1. INTRODUCTION

Guatemala has suffered 33 years of civil war. While the shorter wars of the other Central American countries, El Salvador and Nicaragua, received huge international attention during the 1980s, the world's media has remained relatively silent about Latin America's longest running armed conflict. Inevitably, the war in Guatemala has left a humanitarian crisis in its wake. Since 1980 alone, it is estimated that over 100,000 Guatemalans have died, 40,000 have been the victims of disappearance, at least 100,000 have become refugees in Mexico and a further million have at some time been forced into internal displacement. While Guatemala is the largest of the Central American republics, these figures represent a significant proportion of a population of only 9.7 million.

Most of the victims of the war in Guatemala have been part of the country's indigenous majority. Estimates of their numbers vary, but around half of the country's population are descendants of the Mayan civilization, speaking 21 distinct Mayan languages. Historically marginalised, they make up the vast majority of Guatemala's poor, the landless peasants and the urban shanty-town dwellers. The conflict in Guatemala has assumed an ethnic dimension and racism has been an important factor in the brutality of the massacres of civilian indigenous populations by the army.

The roots of the conflict lie in the distribution of land. In 1952, the government of Jacobo Arbenz introduced an agrarian reform law which provided for the expropriation of idle land from holdings over 223 acres and its distribution to eligible recipients. By June 1954, 2.7 million acres were affected and approximately 100,000 peasant families had received land. Unfortunately for the Arbenz government, the reform brought it into conflict with the U.S. multinational, the United Fruit Company (UFC). As Guatemala's largest landowner, UFC kept only 15 per cent of its lands under cultivation. Under the reform, a total of almost 400,000 acres was expropriated from UFC. Disputes over the levels of compensation for the land led UFC to enlist the aid of two close contacts: John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA. The result was a destabilization campaign followed by a coup d'état. In June 1954, the CIA led an army of exiles from neighbouring Honduras and, on 27 June 1954, President Arbenz resigned.

Colonel Castillo Armas, who took over the reins of government with U.S. support, launched a programme of reversal of the reforms of the Arbenz government. Of all the land expropriated, 99.6 per cent was returned to its former owners. Almost all social organizations, including trade unions, were destroyed and a number of political parties went underground. The U.S. intervention set a pattern of political and economic development which remains largely intact today. Firstly, the nature of the intervention, at the height of McCarthyism in the U.S. itself, meant that the restructuring of the Guatemalan state was designed to limit the popular protests that could produce an alternative. Guatemala became the national security state par excellence. Cycles of repression followed by limited democratic openings mirrored the levels of tension in the Cold War internationally.

Secondly, the state was militarised: Nearly all of Guatemala's constitutionally elected presidents after 1954 came from a military background and had firm military support - or got such support, as did Mendez [1966-1970] by signing a pact with the army. During long periods of supposedly civilian rule ... effective power remained in the hands of the military.

Thirdly, the reversal of the land reform and the subsequent expansion of the agroexport sector left Guatemala with the most skewed distribution of land in Latin America. The last comprehensive land survey, undertaken by USAID in 1979, showed that 89.8 percent of Guatemala's farms were smaller than the minimum necessary to support the average family:

The cry for land is without any doubt the loudest, most insistent and most desperate cry to be heard in Guatemala.

Finally, and as a consequence of the above, the political space to represent the demands of the landless poor was so restricted that illegal resistance often became the only possible form of opposition to the inequalities engendered by the régime. The first guerrilla movement appeared in 1962, a movement which developed after a failed nationalist uprising by military officers against the government of Ydígoras Fuentes in 1960. It grew with the support of poor, mainly non- indigenous (ladino) peasants in the east of the country but was largely wiped out by a counter- insurgency campaign in 1966-7.

During the 1970s, large numbers of landless Mayan peasants migrated to virgin lands in the rain forests on the borders of Mexico. Land colonisation programmes were promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development and a series of cooperatives were set up separately on land bought by U.S. Maryknoll priests. Tensions in this area grew as military landowners attempted to encroach on land belonging to the settlers. The beginnings of new guerrilla activity in these areas provided the excuse for a repression of the church cooperatives which began as selective arrests and ended in the wholesale massacre of communities.

The political and military repression of peasant, union and church-linked organizations by the military government of Lucas García (1978-1982) led large numbers of their members to swell the ranks of the new armed opposition, particularly in the Mayan highlands. At the height of the military offensive by the guerrillas, they were said to have up to 6-8,000 armed fighters and up to half a million active supporters operating in most departments of the country. In 1982, the four guerrilla movements formed a unified military and diplomatic command as the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (Unidad Nacional Revolucionaria Guatemalteca - URNG).

The army's response was one unprecedented in the region. A scorched-earth counterinsurgency war in the highlands from 1981-1983 aimed to literally depopulate the Mayan areas where the guerrillas were operating. The offensive intensified after March 1982, when General Ríos Montt took state power in a coup d'état. The vast majority of today's refugees and internally displaced were victims of these military offensives. Entire sectors of the population became military targets and over 440 villages were completely destroyed, leaving at least 100,000 civilians killed or 'disappeared'. In addition to the massacres, there were huge forced relocations of people and large areas of the highlands were destroyed to deny physical cover to the guerrillas.