The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman

Bishop Gerardi in Quiché, circa 1975

      Guatemala’s internal war had by then been going on, with various degrees of heated and bloody intensity, for eighteen years. The war was a consequence of a coup engineered by the CIA in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history. Arbenz had passed an agrarian reform law to alleviate the inequities of a system that he called, in his inaugural address, “feudal.” Privately owned uncultivated land—far from all of it—was expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. Some of the land was expropriated from the country’s largest single landowner, the United Fruit Company. The Arbenz government reimbursed United Fruit, though at the deflated prices the company had declared the land to be worth for tax purposes.

      United Fruit wielded considerable influence inside the Eisenhower administration through some important personal connections, particularly the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. As Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer explained in Bitter Fruit, an account of the 1954 coup and its aftermath, John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state, had negotiated a favorable railroad transportation deal for United Fruit in Guatemala when he was a senior partner in the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles, who had also done legal work for United Fruit, was director of the CIA. But the most important motive behind the coup was U.S. government fears of communism. Arbenz had legalized the Party in 1952. (It was quite small, with only a few hundred active members, almost none of whom had much influence.) First the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations misconstrued the politics behind the Guatemalan government’s actions, refusing to acknowledge that Arbenz was essentially a nationalist, with no proven ties to Moscow. And so, on the heels of a similar operation in Iran, in which Prime Minister Mosaddeq was deposed, the CIA’s first covert regime-change program in Latin America—which included strident allegations about the imminent establishment of a Soviet military beachead—was soon under way. After several months of economic sabotage, psy-ops maneuvers, threatening gestures by the U.S. military, and an actual invasion by a small rebel force armed and trained by the CIA, Arbenz agreed to resign and asked for political asylum in the Mexican embassy. Guatemala was handed over to an extreme right-wing faction of plantation owners and political leaders who founded their own paramilitary death squads, and to the Guatemalan Army, which was backed by the United States. Arbenz’s land-reform policy was reversed and many of its proponents and beneficiaries were murdered. The Guatemalan Army eventually became the most brutal, corrupt, and criminal military institution in the western hemisphere.

      Five years after Arbenz was removed as a force in Latin America, the Cuban revolution inspired a new concern about the region. Following an aborted military revolt led by a handful of Arbenz-era officers in 1960, the Eisenhower administration made the fateful decision to beef up the Guatemalan Army’s intelligence units, thus engendering a clandestine apparatus of state terror and crime over which eventually even the United States would lose control. A pair of young soldiers—Lieutenant Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios, both of whom had received elite U.S. military training outside Guatemala—took to the countryside to wage guerrilla war against what they described as “tyranny and humiliation.” The uprising had some early support from the now-outlawed Guatemalan Communist Party, but was quickly put down. Although the cause of armed revolution survived, the number of guerrilla forces in Guatemala in the 1960s never exceeded several hundred; yet a counterinsurgency campaign supported by the United States (it was called “counter-terror”) had killed some 10,000 civilians by the end of the decade. An especially tragic paradox of that time was that while the Alliance for Progress program sponsored by President Kennedy sought ways to identify and support young moderate democratic reformers in Guatemala—even, in the 1960s, bringing them to the United States to study—Guatemalan security forces and death squads, backed by the United States, murdered those same reformers after they returned and began to practice what they had learned. By the 1970s, two-thirds of the people who’d been sent to study in the United States had been killed.

      As the possibilities for peaceful change were cut off by violent repression, the ranks of the mostly Marxist guerrillas swelled. Guatemala’s internal war, like the other conflicts soon to follow in Central America (in El Salvador and Nicaragua especially), was usually depicted in the context of rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, and local causes were downplayed, but in fact it was essentially a war to protect an entrenched elite. By the early 1980s, the Guatemalan Army’s highest-ranking officers had become wealthy. Almost all the death squads operating in Guatemala were linked to the Army, although their activity was regularly blamed on rogue right-wing extremists. Either you supported military dictatorship and the oligarchy or you were regarded as a leftist.

      One of my relatives in Guatemala, a politically conservative, devout Catholic physician, known for his nonpartisan commitment to public health issues, was forced to take his family into exile in the 1970s. The barefoot doctors he had trained to deliver essential medical treatment, such as dysentery pills, to the rural poor were being murdered by the Army, which also confiscated a small public clinic he’d built with international donations in the Ixil Triangle town of Nebaj, in a rugged corner of northern El Quiché.

      ON JANUARY 31, 1980, El Quiché literally flamed up into the world’s consciousness when thirty-seven Mayan peasants occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to the violence being inflicted on their communities. Guatemalan security forces stormed the embassy, provoking an inferno that killed all but one of the protesters, as well as embassy staff members and others trapped inside the building. Among the dead was the father of the future Nobel Peace Prize–winner Rigoberta Menchú. That night the sole surviving Indian protester was kidnapped from his hospital bed and killed. His corpse was flung onto the campus of the University of San Carlos, the national public university, before dawn.

      The massacre in the Spanish embassy precipitated an international outcry, and Spain broke off diplomatic relations with Guatemala. Not long afterward, a campaign of terror against the Catholic Church that wouldn’t abate for years was launched throughout the misty mountain towns, villages, and hamlets of El Quiché, which was populated mostly by Maya. In the departmental capital, Santa Cruz, the seat of Bishop Gerardi’s diocese, the mutilated corpses of two Church catechists were discovered hanging outside a small radio station. Convents were strafed with machine-gun fire and attacked with grenades. As the fighting against guerrillas intensified in el antiplano, the mountainous central highlands, the Army seized and occupied church buildings, parish houses, and convents, turning them into barracks and interrogation and torture centers. Statues of saints were draped in military camouflage and olive green, as if to remind parishioners to whom they really owed their obedience, at least if it was earthly salvation they sought. The Spanish priest from the village of Chajul, in the Ixil Triangle, was ambushed and murdered. In Joyabaj, Father Faustino Villanueva was assassinated at his desk. Sometimes, after the Army had finally vacated a church parish or convent building, people would leave lighted candles outside for the restless spirits of those who had been murdered inside.

      IN THE ONCE BUSTLING town of Nebaj, the Army placed a machine-gun nest in the belfry of the church, overlooking the plaza. A few years later, in 1984, I rode the bus from Guatemala City to Nebaj with my friend Jean-Marie Simon, a photographer and journalist who was also a courageous investigator for human rights organizations such as Americas