This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
living together in a model city where they would be inspired by nearby mountain ranges and could forge new knowledge through neighborliness and sports rivalries.123 In fact, the construction of a model University City was a regular theme in the Boletín Universitario for much of the mid-1940s, as USAC and other Latin American universities began to plan new campuses to promote students’ mental and emotional development.124 The first modest step, a residence hall, was completed in February 1951. According to a special feature story in the Boletín Universitario, the residence hall was intended to eliminate the “great enemies of San Carlistas”: “malnourishment, dangerous living, and isolation.”125 Residents were treated to films, a lecture series, Saturday luncheons with prominent scholars, and a music library filled with Wagner and Chopin records. The residence hall also fostered USAC’s first athletic teams. As advocates of “a sound mind in a healthy body,” Congress heartily approved.126
The new Republic of Guatemala and USAC came of age together. From exile years later, Arévalo referred to these years as a period of “creole nationalist revolution,” invoking nineteenth-century revolutions for independence from Spain and underscoring the revolution’s racial character. Martínez Durán’s plans for the university complemented Arévalo’s efforts to make Guatemala a more fecund environment for the development of national culture.
A REPUBLIC OF SAN CARLISTAS
President Arévalo and Rector Martínez Durán envisioned reciprocal paths toward progress for the nation and the university. A close friendship paralleled their shared professional goals. But their terms ended in 1950, Arévalo’s with the election of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, and Martínez Durán’s with the election of engineer Dr. Miguel Asturias Quiñonez.127 From this moment, the paths of USAC and the Republic of Guatemala diverged. Asturias Quiñonez represented the many conservatives who were not enthusiastic about the Revolution’s reforms and had continued to exercise influence through daily newspapers, businesses interests, and the Catholic Church during Arévalo’s presidency. Arévalo had prioritized the university, but Arbenz focused elsewhere. Arbenz was a military man, not an educator. Arbenz was inspired by friendships with young Guatemalan communists, including escuilach Fortuny (who served as his speechwriter), Alfredo Guerra Borges, Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, Enrique Muñoz Meany, and Augusto Charnaud MacDonald. With them Arbenz read Marx, Lenin, and Stalin; national history; and agronomy in order to understand Guatemala’s colonial past and structural inequality.128 Some of these young men were San Carlistas, but their focus was on land reform and labor, not education.
The new president’s study of agricultural history and contemporary agronomy helped him to draft a dramatic agrarian reform and significant public works projects. His agrarian reform expropriated and nationalized idle lands so that campesinos could plant and harvest food for sustenance. In turn, his public works projects focused on three large infrastructural developments: a major highway from the capital to Puerto Barrios to rival the North American–owned IRCA train line; the construction of a second port to solve the transport bottleneck caused by inadequate facilities at Puerto Barrios; and the construction of a hydroelectric plant to supplement the expensive and inadequate service provided by the U.S.-owned monopoly Empresa Eléctrica.129 Arbenz’s immediate aim was to promote industrialization while continuing to provide much-needed jobs for Guatemalans in agricultural and manufacturing sectors. He sought to connect Guatemalans to the world through investment in domestic communication and transportation networks. This was also practical, as the United States and the World Bank declined to invest in Guatemala’s structural development after hearing of Arbenz’s ties to communists. Taken together, the agrarian reform and public works 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.