1945, Congress considered that “one of the most legitimate longings of the nation’s intellectuals has been the organization of a National University” framed by the “nation’s own authentic culture” and the community’s expectations.140 Their efforts had mixed results for recipients—remember the stagnant national literacy rates between 1940 and 1950 and the shortcomings of the empíricos—but they were generative for San Carlistas.
This chapter has encountered students in a singularly transformative moment when they had come to call themselves San Carlistas and articulate a social consciousness that relied upon raced and gendered difference as conditions of possibility for the formation of a republic. This history is significant, for we know little about the historical processes by which powerful urban, middle-class ladino identities were recognized, resisted, or welcomed.141 This City Belongs to You argues that the contested relationship between students, the university, and the Guatemalan and U.S. governments shaped what it meant to be an urban middle-class ladino, largely through the loose consensus around principles of liberalism and the responsibility of students to lead the nation. Students became state makers, and student nationalism was the spirit of the law.
By the early 1950s, the student had become a coherent and powerful political, social, and economic identity. It was so coherent, and so powerful, that it buttressed one of the U.S. government’s most successful campaigns in its war on communism in the Western Hemisphere, the overthrow of Arbenz. When San Carlista cohesion did begin to fracture, it did so precisely along the fault lines of individual rights and free market capitalism, which articulated with status anxiety and racial ambivalence as Guatemalan urban middle-class sectors revitalized conservative social and political thought in the context of the global Cold War. In the early 1950s, anticommunist students emerged from this growing dissensus and took up the mantle of democracy’s true defenders, using the language of liberal democracy.
In fact, the revolutionary Ten Years’ Spring gave the young anticommunists their most convincing rallying cry: “Dios, Patria y Libertad.” Under the Ubico dictatorship, “patria” and “libertad” were weak calls to action. But populist nationalism and the cultural and economic reforms of the Arévalo and Arbenz governments breathed life into Fatherland and freedom. Of course, when young anticommunists of the CEUA cheered “Dios, Patria y Libertad,” they had a different national project in mind.
TWO
Showcase for Democracy, 1953–1957
Dios—Patria—Libertad
God, Fatherland, and Freedom
Slogan of anticommunist students and the Armas regime
Adiós—Patria—Libertad
Goodbye, Fatherland and Freedom
Banners at the Huelga de Dolores, 1955
WHILE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA) cheered “Dios, Patria y Libertad,” students at the 1955 Huelga de Dolores waved a different banner: “Adiós, Patria y Libertad.” The students bade a scathing farewell to the free and democratic nation constructed during the Ten Years’ Spring (1944–1954). In fact, this turn of events had been foretold in the previous year’s celebration. The 1954 No Nos Tientes featured a playful editorial entitled “An Open Letter to Close-Minded Readers.” It read, “We Guatemalans have had frankly wretched luck throughout history: for many decades a group of patriots . . . have handed us over to the gringos so that they could steal banana[s].” But the other agents of imperial expansion, the Soviets, were equally problematic. The editorial continued, “now what is happening is that we want to throw away the sickle even if it’s with the hammer, thanks to our sorry luck to be the chosen victims of such foreign-looking, always purgative, leaders.” In such a situation, they wrote, “the only one who is not gripped by this idiocy is the student.”1
In the early years of the revolutionary governments, San Carlistas had been bureaucrats-in-training who worked with the government to build a better nation. But the university, its students, and the meaning of the middle class had begun to change. By the mid-1950s, only San Carlistas could be trusted to resist advances made by Yankee and Soviet imperialists who sought to exploit Guatemala’s vulnerability and value. An elaborate float in the satirical parade (desfile bufo) also reflected this belief. It depicted Guatemala as an indigenous woman in traditional huipil. Two suitors, “Soviet Paradise” and “North American gold,” flirted while Guatemala moved listlessly between them.2 While the float explicitly critiqued the exploitative politics of neocolonialism, it implicitly disdained women’s subservience. Perhaps unintentionally, it revealed how gender, race, and class shaped San Carlistas’ understandings of political authority. Feminized and indigenous Guatemala was acquiescent to the desires of masculine global superpowers. Again, only San Carlistas could see the risk.
A few months after this float appeared, the anticommunist Liberation Forces of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas invaded from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and quickly defeated the Guatemalan military.3 President Jacobo Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, and with that, the Ten Years’ Spring abruptly ended. Castillo Armas became interim president. Many Arbenz supporters fled to Mexico City; some returned to the same communities they had left after Ubico was overthrown.4
This chapter addresses the changing relationship between university students and the Castillo Armas regime. It traces the impact of these changes on political culture in Guatemala City, especially highlighting the emergence of Catholic anticommunist students as an important political force. Though their numbers were relatively small, anticommunist students were disproportionately influential. They are important, too, for how they challenge our assumptions about student militants and provide an ampler perspective on the issues and anxieties that propelled student activism.5
Though only a fraction of San Carlistas supported him, early in his presidency, Castillo Armas and his advisors met with students and professors of all political inclinations in an attempt to preserve a warm relationship with the universitarios. To fight the specter of communism, much feared and lingering just on the edges of the Guatemalan nation-state, peeking through the pages of university students’ books, and hiding in workers’ hearts, the Castillo Armas regime combined firm anticommunist policies with friendly gestures toward the university and workers’ groups. Only with the May Day and June 1956 protests did the relationship between the government and USAC become intractably antagonistic.
USAC remained the only institution of higher education in Guatemala until 1961. This meant that San Carlistas were not merely a portion of the middle class; rather, the route to the exercise of the professions necessarily passed through USAC. University study also generated some social meaning for that preparation and labor, and created opportunities for certain friendships and rivalries.6 In the revolutionary decade, to be a San Carlista meant to be a valued expert and proto-bureaucrat. Commitment to Central American unity, sovereignty, democracy over fascism, the secularization of the state, liberalization of social life, and social welfare programs became the universitarios’ legacy. During the Castillo Armas regime, democratic guardianship justified growing antagonism toward the government. San Carlistas expressed this in terms of freedoms, rights, and responsibilities. Free market capitalism, personal property rights, and political freedoms, guided both pro–Castillo Armas anticommunist students and pro-Arbenz students. Other principles, like civil freedoms, constitutionality, and electoral democracy bolstered groups who opposed Castillo Armas’s regime. These growing ideological fissures were aggravated by Cold War internationalism and the political and cultural influence of the United States.
The university splintered in the years between the counterrevolution and the beginning of the civil war. Some San Carlistas argued that it was their duty as universitarios to protect the 1945 Constitution; others asserted that the fight for
