This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
formation of a university-wide student group with its own bylaws and juridical norms changed the shape of inter- and intra-facultad relationships. The AEU of the 1920s imagined that university reform would follow after broader national reform, and so focused its energies outside of the university on the Central American Unionist movement. The revitalized AEU of the 1940s, by contrast, focused first on internal concerns.28
Nevertheless, it was the AEU of the 1940s that would most change Guatemalan society. Their first demand was to replace Ubico-appointed administrators with more prepared candidates. In the Faculty of Medicine, students succeeded in replacing Dean Ramiro Gálvez and his secretary Oscar Espada with Antonio Valdeavellano and Alfredo Gil.29 Students in Pharmacy followed suit, demanding new administrators and permission to participate in curriculum reform. Amid these early successes, the AEU struggled with a question that would divide the student body for the next six decades: what was the role of the university in politics? One block of medical students refused to join the AEU because they rejected the group’s involvement in national concerns, limited as it was. Even AEU president Alfonso Marroquín Orellana advocated a limited role for the university in national and citywide affairs. The escuilaches could not disagree more. By September, the avowedly political escuilaches had expanded their influence in the AEU and replaced the apolitical Marroquín Orellana with fellow escuilach, Gerardo Gordillo Barrios.30
As historian Virgilio Álvarez Aragón has noted, joining students across facultades enabled the group to exert political power and influence outside the university.31 For his part, Galich wrote that students found in the new organizations “the democratic exercise that [they] were denied as citizens”—political expression, assembly, and representation.32 Before long, opposition to Ubico became major point of cohesion among groups that had begun with more disparate and modest aims. The AEU had come to represent “the recapture of student rebellion” or, as Galich’s title suggests, “the end of panic and the beginning of the attack.”33
In May 1944, two events encouraged the AEU to go on the offensive. The first was the overthrow of Salvadoran dictator and Ubico crony Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. University students had been instrumental in the dictator’s overthrow, and their Guatemalan counterparts saw this as a victory of the student spirit. The AEU sent a letter of support signed by nearly two hundred students who professed their “faith in the dignified future of our Central American pueblos.”34 We can assume that this was a sizeable percentage of the student body, as enrollment was just 711 students in 1943.35 The second event that catalyzed university students was the incarceration of their classmate, Ramón Cadena. Arrested on charges only vaguely recorded as “political,” Cadena was held in the Central Penitentiary for weeks without due process. Galich and other law students wrote a letter of protest to Ubico on June 12. The letter accused the military tribunal of conducting a false trial and prosecuting Cadena’s personal views rather than the facts of the case. Like the letter of support for Salvadoran students, this letter circulated through the university and gathered dozens of signatures. But before it could reach the hot-tempered dictator, the National Police intercepted the petition. Cadena was released. Students celebrated this as a victory and the student body gained, according to Galich, new “confidence in itself and in its unity.”36
Ubico’s desperation also grew. Repression had been the order of the day for more than a decade, but the detention of visiting scholars, repression of student meetings, interrogation of student leaders, and dismissal of professionals who spoke out of place were committed with greater boldness. Ubico fired Ávila Ayala from his post at INCV. Galich wrote that Ávila Ayala was fired because he asked students to apply knowledge from inside the classroom to question the world outside, precisely the kind of teaching that Ubico despised. Of course he was also an escuilach.37 Reflecting on their audacity, Galich wrote, “we did not know even remotely then, but we already sensed [it].”38 Opposition to Ubico swelled. Students would no longer simply endure.
FROM STRIKE TO REVOLUTION
On the afternoon of June 19, 1944, the AED assembled for a business meeting. The group counted about a hundred students, just under half of the facultad’s total enrollment, though even fewer usually attended meetings.39 But this afternoon, the assembly hall filled with hundreds of students and professors from other facultades, and teachers and other professionals. The crowd presaged an extraordinary turn of events. Perhaps people came to hear the results of the AED elections, which pitted an escuilach against an apolitical candidate. More likely, they anticipated something more. As the meeting began, copies of a letter circulated through the crowd. The letter demanded the dismissal of the new Law facultad dean and secretary, both recent Ubico appointments. This was an aggressive, but not unprecedented, challenge to Ubico’s authority. After all, students in the facultades of Medicine and Pharmacy had made similar demands earlier in the year. But this letter went one step further and proposed two suitable replacements. The letter effectively asserted that the students, not Ubico or his hand-selected faculty, should choose administrators. The letter circulated and the meeting continued.
Then, just as the announcement of the results of the AED elections began, two students proposed a general strike. A roar of excitement filled the room. “Of the passive students of the previous fourteen years, there remained not a whit,” remembered Galich.40 The AED leadership resumed the meeting and announced the election results: escuilach Mario Méndez Montenegro was elected AED president, Hector Zachrisson as vice president, Manuel Galich and Carlos González Landford as secretaries, and Oscar de León Aragón as treasurer. After a round of applause for the newly elected leaders, the crowd again erupted with a motion to strike. Galich remembered, “A ‘hurrah!’ sprang from more than two hundred young but virile throats, and applause rang out through our ‘first minute of the liberation.’”41 They planned a meeting for the following day to give the whole university an opportunity to consider the strike declaration and the AED student leaders time to work out the details. For many decades, San Carlistas would define themselves and their social class through a contentious relationship between the student body, the university, and the state. These early assemblies were the first shouts—hardly whispers—of the struggles to come.
The next day, an even larger group gathered. It was one of the first times in decades that large numbers of students of medicine, law, economics, and engineering had gathered as a group. Representatives from the various facultades took the dais and expressed their support for the strike. The group also voted to unconditionally support the capital city schoolteachers’ strike against Ubico’s education minister. The alliance was practical, as many students like Galich and Ávila Ayala taught at capital city secondary schools while finishing their degrees at university.42 Galich remembers that he and Ávila Ayala left the meeting together and walked from downtown to their homes in the southern neighborhood of Campo Marte in Zone 5, about a three-kilometer walk. They discussed the rising protest as they walked. Anticipating that Ubico would seek retribution, they decided to write two documents: a public declaration of unity between schoolteachers and universitarios and a clear statement of the ideology of the group, an Ideario. The declaration of unity would protect both groups and improve the students’ reputation. The Ideario would clearly articulate the group’s ideals, in case Ubico judged them to be seditious.
First, the Ideario affirmed that administrators and teachers should not be bureaucratic appointments, but rather selected for their academic background and commitment to the university. Second, it argued for the removal of administrators who did not conform to this standard. Third, it prioritized the development of scientific and technical knowledge at the university. It also called for the foundation of a Faculty of Humanities and a research institute on indigenous history and language. It acknowledged students’ desire to participate in policy making at the university. Finally, it called for the government to work closely with students to improve the international reputation of the university through scientific and cultural publications and by reinstating the foreign exchange program. The demands sought to recover the National University’s historic prestige and reorient its activities toward national improvement. Inspired by classical liberalism with a rights-bearing student at the vanguard, the Ideario closed with