their critiques to the university administration. They denounced the appointment of ignorant deans and the dismissal of skilled faculty. They decried the lack of intellectual freedom. Soon they linked these grievances to national political and economic circumstances. They equated the university’s reigning principle of apoliticism to global fascism and blamed apolitical intellectuals for both world wars, arguing that a just society depended on an active university.23
In the middle of the night on May 15, 1942, the escuilaches snuck into the offices of the Third Court of the First Instance, the former home of President José María Reyna Barrios (1892–1898). They gathered to read what Galich calls in his memoir, “The Escuilach Manifesto.” In a romantic passage, Galich recounts the “dim azure light” of the moon where the young men realized their potential: “We have weapons that our forebears did not want, or were unable or were unwilling to wield . . . Three weapons that, well-used, can transform a group of guys . . . into a formidable force, capable of opposing and overthrowing those with bayonets. These three weapons are our youth, our intelligence, and our unity.”24 Galich’s reverence and hindsight intensifies the intoxicating promise of the moment.
His transcription of the manifesto includes an emotional account of the spiritual suffering Guatemala’s youth as a result of persistent despotism and greed. He writes that “the youth of Guatemala has never had teachers, ideologues, leaders who spoke to them of the destiny of the nation with a true heart, as Sarmiento and Alberdi spoke to the youth of South America, or Martí and Hostos, to the Caribbean youth, or, finally, Ingenieros to those of America.” Galich continues, “We have never known an apostle who did not appear later as a puppet, of a thinker who was not an imposter; . . . And what lessons do these teachers of pillage and assassination leave us? They are too bloody to mention.” The manifesto reflected the students’ transnational intellectual formation by Caribbean and South American positivist forefathers Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi, José Martí, Eugenio María de Hostos, and José Ingenieros, even as it also asserted their isolation. Galich’s recounting of the manifesto continues, “If we think about this [we will] understand the eagerness with which the young Guatemalan impatiently awaits someone who will tell him the words that he is wanting to hear, the words of inspiration, of truth, of practical science, of legitimate patriotism, backed up by facts and not by lies.”25 In Galich’s retelling, the “young Guatemalan” becomes the figure for the whole of the nation, awaiting someone who can refine him with inspiration, truth, science, and patriotism. Galich writes that the group tiptoed out of the building with “the sensation of new breath in our souls.”26
Despite their enthusiasm, the young men were patient. While they aimed to prepare students to lead “a large popular movement that [would] destroy from the roots the old institutions and bring about a radical transformation,” they estimated that revolution was around ten years away. In the months after the scene described above, the escuilaches began by building support within the Faculty of Law. In October 1943, they revived the defunct Association of Law Students (Asociación de Estudiantes El Derecho [AED]).27 Following the AED’s example, a number of other facultades founded or revived student associations before the 1943 Christmas recess. Soon, several of these groups banded together into university-wide federation. The group took the name of the Association of University Students (Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios [AEU]), the student federation formed in 1920, an earlier moment of groundswell in student organizing across Latin America, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, and Cuba. The formation of a university-wide student group with its own bylaws and juridical norms changed the shape of inter- and intra-facultad relationships. The AEU of the 1920s imagined that university reform would follow after broader national reform, and so focused its energies outside of the university on the Central American Unionist movement. The revitalized AEU of the 1940s, by contrast, focused first on internal concerns.28
Nevertheless, it was the AEU of the 1940s that would most change Guatemalan society. Their first demand was to replace Ubico-appointed administrators with more prepared candidates. In the Faculty of Medicine, students succeeded in replacing Dean Ramiro Gálvez and his secretary Oscar Espada with Antonio Valdeavellano and Alfredo Gil.29 Students in Pharmacy followed suit, demanding new administrators and permission to participate in curriculum reform. Amid these early successes, the AEU struggled with a question that would divide the student body for the next six decades: what was the role of the university in politics? One block of medical students refused to join the AEU because they rejected the group’s involvement in national concerns, limited as it was. Even AEU president Alfonso Marroquín Orellana advocated a limited role for the university in national and citywide affairs. The escuilaches could not disagree more. By September, the avowedly political escuilaches had expanded their influence in the AEU and replaced the apolitical Marroquín Orellana with fellow escuilach, Gerardo Gordillo Barrios.30
As historian Virgilio Álvarez Aragón has noted, joining students across facultades enabled the group to exert political power and influence outside the university.31 For his part, Galich wrote that students found in the new organizations “the democratic exercise that [they] were denied as citizens”—political expression, assembly, and representation.32 Before long, opposition to Ubico became major point of cohesion among groups that had begun with more disparate and modest aims. The AEU had come to represent “the recapture of student rebellion” or, as Galich’s title suggests, “the end of panic and the beginning of the attack.”33
In May 1944, two events encouraged the AEU to go on the offensive. The first was the overthrow of Salvadoran dictator and Ubico crony Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. University students had been instrumental in the dictator’s overthrow, and their Guatemalan counterparts saw this as a victory of the student spirit. The AEU sent a letter of support signed by nearly two hundred students who professed their “faith in the dignified future of our Central American pueblos.”34 We can assume that this was a sizeable percentage of the student body, as enrollment was just 711 students in 1943.35 The second event that catalyzed university students was the incarceration of their classmate, Ramón Cadena. Arrested on charges only vaguely recorded as “political,” Cadena was held in the Central Penitentiary for weeks without due process. Galich and other law students wrote a letter of protest to Ubico on June 12. The letter accused the military tribunal of conducting a false trial and prosecuting Cadena’s personal views rather than the facts of the case. Like the letter of support for Salvadoran students, this letter circulated through the university and gathered dozens of signatures. But before it could reach the hot-tempered dictator, the National Police intercepted the petition. Cadena was released. Students celebrated this as a victory and the student body gained, according to Galich, new “confidence in itself and in its unity.”36
Ubico’s desperation also grew. Repression had been the order of the day for more than a decade, but the detention of visiting scholars, repression of student meetings, interrogation of student leaders, and dismissal of professionals who spoke out of place were committed with greater boldness. Ubico fired Ávila Ayala from his post at INCV. Galich wrote that Ávila Ayala was fired because he asked students to apply knowledge from inside the classroom to question the world outside, precisely the kind of teaching that Ubico despised. Of course he was also an escuilach.37 Reflecting on their audacity, Galich wrote, “we did not know even remotely then, but we already sensed [it].”38 Opposition to Ubico swelled. Students would no longer simply endure.
FROM STRIKE TO REVOLUTION
On the afternoon of June 19, 1944, the AED assembled for a business meeting. The group counted about a hundred students, just under half of the facultad’s total enrollment, though even fewer usually attended meetings.39 But this afternoon, the assembly hall filled with hundreds of students and professors from other facultades, and teachers and other professionals. The crowd presaged an extraordinary turn of events. Perhaps people came to hear the results of the AED elections, which pitted an escuilach against an apolitical candidate.
