Guatemalan Civil War : Ask Biography

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The Guatemalan Civil War ran from 1960 to 1996. The thirty-six-year civil war began as a grassroots, popular response to the rightist and military usurpation of civil government (State and public institutions), and the dictatorship's disrespect for the human and civil rights of the majority population. In 1944, the "October Revolutionaries" assumed government and instituted liberal economic reform benefiting and politically strengthening the civil and labor rights of the urban working class and the peasants. Elsewhere, a group of leftist students, professionals, and liberal-democratic government coalitions were led by Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

In consequence, the U.S. Government, ordered the CIA to launch Operation PBSUCCESS (1953 � 54) and halt Guatemala's “drift to the Left”, as perceived by the corporate fruit companies and the U.S. State Department. The CIA chose right-wing army Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead an "insurrection" in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Upon deposing the Árbenz Guzmán Government, Col. Castillo Armas began dismantling a decade of socio-economic reform and legislative progress, and banned labor unions and Left-wing political parties, disenfranchisement that radicalized left-wing Guatemalans.

A series of military coups d’état followed, featuring fraudulent elections offering only military officers as candidates to civil government office. Aggravating the general poverty and political repression motivating the civil war was the socio-economic discrimination and racism practiced against the Guatemala's indigenous peoples, such as the Maya; many later fought the civil war. Although the dark-skinned native Guatemalans constitute more than half of the national populace, they are landless, whilst the land-lord upper classes of the oligarchy, white-skinned descendants of European immigrants to Guatemala, controlled most of the land.

40,000 to 50,000 disappeared during the war and approximately 200,000 were killed. Felipe Cusanero became the first person to be sentenced for this in 2009 when he received a 150-year jail term, 25 years for each of his six missing victims. This was hailed a landmark prison sentence in Guatemala.