projects undermined the longstanding economic power of North American businesses.
Unlike Arévalo, Arbenz was confrontational toward large landowners, especially UFCO. His programs reoriented Guatemala’s rich natural resources to national improvement rather than foreign export by reforming domestic capital and investment. At the same time, his combined offering of land, credit, and literacy drew on a network of contacts between the city and the periphery that had not existed at the outset of Arévalo’s presidency. As a result, while Arbenz’s literacy program was characterized by less lofty rhetoric than Arévalo’s, it may have reached more effectively into the lives of rural peasants.130 USAC students had little to do with these programs for national development and structural change; instead, a diverse group of foreign intellectuals, Guatemalan intellectuals educated abroad, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later the World Bank), and advisors from foreign businesses including Westinghouse advised Arbenz.131
For his part, Asturias Quiñonez did not mind being left out. He did not share Martínez Durán’s commitment to civic humanism.132 Nor did he imagine an active role for the university in the lives of its students, much less in the direction of the nation. Instead, he prioritized the return of lost prestige to USAC and focused on the classroom rather than the world outside. To do so, he courted the support of professionals who had earned degrees from the National University in the Ubico era. Like Asturias Quiñonez, they argued that politics were a distraction to the true academic. Many of them were worried about their alma mater’s declining prestige as more and more Guatemalans had attained the prerequisites to attend USAC.133
As I have mentioned already, daily newspapers had long debated the appropriate role for USAC and respected academics of diverse political orientations argued for an apolitical university. But by the time Asturias Quiñonez was elected, apoliticism had become a keyword in anticommunist and other conservative students’ political vocabularies. They argued that social transformation was simply not their responsibility; worse, it was a communist ruse. Around the same time, the Revolution’s most ardent supporters within the university had turned to national politics rather than university administration. Most of the escuilaches and their peers had graduated or left USAC to work. This allowed more conservative San Carlistas to shape university governance and student organizations in the early 1950s. A small group of anti-Arbenz, anticommunist students whose influence far exceeded their small numbers stepped into the void. More and more, they denounced the Arbenz government and called for another revolution to wrest Guatemala from the communists’ grip. They were called the Committee of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA).
What explains this rising antagonism toward the revolutionary governments, if students were filling the ranks of the nation’s growing bureaucracy and enjoying greater responsibility, reputation, and intellectual freedom than they had enjoyed in many decades? For one, the U.S. foreign policy shift from containment to intervention against communism profoundly divided the globe and contributed to a sense of looming danger that was unmistakable in students’ publications across the political spectrum. Second, Guatemala’s national political scene grew increasingly fractured. In the middle of the Cold War, Arbenz publicly cultivated close friendships with known communists. Meanwhile, the military held on to significant power. Aside from the sixty or so commanders who were dismissed after the October 20 uprising, Ubico’s military survived the revolution intact. In fact, fearing another revolt, the 1945 Constitutional Assembly had voted to protect the military as an autonomous entity alongside the executive, judicial, and legislative branches. Finally, Arbenz’s 1952 Agrarian Reform presented a real challenge to the interests of coffee barons and latifundio landlords. Even though it stopped short of remaking the nation’s agrarian structure, it threatened powerful economic interests at home in Guatemala and abroad.
In response to these threats to their influence, military and economic elites, and even influential lawyers, bankers, and journalists, began to look for a political opening.134 As Greg Grandin has argued, local concerns and global ideologies transformed “an institutional defense of hierarchical privilege into a more contrived ideology confected from component parts of radical Catholicism, martial nationalism, and patriarchal allegiance.”135 The fullest expression of this contrived ideology would take decades to develop, but its roots lay in the anticommunist rumblings of the early 1950s. Possible only in a particular economic conjuncture of prosperity and the invigoration of democratic ideals offered by the revolution, anticommunism imagined Guatemala poised on the edge of a long fall into Soviet hands. As early as 1950, internal factors fused with external factors to mobilize anti-Arbenz sentiment on campus.
San Carlista unity was aggravated by an additional factor. As I wrote in the introduction, in the eleven years between 1943 and 1954, the number of enrollments increased more than 450 percent. In a single year between 1950 and 1951, university enrollments grew 19 percent, from 2,373 to 2,824 students.136 This rapid growth taxed the university infrastructure and created overcrowded classrooms and registration bottlenecks. Greater enrollment reflected the presence of some less elite students at the university. Of course, this was Arévalo’s objective when he expanded the public school system, but in practice the widened enrollments challenged some San Carlistas’ egalitarian idealizations. Suddenly, San Carlistas found themselves sharing classrooms with strangers, not just familiar compañeros from the capital city’s few elite high schools.
These changes created a charged atmosphere for social debate and disagreement. The student-authored editorials, memoirs, and reportage discussed in this chapter and the next suggest that political fracture at the university was precisely the product of the atmosphere of free thinking that the revolution had affirmed was so important to the democratic project. At the same time, San Carlistas’ involvement in statecraft during the Ten Years’ Spring demanded a certain investment in democratic fitness that upheld students and faculty as democracy’s defenders as it excluded people who were uneducated—an exclusion that, as I have shown above, especially affected indigenous people. Student nationalism championed individual rights, civil freedoms, and electoral democracy for the educated elite while the indigenous majority awaited democratic tutelage. Surely not all students and faculty shared these beliefs, but they were common enough to make the San Carlista a coherent political and social subject. In other words, the identities of these urban intellectuals were far from self-evident or a priori; instead, they were formed in dialogue with national debates about the meaning of the nation and of democracy. As Victoria Langland has noted in Brazil, university students negotiated difficult and conflicting identities as intellectual elites in peripheral places.137 The identifier San Carlista became a palimpsest of the institution’s celebrated colonial past, the glory of the revolution, and ongoing debates over the meaning of democracy. It reflected a social consciousness built on a raced and classed definition of citizenship.
Clearly, the revolution’s consequences at the university were manifold. During the Ten Years’ Spring, university enrollments soared and the ranks of the urban bureaucracy expanded. Professors were no longer anonymous workers and students were no longer mass-manufactured products of Ubico’s factory of professionals, lacking collegiality and responsibility. As one student journalist wrote in an essay published in the Boletín Universitario in observance of the anniversary of the revolution, “For many years, the word ‘universitario’ was used exclusively to denote students and teachers. The graduate was the ‘egresado,’ the professional who was submerged in the hustle and bustle of his career and who more or less lost his connection to the Alma Mater.”138 The revolution required more of San Carlistas. The journalist continued, “the word ‘egresado’ has been banished from the lexicon of the university . . . the professional does not ‘graduate’ from the university but instead enters . . . the Professional Colegio.”139 As part of the colegio, the San Carlista remained tied to USAC by service commitments and licensure requirements.
The revolution also obliged San Carlistas to build new relationships with the pueblo. No longer mindless products of a “decadent factory of professionals,” San Carlistas were to be conscientious leaders
