2).

     What is today Guatemala contained within its borders major centers of the
pre-Columbian Mayan civilization, although the Mayan culture area extended
into present-day Honduras, Chiapas, and Yucatan in southeast Mexico.
Presumably the first inhabitants of the region were nomadic hunters;
archaeological evidence of permanent settlement dates from the second
millennium B.C. Settlements from that era have been excavated on the outskirts
of present-day Guatemala City, in the country's Highlands, and in the hot rain
forest area of northern Guatemala known as the Peten.

     Although the earliest permanent settlements seem to have been in the
Highlands, the most notable achievements of classic Mayan cult