the group agreed to give Ubico twenty-four hours to comply. Before the meeting adjourned, a group of young lawyers joined the strike. Now the striking students had support from two important professional sectors, education and law.
After the meeting, the escuilaches assembled at Ávila Ayala’s house to prepare the long list of demands to be delivered to the president. The young men talked, smoked, typed, and copyedited. On breaks, Galich remembers how they retired to a different room to consult a fortune-telling toy. Regrettably, these fortunes are lost to history.52 The following morning of June 22, Cerezo Dardón delivered the demands and the Ideario to Ubico. Galich remembers that he tried to sleep late, but his daughter’s cries woke him. Unable to rest, Galich went to meet with friends in the offices of the Third Court. His sleeplessness was a stroke of luck, as policemen came searching for him soon after he left. Ubico had ordered the arrest of the student leaders. He had also suspended the constitution. Friends smuggled Galich, Ávila Ayala, and Méndez Montenegro into the Mexican Embassy, where they joined nearly all of the students, teachers, and lawyers who had signed the strike declaration.53 The group anticipated arrest, exile, or worse. They waited to see how the rest of the nation would respond. An answer came later that afternoon in a treatise entitled “The Document of the 311.” Named for its three hundred-eleven signatories, including many professionals and high-profile academics, the document called for an end the state of exception and the reinstatement of the Constitution.54
Hand to hand and by word of mouth, the demands, the Ideario, and other declarations, slogans, and plans circulated throughout the capital. Small protests punctuated daily life over the next three days. The Ubico regime responded by sending parapolice forces into neighborhoods to loot and attack residents. The protestors were blamed for damages and injuries.55 On the afternoon of June 25, a group of schoolteachers organized a protest at the Church of St. Francis, located five blocks from the National Palace. Their chants and signs demanded freedom, democracy, and Ubico’s dismissal. Memoirs and journalistic accounts of the protest emphasize that the women were well-dressed, professional, and orderly. This was important to the opposition’s claim that the imminent attack was unjustified. Ubico ordered the military and police to enclose the protestors. Officers fired shots into the crowd and one young teacher, Maria Chinchilla Recinos, was struck and died in the street. For many, this attack against a teacher—a professional woman who nurtured the nation’s children—was unforgiveable. Emboldened, workers’ groups came forward to join the strike and Ubico’s regime lost what little support it had from small business owners who depended on him to curb worker unrest. According to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, by the end of June, Guatemala seemed to be “on the verge of a revolution.”56
Like others who had openly opposed Ubico, Galich, Ávila Ayala, Méndez Montenegro, and Cerezo decided to go into exile in Mexico as the situation deteriorated.57 In fact, they were on a train to Mexico City when the conductor announced Ubico’s resignation.58 Only eight days had passed since the young men had met with Ubico’s secretary. Galich wrote, “It was as if a frenzy overtook us. We hugged. We squeezed one another for a long time. We drank every beer on the train. Some mariachis accompanied our celebration with songs from the Aztec land.”59 The young men’s Mexican exile became a sightseeing holiday. The group went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, visited a secret aguardiente factory, and met with Mexican university students. To Ávila Ayala’s dismay, they even saw a bullfight. He despised the fiesta brava and spoke, Galich wrote, “in the name of some hypothetical society for the protection of animals—‘I don’t know how you can applaud such savagery.’”60 The young men returned to a hero’s welcome. Apparently, Galich was embraced so enthusiastically that his trousers fell off.61
Two weeks later, Ubico’s handpicked successor, Federico Ponce Vaides, was sworn in as interim president. Elections were scheduled for mid-December, but Ponce’s dictatorial intentions were clear from the outset. Opposition continued to grow. The AEU sent more demands and petitions to the National Palace. To their earlier demands, they added the reinstatement of all public employees who had been fired for participating in the anti-Ubico strikes, the removal of police from all university buildings, the retraction of threats made against teachers, and respect for “democratic rights.”62 They also demanded university autonomy. In short, Ubico’s resignation did not bring order, but instead emboldened the opposition.63 Ponce maneuvered between the protestors’ and his predecessor’s expectations, but had little success in satisfying either. For instance, when students convened an all-university congress to assemble a list of acceptable candidates to replace the university’s Ubico-appointed rector, Ponce was all but forced to accept one of their suggestions, Carlos Federico Mora.
Ponce also faced competition in upcoming presidential elections. Two new political parties emerged out of the anti-Ubico strikes. Schoolteachers and professionals formed the National Renovation Party (Partido Nacional Renovador [PNR]) on the day after Ubico stepped down. They selected their candidate for president that same afternoon: distinguished professor and doctor of education Juan José Arévalo Bermejo. Arévalo, like many other capital-city-born intellectual elites, had spent many years abroad at university or in exile, and sometimes both. He had attended the National University for a short time before going to Paris. From Paris, he went to Argentina on a scholarship to study education, where he finished a PhD. In 1934, he returned to Guatemala to serve in the Ministry of Education but returned to Argentina two years later after conflicts with Ubico. Students formed another party, the Frente Popular Libertador (FPL).64 The FPL nominated AED president Julio César Méndez Montenegro as their candidate and National University alumni filled his cabinet. In August, however, the group joined the PNR to form the Revolutionary Action Party (Partido de Acción Revolucionaria [PAR]) and back Arévalo. Méndez Montenegro would have to wait until 1966 for his turn as president. Many things would change by that time.
Meanwhile, Ponce’s regime showed more signs of stress. Public protest continued in the capital city. Critics of Ubico, like Luis Cardoza y Aragón, began to return from the exiles in places like Paris and Mexico.65 On September 15, Guatemala’s Independence Day, columns of machete-wielding campesinos paraded through the city center, proclaiming their loyalty to Ponce. The press speculated that the president had bribed the poor rural citizens in an attempt to aggravate urban ladino fears of the rural indigenous masses.66 The suspicious assassination of the founder of the popular opposition newspaper El Imparcial (founded in 1922 by members of the celebrated Generation of 1920) also seemed linked to Ponce’s attempt to maintain control. Citizens doubted whether the December elections would take place and if so, that they would be fair. Some students, teachers, and other citizens began to collect weapons for an armed insurrection.
A clearer plan had developed within the armed forces. At around 2:00 A.M. on October 20, young officers in the prestigious National Guard seized the Matamoros Barracks and laid siege to San José Castle, the Army’s most important storehouse for powder, munitions, and arms at the southern edge of Guatemala City. The young National Guard officers resented the cronyism that had limited high-ranking positions to loyal officers from elite families and the mistreatment that had characterized their years of service.67 They distributed arms to between two and three thousand troops and civilians, including some students and alumni, like José Rölz-Bennett and the Méndez Montenegro brothers.68
This chapter began with a scene from the following morning, when National Guard tanks rolled toward the National Palace and Ponce and Ubico were perhaps in hiding or had fled the country. Two military men, Jacobo Arbenz and Francisco Javier Arana, and one civilian, National University alumnus Jorge Toriello, assumed executive power. A grand celebration of the revolution was delayed until October 26, when about 100,000 civilians marched through the city center. Students joined campesinos, workers, teachers, and the poor below the balcony of the grand Post Office to greet the new ruling junta. The junta suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Legislative Assembly, and expelled a handful of generals and police chiefs. Ubico’s capricious rule was over. Just two years had passed since the escuilaches had dreamed of
