This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
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 justice required the defeat of communism; still others sought a return to apoliticism and the elimination 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’