This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana

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 of Guatemalan Anticommunist University Students in Exile in order to connect exiled anticommunists throughout the hemisphere. The paper was printed at a shop in Tegucigalpa called Talleres La República and edited by Cosme Viscovich Palomo, Mario López Villatoro (secretary of relations), and Lionel Sisniega Otero (CEUA general secretary).²¹ In the pages of the Bulletin, Catholic anticommunists shared their conviction that Arbenz had imperiled the nation and its citizens’ natural rights. They charged that he had violated the Constitution by forcing them into exile and censuring their political meetings. They called the students, faculty, and administrators who supported Arbenz communist dupes and wrote that the Association of University Students (AEU) was filled with liars. From exile, the CEUAGE pledged to be “a strong nucleus of men imbued with the feelings of Nation, Home, Religion, and Liberty, who [would] try to win for their pueblo the conquest of real democracy.”²² This conquest would demand “great sacrifices, painful work, enormous doses of civic will, a lot of patriotism and honor and more honor.”²³ In no uncertain terms, the CEUA’s promise evoked the responsibilities of student nationalism.

      The group debuted its Plan de Tegucigalpa in the Christmas Eve edition of the Bulletin. It circulated quickly in a pamphlet. The U.S. Library of Congress catalogued one copy before the end of the year. In March 1954, some students traveled to Caracas to present the plan at the Tenth Inter-American Conference.²⁴ The Plan’s focus on education reflected the interests of its authors, who were all students and young professionals. In many ways, its educational ideals were not so different from those of the Revolution. Echoing the neo-Lamarckism that informed indigenismo in previous decades, the CEUA prioritized building strength of character. Guatemalan youth “marched blindly” because of a defective educational system. Their personalities were undeveloped, demonstrated by “the skittishness, the fickle spirit, the instability of purpose, the inconsistency of moral values, [and] the lack of constancy in the achievement of the highest ideals.”²⁵ The Plan remedied this by providing an education that attended to the growth of the personality as much as the intellect. It included free and mandatory primary education, a literacy campaign, art schools, and centers for rural instruction. Under the Plan, the purpose of the university was to “enlighten” and “restore” the pueblo of Guatemala, complementing the government’s role as moral guide.²⁶ Again, this was quite like the role of the university in the revolutionary governments.

      There were some marked departures from the Revolution’s educational philosophy. A long section entitled “University Autonomy” proposed a budget that eliminated university fundraising from the manufacture and sale of liquor (a significant source of income, especially during the Huelga de Dolores). For the moral compass of anticommunist San Carlistas, it was “a great contradiction that, to a large extent, our greatest cultural institution lives on death.” They added that a basic function of the university ought to be to “combat, by all means at its disposal, the destruction of the alcoholic scourge . . . a prelude to crime and prostitution, determinant factor in vagrancy and misery and an imponderable burden on society.”²⁷ Under the Plan, the government of Guatemala would become a representative democracy led by the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. This resonated with the platform of the Movimiento Estudiantil Profesional (MEP) nearby in Mexico, established by the Episcopate and Mexican Catholic Action between 1945 and 1947.²⁸ CEUA students likely met the MEP at one of the many anticommunist congresses held throughout the region, perhaps at the Congreso Contra la Intervención Soviética en América Latina, held in Mexico City at the end of May 1954 and advertised on the cover of the Boletín.

      Like their peers who had helped to draft the 1945 Constitution, CEUA students were concerned about Guatemala’s large indigenous population. The Plan called for a “government of the pueblo, by the pueblo, for the pueblo” and “attendant to the idiosyncrasies of Guatemala.”²⁹ Like newspaper editors a decade earlier, the CEUA explained how centuries of repression had left indigenous communities “isolated, fearful, distrustful, and suspicious of the ladinos.” As a result, the nation formed into two distinct societies, preventing the construction of a “healthy and organically capable pueblo.”³⁰ The CEUA students explained: