During the Mendez Montenegro presidency the peak of the counter insurgency occurred, in which FAR was wiped out. ?The elections of 1966 marked the beginning of the end for the guerrilla forces of that era. Taking advantage of the guerrillas? unofficial truce, the army unleashed a brutal counter-insurgency under the command of Colonel Carlos Arana Osor?o.? As well, 1966 and the Mendez presidency saw the formation of ?death squads.? The first death squad to appear was Mano Blanca, or white hand. The government and Mario Sandoval Alarc?n, a right-wing political leader of the National Liberation Movement (MLN) organized Mano Blanca. By 1967, a year after it?s formation, Mano Blanca was accompanied by over 20 other death squads that targeted over 500 individuals whose names appeared on ?the lists.? The death squads that came into being during this time consisted mainly of off duty police officers and soldiers who acted as a sort of vigilante. During this time, the United States became even more involved with Guatemalan politics. The counterinsurgency was ?a campaign that included the use of U.S. advisers and American pilots flying napalm attacks on suspected guerrilla strongholds from the U.S. base in Panama.?
In the four years of the Mendez presidency, over 30,000 Guatemalans lost their lives. The indigenous peoples, during this time, were murdered, disappeared, tortured, raped, and beaten. A decade earlier the people of Guatemala lived in relative peace, now they lived in state of terror. ?Between 1966 and 1970, on the pretext of eliminating communism, some 10,000 non-combatants were killed in order to assassinate an estimated 300 to 500 guerrillas who retreated to the northern Pet?n jungle to recover and regroup.? While the guerrilla movement had virtually stopped by 1970 when Carlos Arana Osorio took office ?disappearances,? which most often led to death not only continued but also according to Amnesty International peaked during the 1970s. ?Between 1970 and 1974, 15,325 Guatemalans ?disappeared.?? Nevertheless, peasant organizations began to form during the mid-1970s.
Much of the organization of peasant groups and unions was due to the Christian Democrat arty and the Catholic Church. Two prominent unions emerged at this time, the National Workers Confederation (CNT) and the Autonomous Trade Union Federation of Guatemala (FASGUA). As well by 1974 when Laugerud Garc?a was inaugurated the guerrilla movement had regrouped and grown. In addition to the previous guerrilla groups a new one emerged, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). The Guatemalan government and military responded forcefully to the growing guerrilla groups. ?Under the Laugerud Garc?a government, army penetration of the rural countryside began, establishing in many areas the groundwork for later occupation.? In 1976, Guatemala received another blow; this one however came from Mother Nature. On February 4, 1976 an earthquake, that registered 7.5 on the Richter Scale, hit Guatemala. It ?killed 22,000 people, injured 77,000, and left one million peasants homeless.? Nevertheless opposition groups and recouped continued to grow, and on May 1, 1978 the Committee for Peasant Unity, or CUC, publicly announced its existence. Rigoberta Mench?, an indigenous peasant woman from Guatemala turned human rights activist, explains how her father, a ?political prisoner? and other peasants started the CUC.
?So my father came back very proudly and said, ?We must fight the rich because they have become rich with our land, our crops.? That was when my father started to join up with other peasants [in 1977] and discussed the creation of the CUC with them. A lot of peasants had been discussing the Committee but nothing concrete had been done, so my father joined the CUC and helped them understand things more clearly. ? That?s how the CUC began to form as such. It organized the peasants both in the Altiplano and on the coast. It wasn?t a formal organization with a name and all that [at first]: more like groups of communities, at the grass roots, that sort of thing,? (emphasis added).
Nevertheless, while peasant and student organizations grew along with guerrilla groups the repression continued. ?Massive violence began during the last year of the Laugerud Garc?a government, with mounting selective assassinations in Guatemala City and large-scale army repression in the countryside.?
Such violence continued into the Lucas Garc?a government. An example of this repression and violence is apparent in the Panz?s massacre of 1978. The government?s ?scorched earth? campaign against isolated peasant villages believed to support the opposition carried a deadly toll, with a massacre at Panz?s in May 1978 being perhaps the best known military operation of this type. On May 29, 1978, 500 to 700 Kekch?, an indigenous Mayan group from Guatemala?s highlands, gathered in Panz?s to protest their expulsions from their land to the Mayor and an official of INTA. Once in the central square the military ringed the square and opened fire killing over 100 protestors. The dead were put into mass graves, supposedly dug beforehand. The government later asserted that the Indians had started the violence, and only admitted to killing 38 people. The violence and repression did not end unfortunately with the Lucas Garc?a government either. While Rios Montt declared in 1982 after a coup that he led, ?that there would be no more assassinations? and fair trials from those who violated the law, ?rural repression soared immediately after the coup,? and continues, though in lesser amounts, today.
?Since 1982 Guatemala has lived through two presidential elections, two military coups, two states of alert, two Constitutions, an eleven-month state of siege, a three month state of emergency, at least four amnesty periods, and four heads of state ? three of them army generals.? Could all of this and the genocide of Guatemala been prevented during the ten years of spring? Possibly if Arbenz and Ar?valo had restricted union organization to non-communist unions, which would have, in theory prevented U.S. involvement. However it remains unlikely that this would have been enough. The UFCO and United State could have found, or created other reasons for the coup, which ultimately destroyed the democracy and peace in Guatemala. Now Guatemala is left with the remnants of genocide, oppression, and political instability. Terror remains a driving force in Guatemalan society, and to think it all could have been avoided if the United States had not led the coup on the Arbenz administration.
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