true heart.” Maybe Arbenz, Arana, and Toriello could be just such a trio.
FIGURE 1. Citizens gathered in front of the National Palace, October 20, 1944. Photograph by J. Francisco Muñoz. Enrique Muñoz Meany Collection, Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).
MAKING A REPUBLIC FROM THE UNIVERSITY
For their role in the revolution and elite academic preparation, many student leaders were rewarded with high-level appointments or elected positions in the new revolutionary government. Recent graduates of the university’s Law Faculty became architects of the nation-state as ministers in the executive branch, representatives in the Legislative Assembly, and delegates in the Constitutional Assembly. Two years after dreaming up their ten-year plan to create revolution, Galich and the gadfly escuilaches began to rebuild the government from the very seats of power they had opposed. This made for a very young government. Alfonso Bauer Paíz, who served as Minister of Economy and Labor, was 26 years old. Galich, the recently elected president of the Legislature, was an elder among the students at 31 in 1944. The average age of a member of Congress by 1951 was 35, but some congressmen were as young as 22. These student-statesmen balanced homework with the legislative agenda, running from Assembly to class on any given day.69
Fittingly, education was one of the first issues confronted by the new government. Two weeks after Ponce’s defeat, the junta presented Decree 12 to the Congressional Education Commission (CEC). In addition to honoring students for their bravery in the revolution, the decree acknowledged how the university had suffered during the dictatorship. Under Ubico, the decree read, the university was made into a “factory of professionals where investigation was hollow and thinking lost all relevance.”70 A gesture of good will, Decree 12 granted the university autonomy in “intellectual, cultural, and administrative questions.” But to the CEC’s student-statesmen, it was useless to grant autonomy to the existing institution, formed as it was during the “asphyxiating” dictatorship.71 They rejected even the implicit limitation of the university’s autonomy to “intellectual, cultural, and administrative questions.” For the junta, Decree 12 was a symbolic recognition while the CEC balked at abstractions that might be empty in practice. The junta suggested reform while student–statesmen demanded total regeneration. The CEC reasoned that a new nation needed a new university.
The CEC made significant changes to the junta’s decree. They began with the university’s name. The National University would again be called the University of San Carlos (USAC), a gesture to its prestige in the colonial era. Next, the CEC pledged to extend the university’s reach beyond the capital city through extension programs and branch campuses. Additionally, they reserved the right for the university alone to alter, form, or dissolve any programs of study in accordance with society’s changing needs. Most importantly, the CEC limited executive power over the university by eliminating an article in the initial draft of the decree that permitted the executive to intervene in the university in certain circumstances. Individuals chosen by the USAC electorate were solely responsible for its operation. National well-being and scientific, technological, and cultural development would be in the hands of the autonomous university.
The CEC also formed two new programs in Mathematics and Humanities, which demonstrated the university’s new attitude toward knowledge production.72 Instead of engineering, an applied science that created technicians, the new USAC emphasized theoretical mathematics. In turn, the Humanities facultad would serve as the university’s ethical compass.73 As the keynote speaker at its inauguration, President Arévalo declared, “Our university is indebted to the youth of Guatemala,” but “mediocrity, sensationalism, and mercantilism . . . have impoverished us and we are going mad.” He continued, “We need teachers for the youth: we need something like priests, charged with telling us in which direction the nation ought to go.” The Humanities program was designed to produce just these types of thinkers who would through their word and their conduct inspire “faith, courage, and self-sacrifice” in the youth.74 Arévalo called on students to lead the people of Guatemala as secular priests.
In these first months of the Revolution, students, faculty, and alumni worked to restructure both the university and the nation in the image of an ideal republic. Their efforts not only revised the laws that governed the university, but also confirmed the presence of a coherent civic block at USAC. The ruling junta, CEC, and daily newspapers consistently referred to students, professors, and administrators as “San Carlistas.”
San Carlistas also joined the Constitutional Assembly, which hurried to write a Constitution before Arévalo’s inauguration on March 15. The Constitutional Assembly united two generations of San Carlistas: elders of the Generation of 1920, who as members of the Unionist Party had aided the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera, and neophytes who had entered national-level politics with the Revolution. The elders included luminaries David Vela, Francisco Villagrán de Leon, José Rölz-Bennett, Clemente Marroquín Rojas, and José Falla. Some escuilaches were among the younger generation. Of the Commission of Fifteen that initially drafted the Constitution, fourteen members were lawyers or law students; one was a medical doctor.75 Unsurprisingly, their chief concerns were universal suffrage, literacy, and federal social reforms, including university extension programs, and the foundation of the National Indigenista Institute (IIN), which sought—in certain terms—to improve government relations with rural indigenous citizens.76
While student-statesmen discussed these concerns within the immediate context of Guatemala, they also engaged with larger ideological debates that circulated throughout much of the world after World War II. The Constitutional Assembly employed the new human rights–based language of organizations like the United Nations. San Carlistas were also early members of the International Union of Students (IUS) in 1946, an organization with consultative status in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).77 Contemporary internationalist ideals were reflected in the Assembly’s invocation of the “democratic spirit” that divided the world into two antagonistic blocs: fascist and democratic. In Guatemala, however, this sweeping call for democracy elided liberal and popular political concerns. This elision enabled a strong governing coalition, albeit one with deep internal divisions.78 Within a decade, conflicts over the precise meanings and practices of democracy would destabilize the revolutionary governments, a topic taken up at length in Chapter 2.
But even in the Revolution’s first months, the tension between liberal political philosophy and popular concerns put intellectual elites at odds with urban workers, rural farmers, and the jobless. Some of these divisions were exposed in the debate over universal suffrage. The ruling junta opposed extending the right to vote to illiterate men and women because they were seen as remnants of feudalism, not modern citizens, and therefore ineligible for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The junta insisted that restricting the vote to literate citizens would secure the nation for democracy and protect it against fascism because illiterate people were likely to be exploited by politicians, an argument supported by the historical memory of the presidency of Rafael Carrera and other nineteenth-century caudillos. Initially, the AEU and the AED agreed. Contradictory as this may seem, it serves as a reminder that San Carlistas were literate, ladino, mostly urban—in a word, urbane.
The junta, student leaders, ministers, advisors, and members of the Assembly came from the only ethnic, class, and regional background where the ability to read and write in Castilian Spanish was common. In 1950 (the first post-revolutionary census), 73.8 percent of Guatemala City residents were literate, while national figures including the majority-indigenous periphery recorded only 27.8 percent literacy. Many urban intellectuals accepted this evidence of the link between indigeneity and illiteracy. In summary comments in the national census, unnamed statisticians reiterated the implications of these numbers: “Literacy, taken to mean the ability to
