of the role of the university in national political life and, in return, politics in university life. The social role and meaning of “San Carlista” shifted from proto-bureaucrat to state antagonist in these years. This chapter follows a series of events that provoked this shift. It emphasizes internal factors that enabled the rise of anticommunism and, later, the cohesion of the political left and right.
In fact, the period defies our understandings of the left and the right, in part because these terms attained their contemporary meaning in these years. This brief but complex moment between the counterrevolution and the beginning of the civil war usually appears as either the tragic postscript to the revolution or the telling prequel to the civil war. Furthermore, most of the scholarship about the end of the revolution was written in the midst of the civil war. At that moment, it was difficult to see Castillo Armas’s coup as anything but the beginning of many decades of military rule. Historians paid a preponderance of attention to U.S. economic and political intervention, implicating the United States in the Central American civil wars and their aftermaths.7 But this focus also permitted an erroneous view of Guatemalans as passive, disorganized, capricious, or even self-interested dupes.
The rich counterrevolutionary archive quickly belies these depictions. Complex internal and external factors, especially region, race, land ownership, and education enabled the success of Castillo Armas’s disorganized motley crew of Cold Warriors.8 In order to explain this change, this chapter begins with a discussion of the Plan de Tegucigalpa, a student-authored anticommunist plan for government written by the CEUA in late 1953 that would become the foundation of Castillo Armas’s 1956 Constitution. For around nine months, CEUA students carried out counterinsurgency propaganda plans devised for them by agents in a CIA field office, spreading leaflets and painting graffiti in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of the pueblo. These middle-class anticommunist students “functioned as a broker between the upper echelons, both domestic and foreign, of reaction and the street thugs and paramilitary forces responsible for some of the worst acts of counterrevolutionary terror.”9 Some, like Lionel Sisniega Otero, transmitted the anticommunism of the upper echelons as a broadcaster for Radio Liberación. Many later joined the military, business leaders, and the Catholic Church to form the National Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Nacional [MDN]) Party. Importantly, even this agonistic brokerage reinforced the social role of the middle class as thought leaders.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department observed, “Guatemala’s middle and ‘intellectual’ classes from the beginning have been deeply and emotionally committed to maintaining the political freedoms, social reforms, and feeling of nationality for which they fought in the 1944 Revolution.”10 This emotional commitment was apparent among the editors of USAC’s most widely read student newspaper, El Estudiante. An editorial entitled “University and Pueblo” from the June 9, 1955, edition pledged, “Today’s struggle was yesterday’s struggle and will be the struggle forever, if [the University] is to act with the decency and honesty that the Nation desires.” It continued, “The nobility of spirit and the moral respectability that were constant in the youth of the past should be the same virtues that inspire the actions of the students of today. The sacrifices made in a not-distant moment will be lost if the youth of today do not raise the pristine flags bequeathed to them by the students of the past.”11 Less than a year after the counterrevolution, student journalists reminded their classmates of their revolutionary duty to the pueblo.
A year later, protests in May and June 1956 sowed the seeds of the popular movement. I discuss the effects of these protests, weighing newspaper coverage, government decrees, and student-authored press releases.12 Growing numbers of San Carlistas viewed the Castillo Armas regime as morally bankrupt and asserted that they were duty-bound to fight for the pueblo. After Castillo Armas prohibited trade unions and political parties, the university became one of the few remaining spaces for opposition. The regime came to see USAC and its students as a threat. The chapter concludes by revisiting the ongoing public debate over the appropriate role of the university in national political life. By the time Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957, Guatemala’s “showcase for democracy” had dissolved into States of Alarm and Emergency and political violence.13 Student nationalism was marked by its oppositional relationship to the state.
ANTICOMMUNIST STUDENTS AS STATE MAKERS
Ever vigilant against communism in the Western Hemisphere, U.S. intelligence officers quickly identified the small ranks of the CEUA as an asset.14 An intelligence officer from the CIA field office (codenamed “LINCOLN”) approached a CEUA member in Guatemala City shortly after the group’s formation. At the time, the group counted around just fifty members, but their anticommunist spirit was exuberant, unlike “the cynical politics of [General Miguel] Ydígoras and Castillo Armas.”15 The plan was to intimidate government officials and create the impression of a broad antigovernment movement. For months, CIA staffers spent hours imagining projects for the students to carry out. The CEUA’s first action took place on September 15, 1953, when they pasted 106,000 anticommunist stickers on buses and trains. Later CEUA students marked government officials’ homes with signs reading “A Communist Lives Here” and sent fake funeral notices to President Jacobo Arbenz and José Manuel Fortuny. One poster that appeared in the capital city read, “Guatemalteco: On the day of the Liberation, those who aid Arbenz WILL DIE! Those who support the Patriotic Resistance will fight and WILL LIVE for a better Guatemala! The great day is coming! Choose!”16 The CIA transmitted publications for the students to distribute and students interrupted public meetings to do so.
With the help of an organization of anticommunist market women, the CEUA distributed thousands of copies of Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano’s anticommunist pastoral letter. They sponsored a radio program until April 1954, when armed men invaded the station mid-program and beat the student broadcasters.17 The infamous “32 Marking Campaign” had students paint the number 32 in public places throughout the capital, and on buses and trains bound for the city. This was in reference to Article 32 of the Constitution, which outlawed foreign political parties. According to CIA operative Jerome C. Dunbar, “The aim is to create suspense and interest among those who do not know the meaning, and to induce conversation about the symbol.”18 The students’ success can be deduced from the reaction they elicited from the Arbenz government (growing numbers of arrests and exiles) and from the support they received from prominent Catholics (the archbishop and the market women’s organization).
FIGURE 3. Lionel Sisniega Otero and Mario López Villatoro broadcasting for Radio de la Liberación, Chiquimula, 1954. Photograph by Alejandro Guzmán. Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).
Many of these covert missions required students to take great risks. By May 1954, the CEUA’s membership dwindled. Many militant students had been arrested and some even exiled.19 There was a debate, too, within the CIA field office as to the efficacy of the projects that engaged in philosophical debates with communism. They were better off, some agents argued, “[creating] dissension, confusion, and FEAR in the enemy camp.”20 For their part, the CEUA students began to critique the propaganda they were asked to distribute. They purportedly found it too divisive and began to suspect that they were being used to bait the Arbenz government into using repressive tactics. By May 26, 1954, ten CEUA students were in jail, no new students had been recruited, and others refused to work.
In fact, the growing counterrevolution no longer relied on covert propaganda operations. A plan for military invasion was underway, led by Castillo Armas and troops of exiled anticommunists. Since Arbenz’s election, student exiles gathered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and San Salvador, El Salvador where they joined two groups, the Committee of Guatemalan Anticommunist University Students in Exile (CEUAGE) and the Anticommunist Front of Guatemalans in Exile (FAGE). In June 1953, a few months before the CEUA’s first public action, the CEUAGE began to publish its Bulletin of the Committee
