This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
were scheduled for mid-December, but Ponce’s dictatorial intentions were clear from the outset. Opposition continued to grow. The AEU sent more demands and petitions to the National Palace. To their earlier demands, they added the reinstatement of all public employees who had been fired for participating in the anti-Ubico strikes, the removal of police from all university buildings, the retraction of threats made against teachers, and respect for “democratic rights.”62 They also demanded university autonomy. In short, Ubico’s resignation did not bring order, but instead emboldened the opposition.63 Ponce maneuvered between the protestors’ and his predecessor’s expectations, but had little success in satisfying either. For instance, when students convened an all-university congress to assemble a list of acceptable candidates to replace the university’s Ubico-appointed rector, Ponce was all but forced to accept one of their suggestions, Carlos Federico Mora.
Ponce also faced competition in upcoming presidential elections. Two new political parties emerged out of the anti-Ubico strikes. Schoolteachers and professionals formed the National Renovation Party (Partido Nacional Renovador [PNR]) on the day after Ubico stepped down. They selected their candidate for president that same afternoon: distinguished professor and doctor of education Juan José Arévalo Bermejo. Arévalo, like many other capital-city-born intellectual elites, had spent many years abroad at university or in exile, and sometimes both. He had attended the National University for a short time before going to Paris. From Paris, he went to Argentina on a scholarship to study education, where he finished a PhD. In 1934, he returned to Guatemala to serve in the Ministry of Education but returned to Argentina two years later after conflicts with Ubico. Students formed another party, the Frente Popular Libertador (FPL).64 The FPL nominated AED president Julio César Méndez Montenegro as their candidate and National University alumni filled his cabinet. In August, however, the group joined the PNR to form the Revolutionary Action Party (Partido de Acción Revolucionaria [PAR]) and back Arévalo. Méndez Montenegro would have to wait until 1966 for his turn as president. Many things would change by that time.
Meanwhile, Ponce’s regime showed more signs of stress. Public protest continued in the capital city. Critics of Ubico, like Luis Cardoza y Aragón, began to return from the exiles in places like Paris and Mexico.65 On September 15, Guatemala’s Independence Day, columns of machete-wielding campesinos paraded through the city center, proclaiming their loyalty to Ponce. The press speculated that the president had bribed the poor rural citizens in an attempt to aggravate urban ladino fears of the rural indigenous masses.66 The suspicious assassination of the founder of the popular opposition newspaper El Imparcial (founded in 1922 by members of the celebrated Generation of 1920) also seemed linked to Ponce’s attempt to maintain control. Citizens doubted whether the December elections would take place and if so, that they would be fair. Some students, teachers, and other citizens began to collect weapons for an armed insurrection.
A clearer plan had developed within the armed forces. At around 2:00 A.M. on October 20, young officers in the prestigious National Guard seized the Matamoros Barracks and laid siege to San José Castle, the Army’s most important storehouse for powder, munitions, and arms at the southern edge of Guatemala City. The young National Guard officers resented the cronyism that had limited high-ranking positions to loyal officers from elite families and the mistreatment that had characterized their years of service.67 They distributed arms to between two and three thousand troops and civilians, including some students and alumni, like José Rölz-Bennett and the Méndez Montenegro brothers.68
This chapter began with a scene from the following morning, when National Guard tanks rolled toward the National Palace and Ponce and Ubico were perhaps in hiding or had fled the country. Two military men, Jacobo Arbenz and Francisco Javier Arana, and one civilian, National University alumnus Jorge Toriello, assumed executive power. A grand celebration of the revolution was delayed until October 26, when about 100,000 civilians marched through the city center. Students joined campesinos, workers, teachers, and the poor below the balcony of the grand Post Office to greet the new ruling junta. The junta suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Legislative Assembly, and expelled a handful of generals and police chiefs. Ubico’s capricious rule was over. Just two years had passed since the escuilaches had dreamed of “teachers, ideologues, leaders” who would speak “to them of the destiny of the nation with a 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