Free Newsletters
Sign up now
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo (center) and Vice President Karin Herrera (right) attend an indigenous rite in their honor at the sacred Mayan site of Kaminaljuyú in Guatemala City on Jan. 16, a day after their inauguration. Arevalo was elected with a landslide victory in August. (AP/Moïses Castillo)
Guatemala, thus explained by a dysfunctional government and horrific human rights abuses, has become a symbol of democratic, if tenuous, hope in a world where authoritarian models dominate.
The Jan. 15 inauguration of anti-corruption reformer Bernardo Arevalo as president of Central America’s most populous country is, in many respects, full circle. The Catholic contribution at this time is, as you will see, tremendous.
Arevalo’s landslide victory in the April runoff election was described by the New York Times as “a resounding rebuke to the conservative political establishment” in this country. Time magazine saw it as “a rekindling of the revolutionary flame that once sought to move Guatemala from a feudal autocracy to a more inclusive social democracy. “
If our country’s civilian world has finally learned something from its long complicity in Guatemala’s suffering, so does the devout world, namely the American Catholic community.
That revolutionary flame was initially carried by Arévalo’s father, Juan José Arévalo, an academic who became the first democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1944. The reforms he advanced in health care, education, labor and democratic rights were a sharp departure from decades of military dictatorship. Those reforms were advanced by his successor, Jacobo Arbenz. Both were seen as threats to the established order, and Arbenz’ proposed land reforms were particularly upsetting to the U.S. firm United Fruit, which not only owned vast amounts of land, but also much of the country’s infrastructure.
This is described in wonderful detail, among other sources, in Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala through the sleuths Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger.
Guatemala, a U. S. target
At this point, Guatemala has become a target of Eisenhower’s administration through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who easily convinced through United Fruit that the reforms were a communist plot. He encouraged a CIA-backed coup that overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954 and replaced it with a military dictatorship. The result? The beginnings of guerrilla warfare in Central America, 36 years of civil war in Guatemala, the disenfranchisement and eventual genocide of the indigenous population there, and otherwise the brutal bloodbath of the civilian population through government-aligned death squads.
Supporters of Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arevalo (right) clash with police outside Congress to protest the delay in the start of the legislative consultation scheduled to swear in new lawmakers on Jan. 14. (AP/Santiago Billy)
All of this is accompanied by U. S. complicity, from the education of the U. S. military to the constant presence of CIA agents and soldiers.
Perhaps the darkest moments of this decades-long dark era occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when some of the most egregious human rights horrors occurred.
General Lucas García, then president, engaged in a cruel intimidation, individual by individual, of the institutions through death squads. He ruled from 1978, when the Carter administration suspended military aid due to human rights violations, until 1982, when he overthrew General Efraín Ríos Montt in a coup d’état.
President Ronald Reagan, who saw communists in each and every coffee factory in Central America, was either incredibly naïve about what was happening in Guatemala or deliberately blind. He confided to the world that Ríos Montt was “totally loyal to democracy in Guatemala,” that he had been the victim of a “bad agreement” and that he was “a man of excellent personal integrity. “The Reagan administration reinstated military aid in 1983.
Despite Reagan’s assurances, the general was not a democratic savior. Montt was a devout right-wing dictator who oversaw what the United Nations called a genocide against the indigenous population. He was convicted of genocide through his own national court, but died in 2018 before a final sentence could be handed down.
Sr. Rosa María Reyes poses for a photo in front of a statue of Our Lady of the Assumption after voting at a school Aug. 20 in Guatemala City. Guatemala wasn’t just voting for a candidate but for change it desperately needs, she said. (NCR photo/Rhina Guidos)
A Deep Aspiration for Democracy
The war was practically exhausted and peace agreements were signed in 1996. But, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this was equivalent to signing a law prohibiting natural disasters. The official violence of the State has just been transformed into a diverse bureaucracy of civil violence. Guatemala has become an address for drug traffickers and an uninterrupted source of resources exploitable through foreign interests. Those who are the country’s main political and judicial establishments, as well as the wealthy commercial interests, heirs of this long legacy of oppression, especially opposed to the gigantic indigenous Mayan population. – they resisted the election of Arévalo. They even managed to delay his inauguration for nine hours.
The fact that, in spite of everything, he was able to take up a job testifies to a deep preference for democracy in Guatemalan society, a patience that is almost unimaginable in the face of the obstacles that these forces of the intelligent have had to overcome.
One day, I found the face of this persistent hope in the user of Julia Esquivel, a world-renowned poet, theologian, and human rights activist. It was in 2013, the last of a series of trips I made to Guatemala starting in 1981. . Esquivel, who died in 2019, was 82 years old at the time of my visit. She was forced into exile in 1980 for 8 years for opposing the government. From our meeting, I wrote that while she knew the horrors of Guatemala’s recent history, she also spoke fervently of her hope for her country’s future.
“There are other people who have suffered violence, who have suffered terrible violence, women who have been raped, who are now running with other women to deal with the rage they feel and regain their essential humanity,” she said. “For me it’s a miracle.
“The other thing that is incredible when I think about it are the communities, the rural communities, who continue to organize and through organizing oppose the exploitation of the mining corporations,” he said, referring to the clashes between popular leaders. Indigenous communities and mining corporations on land use and environmental issues. How is it imaginable that after everything they’ve been through, everything they’ve suffered, these communities have the strength to come together and resist?It’s admirable. “
She was even surprised by the degree of strength shown by the women of Guatemala and the communities she spoke about in the face of recent opposition. According to journalist Mary Jo McConahay, who has reported extensively on Guatemala for decades and attended Arevalo’s inauguration, the Maya population has been critical to the new president’s success.
The Indigenous authorities, she reported, “kept up a constant flow of informational meetings and communiques and organized an extraordinary 106-day peaceful siege of the Justice Ministry to pressure for respect for the vote.”
Arévalo, a career diplomat with degrees in philosophy and sociology, faces great odds in his ambition to turn Guatemala into a legitimately democratic society. He campaigned on a promise to end corruption in the country, a Sisyphean undertaking.
If Guatemala has truly entered a new era, it is not only because of its determination, but also because of a multitude of devout witnesses who have given their lives for reasons of peace and human dignity. The role of Catholics at the time was impressive, adding that of others such as the late Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline sister from Mount St. Mary. John’s. Joseph, Kentucky, who survived torture and rape through the military while serving in the country. She then became an advocate for enfermos. de torture.
Blessed Stanley Rother, murdered in 1981 in the Guatemalan village where he worked among the handicapped, was beatified in 2017. (OSV News/CNS Archive, Archives of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City)
Fr. Stanley Rother, an Oklahoma priest, served the indigenous population of Santiago Atitlan from 1968 until 1981, when he was killed by 3 masked men. Rother, who had the option to return home to the United States after learning he was being attacked, to stay. with the other people I had been shepherding with.
Mons. Juan Gerardi, founder of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala and promoter of the interdiocesan task for the recovery of ancient memory, known as REMHI, murdered in 1998 in front of his residence. The killing came two days after he published “Guatemala: Never Again,” a church-sponsored report on the three decades of violence that has torn the country apart.
A Guatemalan holds a sign honoring murdered Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera on April 26, 2002, in the cathedral of Guatemala City. A special exhibition marked the fourth anniversary of his assassination. (CNS/Reuters)
At the end of April 2021, the Catholic Church in Guatemala celebrated the beatification of the 10 martyrs of Quiché, 3 priests and seven lay people killed between 1980 and 1991. One of the six lay catechists was 12-year-old Juan Barrera Mendez. , “who helped prepare the little ones for their First Communion,” Catholic News Service reported. “Captured by foot soldiers from a prayer assembly who believed it to be a group of leftist guerrillas, the boy was tortured and then shot in 1980. “
The United States, which supports the new president and plans to consolidate democracy and human rights, is nevertheless in a position to do something smart in Guatemala.
Families enter a voting center in Chinautla, on the edge of Guatemala City, in mid-August. (Courtesy of Faith in Action)
If our country’s civilian world has finally learned anything from its long complicity in Guatemala’s suffering, it also deserves it from the devout world, that is, from the American Catholic community. The other peoples of Guatemala whom we extol today as examples of civil and devout courage were not defenders of militarism, nor of a form of faith that is capable of making common cause with the defenders of an exploitative economy or nationalist chauvinism.
Quite the opposite.
If Arévalo achieves even a fraction of what the population expects, it will be the triumph of struggle, of determined humility, of a sustained effort to go beyond the prestige of victim and seek tactics to uplift the marginalized, especially women and the indigenous population. . Valuable lessons in all this for the civil sphere and devoted leaders of its neighbor to the north.