Springing Back

The election of a reformer has sown new seeds of hope in Guatemala.

A genocidal civil war in Guatemala laid waste to entire villages in the second half of the 20th century. Pictured last July, Bernardo Arévalo campaigns for president on the ticket of his Movimiento Semilla in an indigenous community, ahead of the contest’s second round.

Daniel Hernandez-Salazar / Shutterstock

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S8 E9. Springing Back

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Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president. He served from 1945 to 1951.

Government of Guatemala / Wikipedia

Nearly 80 years ago, Juan José Arévalo took office as Guatemala’s first democratically elected head of state. Only a decade later, the CIA engineered his successor’s ouster — and the end of the Guatemalan revolution. A vicious civil war ensued over the rest of the century, killing as many as 200,000 civilians. Today, Guatemalans are hopeful that their newly elected leader, Bernardo Arévalo, son of the first president, will usher in a second political spring. But our two guests say he faces an uphill battle.

Kate Doyle has helped lead a project to unearth millions of documents on U.S. interference in Guatemala and the atrocities of the country’s military regimes over the last 70 years. Of the pro-democracy, center-left Movimiento Semilla’s recent victory at the polls, she tells Will and Nick, “I was probably as surprised as Bernardo Arévalo.”

We also speak with Alvaro Montenegro Muralles, a lawyer and journalist who helped found a group that led the charge against corruption, repression and deep inequality with massive protests in 2015. The key for Arévalo moving forward, Montenegro says, will be maintaining the alliances built among workers, peasants, students and ordinary citizens clamoring for change — and for the past not to be forgotten.

Meet

Kate Doyle

Kate Doyle is a senior analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive. She directs The Guatemala Project to declassify American and Guatemalan records. Her work supports truth commissions and prosecutions aimed at redressing state violence. Doyle is the editor of the collections Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the U.S., 1954-1999 and El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights 1980-1994. Follow her @doylekate.

Alvaro Montenegro Muralles

Alvaro Montenegro Muralles is a lawyer, political analyst and journalist based in Guatemala City. He helped found the civic group JusticiaYa and advocates for legislative reform, judicial oversight and the rule of law. Montenegro was a 2021 Ford Foundation Global Fellow. His reporting and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Plaza Publica and El Faro. He also blogs occasionally at Sinuosos caminos. Follow Montenegro @coromboncote.

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The former military strongman José Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide in 2013, but his conviction was promptly vacated — a travesty Doyle took up in an essay for The Nation. Ríos Montt died two years later, before his retrial concluded.

Guatemalan Gen. José Efraín Ríos Montt holds his first press conference in the National Palace after seizing power in a military coup, on March 3, 1982.

Jean-Marie Simon / National Security Archive

Doyle has also been investigating the 2014 massacre of 43 university students who were abducted while on route to a demonstration in Mexico City. Her work has shown that U.S. drug enforcement officials knew local police and the cartel responsible for their deaths were part of an organized crime infrastructure.

In a 2017 journal article, Doyle describes how human rights advocates are making novel use of U.S. tort law to seek at least some measure of justice for victims of state violence across Latin America.

Writing with colleagues Anita Isaacs and Rachel A. Schwartz, Montenegro argued last year that corrupt elites were dismantling democratic institutions in Guatemala. Ahead of the 2023 vote, they said, then­–President Alejandro Giammattei installed allies in the judicial system, paving the way for election deniers to try to discredit the results.

Under prior Guatemalan administrations, jurists, journalists and activists have been intimidated and exiled for ferreting out bad actors. Montenegro writes about one former anti-corruption prosecutor, Virginia Laparra, who got jail time on phony charges of abusing her authority.

Montenegro has described President Arévalo’s win as nothing short of “magical realism” — a special opportunity to push for equitable social policy and political transformation. But Montenegro also says the struggle against entrenched systems of cronyism and patronage will be real, plain and simple.

Learn

More than half of Guatemalans live in poverty, according to the World Bank. That’s among the highest rates in Latin America.

The moldy documents in this heap found in Guatemala City detail police activity from 1882 to 1996 — including the disappearance, torture and slaughter of civilians during the civil war.

Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional / Guatemala

After years of Freedom of Information Act requests, in 1997 the CIA released a trove of documents related to its covert operation PBSuccess — the code word for an intervention that removed Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz from power in 1954. Included in these records were hit lists for dozens of people in Arbenz’s government and a how-to manual on assassination. Fashioned as a “bloodless” revolt, the coup — which benefited the United Fruit Co. — kicked off four decades of civil war.

The 1983 documentary When the Mountains Tremble narrates the civil war from the point of view of indigenous Mayan communities devastated by the conflict. It features a re-enactment of Arbenz, before he was deposed, pleading in vain for understanding from the Eisenhower administration’s ambassador to Guatemala.

Boston University historian Rachel Nolan last year did a deep dive on the 1954 coup d’état for the podcast Warfare. PBS provides a timeline of the war that followed, situating the complex history of human rights abuses across multiple regimes.

The Guatemalan truth process has led to numerous prosecutions of former officials. Gen. Manuel Benedicto Lucas García went on trial in April. He is charged with disappearances, sexual violence and genocide committed while he served during the presidency of his brother, Fernando Romeo Lucas García, from 1978 to 1982. The case is expected to take months and draw on accounts from no less than 150 witnesses, including 30 victims of sex crimes.

Hundreds blocked roads in Guatemala City and protested the policies of President Giammattei and Attorney General Porras during a national strike, on July 29, 2021.

Daniel Hernandez-Salazar / Shutterstock

The Association for Justice and Reconciliation — founded by Mayan survivors — helped bring earlier charges against Ríos Montt, in 2013. Last fall the group mobilized in defense of Arévalo’s triumph at the polls, even as the sitting attorney general, Consuelo Porras, attempted to thwart his inauguration.

Porras remains in office, protected from removal by Guatemalan law, despite widespread calls for her to resign. Twice sanctioned by the United States for anti-democratic behavior, Porras has a reputation for serving the interests of business and political elites and hampering corruption investigations. Unless removed with cause, she will serve out her term until 2026.

One analyst for El Espectador, in December accused Porras of being “the spear and shield of the ‘Pact of Corrupts’” for her efforts to overturn the election.

In response to her moves, pro-democracy protests erupted over the course of 105 days. The European Union and the Organization of American States, meanwhile, denounced the legal challenge to Arévalo’s win as an “attempted coup.”

In March, the Washington Post reported that Fox News contributor Richard Grenell, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Germany under former president Donald Trump, had visited Guatemala in January in an effort to reach out to right-wing powerbrokers. Grenell promoted the seizing of ballot boxes while the election was still being contested, in what observers decry as Trump-sanctioned shadow diplomacy.

The Biden administration, for its part, supported a peaceful transition of power and met with Arévalo in Washington in October.

Guatemalan anthropologist and journalist Dina Fernández, writing for the Americas Quarterly, reflects on Arévalo’s first 100 days in office, saying many supporters believe he is “moving too slowly” and falling short of his reform promises.

Stephen G. McFarland, a two-time U.S. envoy to Guatemala, offers a more sanguine take, in a three-part analysis on the new administration, titled “Sometimes the Good Guys Win.”

Heard on the show

Song art: “Pequeñas Guitarras”

Mr Smith

We led the top of the show with Al Jazeera’s live coverage of celebrations in Guatemala City on election night, Aug. 20, 2023.

You’ll also hear scoring with several songs, in this order: “Pequeñas Guitarras,” by Mr Smith (2021, on Hope Lights the Horizon); “I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor,” by Chris Zabriskie (2009, on the eponymous album); “Chance,” by Edoy (2021, on Introspect); and “End Credits,” by Pawel Feszczuk (2022, from Deadly War).

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