‘The army acted on what we told them. It got messy because we killed amongst ourselves. The army took advantage of envy and hatred between neighbours, and that is why people died.’Footnote 1 This testimony provided to the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (Historical Clarification Commission, CEH) reflects on practices of denunciation set against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96) in which an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or forcibly disappeared in Cold War counter-insurgency operations. Testimonial evidence compiled in the final reports of the CEH and the Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory, REMHI) project as well as ethnographic accounts are awash with references to the crucial role that informers, spies and other civilian accomplices played in aiding and abetting the Guatemalan military regime.Footnote 2 Many scholars have noted the civilian population's extraordinary involvement in the armed conflict, leading Diane M. Nelson to posit the Guatemalan counter-insurgency as ‘exceptional for its almost total incorporation of civilians’.Footnote 3 In recent years, previously rigid dichotomies between victims and perpetrators blurred as scholars began focusing on low-level perpetrators such as civil defence patrols, an irregular state-sponsored ‘plain-clothes auxiliary force’ mandated with bringing rural communities under military surveillance and control by gathering intelligence and flushing out rebels through search-and-destroy expeditions.Footnote 4
Ordinary Guatemalans who denounced their neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers to state security forces have hitherto largely escaped scrutiny. Yet, as the CEH argues, ‘anybody could go to the military base and hand in a list of guerrilleros to get rid of a personal enemy’.Footnote 5 In Chile and Argentina, a growing body of literature has begun exploring more grassroots aspects of civil complicity with the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on broader societal attitudes of consensus and the manifold ways in which these regimes decentralised the counter-insurgency into civilian, patronal and ecclesiastical hands.Footnote 6 In the slipstream of this ‘revisionist current’, scant scholarly attention has been directed to the practice of denunciation, partly due to the scarcity of archival evidence.Footnote 7 Argentine historian Daniel Lvovich conducted an exploratory analysis of denunciation in the archives of the Dirección de Inteligencia de la Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (Intelligence Directorate of the Province of Buenos Aires Police, DIPBA).Footnote 8 Scholars based in continental Europe effectively provoked a paradigm shift in the 1990s by moving denunciations from the margins to the centre of relations between authoritarian systems and society at the grassroots level. A ‘more interactive model of dictatorship’ emerged in which ‘the people were not totally determined, repressed and isolated’ but found in these systems ‘new ways to act, participate and make their presence felt’.Footnote 9
This article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). Departing from an untapped set of confidential documents found in the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (Historical Archive of the National Police, AHPN) in Guatemala City, this contribution evidences the grassroots involvement of ordinary Guatemalans within everyday political surveillance and social control. Thoughtfully engaging the complexity of popular participation in violence requires combining both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. From above, this contribution draws on an analysis of various police and military manuals to evidence the key importance state intelligence apparatuses ascribed to denunciations for establishing and maintaining social control. I show how subsequent military regimes engineered a denunciatory atmosphere which not only served intelligence-gathering efforts, but primarily instilled a climate of fear and mutual suspicion that fuelled a self-disciplining society. From below, archival evidence reveals the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that spurred civilians to denounce their neighbours, personal adversaries and local opponents to the Policía Nacional (National Police, PN) in attempts to strengthen their positions in the shadow of the conflict. A critical discourse analysis of a collection of 136 denunciations evaluates the persuasion strategies denouncers employed, following common scripts and adopting the counter-insurgent jargon of the military regime to spur authorities to intervene on their behalf. Ultimately, rather than pass moral verdicts upon denouncers, this article's conclusions make sense of practices of denunciation by tying together top-down and bottom-up perspectives. I argue that, although the Guatemalan state used civilians to gain local knowledge on counter-insurgent targets, denunciations also linked up with local necessities of ordinary Guatemalans who learned to exploit authorities’ demand for information to reap personal benefits. Lastly, I challenge the voluntary character scholars ascribe to practices of denunciation by focusing on the survival and security considerations that underlie many denunciations. I show how the institution of denunciation not only opened up novel pathways for opportunistic actions but also provided new strategies for survival with which ordinary Guatemalans navigated the pressures and exigencies of a civil war that overshadowed daily existence and structured available choices.
The Archive and Its Limitations
This article draws upon a fine-grained analysis of denunciations that were brought in front of the PN, the Government Ministry or the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic between 1970 and 1985. Denunciations reached authorities through (anonymous) phone calls, telegrams and letters while some drew elaborate maps of rural areas, marking the residences of those who allegedly provided support to local guerrillas. Over half of the 136 denunciations originated from the metropolitan area where state security forces engaged in selective state terror against the urban popular movement. This urban bias reflects the unavailability, to date, of archival fonds pertaining to rural departments’ police substations. Denunciations from rural areas, where the army's indiscriminate violence targeted the armed insurgency's (potential) civilian support base, originated from hamlets and towns across the national territory. Denunciations contained accusations of a political nature and primarily informed authorities on alleged guerrilla gatherings and planned actions, the distribution of subversive propaganda, the appearance of subversive graffiti and the locations of guerrilla training or stash-and-hide-out places. Civilians accused individuals, entire families and villages or groups of up to 40 civilians of being subversive or associating with subversives. Allegations ranged from merely being ‘involved in bad politics’ to meticulously reconstructing private conversations in which the denounced had slandered state officials.Footnote 10
As the repository of a professionalised counter-insurgency apparatus, the AHPN has enabled a top-down understanding of everyday terror and the dominant role the institution played in political policing and surveillance.Footnote 11 The police came to assume ‘direct authorship over urban violence’ when President Lucas García (1978–82) appointed Colonel Chupina Barahona as the PN's director-general, a choice that marked the generalisation of violence and ‘mirrored the military's decided turn towards mass violence’.Footnote 12 The police came to subscribe wholly and submissively to the counter-insurgency strategy of the army and effectively found itself under military jurisdiction. The archive developed into a Cold War instrument for militarised ‘surveillance, social control and ideological management’, using archival records to observe, register and annihilate state enemies.Footnote 13 Examining the historical development of police forces worldwide, leading policing theorist David H. Bayley argues that all governments develop some capacity for ‘secret and systematic’ monitoring of political activity as political surveillance has been a ‘core function of policing for centuries’.Footnote 14 Amassing secret intelligence constitutes, in other words, the ‘lifeblood of policing and is as old as policing itself’.Footnote 15 What has remained largely unexplored by scholars drawing on the AHPN records, however, are the myriad ways ordinary Guatemalans assisted the PN in its profound intrusion into everyday life by providing private intelligence.
A series of limitations on the available archival records renders a truly representative sample of denunciations impossible to obtain. Across liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, monitoring and controlling subversive behaviour is generally ‘the task of specifically political police’.Footnote 16 Yet denunciations are found scattered throughout the AHPN records of the various police structures that received denunciations and the many different squads tasked by the director-general with conducting investigations. A body of records of 136 denunciations, which form the basis of this analysis, was salvaged from the vast archival (sub)fonds pertaining to five major entities of the PN.Footnote 17 Denunciations additionally tended to generate little subsequent paperwork, complicating a reconstruction of how the PN bureaucratically handled civilian denunciations. Police reports on denunciations could only be located in 37 out of these 136 cases, although police manuals and records demonstrate that the police conducted elaborate investigations to verify or dismiss even the most far-fetched denunciations. Nonetheless, without such reports, conclusive evidence on the implications of denunciations for the accused individual remains elusive. In only five cases did police investigations prove that informants had provided correct information. Suspects could be identified in only three of the five truthful denunciations, yet only in a single case was the accused led before the courts. In both other cases, the archive does not provide documentary clues on the fate of the denounced. In two separate instances, records reveal that accused individuals became the objects of political persecution, facing extensive surveillance, house searches and temporary arrests, despite the baselessness of the charges brought against them.
Archival records suggest that denounced civilians did not suffer physical violence at the hands of police units. These police records, however, cannot be taken at face value as denunciations were investigated by some of the most infamous police entities. Criminal investigation units received denunciations directly from the director-general, who personally wrote instructions in the margins of denunciations, indicating which police unit was tasked with investigating the denunciation and reporting back results. The plain-clothes Detective Corps, most often assigned to investigate denunciations, gained notoriety as a corruption-plagued police squad engaging in political persecution, often laying the intelligence groundwork that enabled selective killings and forced disappearances of political opponents.Footnote 18 Commando Six, another plain-clothes investigative police substructure, functioned as a rapid deployment force and was dubbed alternately the ‘most brutal of police's specialty squads’ or plainly a ‘police death squad’.Footnote 19 Both entities engaged in widespread extrajudicial violence against alleged political opponents. Police intelligence, including denunciations, additionally circulated widely among state intelligence services. For example, the PN often copied in the infamous intelligence unit of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (Presidential Staff, EMP) on the communication. Known popularly as ‘El Archivo’ or ‘La Regional’, the latter became ‘the nerve center for coordinating counter-terror assassination operations’ as it allowed the highest branches of state security forces to coordinate intelligence and orchestrate forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.Footnote 20 Thus, denunciations might well have been dealt with extrajudicially, either by rogue police entities, military intelligence units or the death squads operating within PN headquarters.Footnote 21 This clandestine mode of operating might well account for both the scarcity of investigative reports into denunciations as well as the absence of archival records documenting police violence against the denounced.
In those rare instances where archival records indicate the denounced became subject to state-sponsored terror, drawing causal relationships between both events proves problematic. In 1980, for example, a school director was accused of organising a teacher strike, distributing subversive propaganda and spray-painting slogans glorifying the armed insurgency.Footnote 22 Police files later document his abduction by ‘unknown men’, often a euphemism for clandestine death squads.Footnote 23 The archive does not, however, contain smoking-gun documents connecting the denunciation with the subsequent abduction. Any research pretending to either draw definitive conclusions on police handling of denunciations or conduct quantitative analysis on the basis of fragmentary archival material would thus be on shaky ground. It remains equally problematic to determine the magnitude of the phenomenon of denunciation. The available evidence renders it difficult to argue that in Guatemala, as has been observed for Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Francoist Spain, denunciations ‘constituted a crucial ingredient’ of state terror or formed the ‘most important driving force behind the killing and incarceration’.Footnote 24
Complementary evidence from the archives nonetheless suggests the practice of denunciation was widespread. Thousands of confidential reports, which summarised counter-insurgent intelligence to facilitate its distribution among the relevant police squads, opened with phrases like ‘Credible sources guarantee’ (‘Fuentes de todo crédito aseguran’) or ‘From unconfirmed sources’ (‘Por fuentes aún no confirmadas’). Such documents often reported on private knowledge known only to intimate social circles, indicating they were based on intelligence provided by ordinary Guatemalans. Additionally, my own preliminary research on the high turnover rate of confidential informants hints at a considerable number of citizens being directly involved in intelligence gathering at one time or another. Ultimately, considering the armed forces were often the only authority present in sparsely populated areas without access to postal, telegraph and telephone services, local military units and outposts likely received the bulk of the denunciations. Practices of denunciations are ubiquitous in historical and anthropological accounts of the Guatemalan Civil War. As David Stoll observed during his fieldwork in the department of El Quiché, ‘many of the deaths came out of personal quarrels, when small-town enemies denounced each other as subversives or army informers. One woman is said to have charged vengeance-seekers money to take denunciation of their enemies to the army, until the army realised what she was doing and took her away too.’Footnote 25
Denunciation as a Practice
Shelia Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately define denunciations as ‘spontaneous communications from individual citizens to the state containing accusations of wrongdoing by other citizens or officials and implicitly or explicitly calling for a punishment’.Footnote 26 Denouncers were thus unconnected to the police or army chain of command, differentiating them from confidential informants who were formally authorised and accredited by military and police intelligence units and received payments for providing information on predetermined objectives.Footnote 27 This distinction between various types of informants, however, remains inexistent in colloquial language and the social imaginary of Guatemala, where civilian denouncers, confidential informants, civil patrollers and military commissioners are lumped together as orejas (spies), esbirros (henchmen) or chivatos (snitches).
Denunciations mark a collusion of private and state interests. According to political scientist Stathis Kalyvas’ theory of irregular war, denunciation constitutes a microfoundation of civil war. Political actors rely on local knowledge for the personalised targeting of rival actors and their local supporters. Selective violence in civil war, according to Kalyvas, is thus jointly produced by supra-local actors seeking to control the population and local actors willing to satisfy state demands for private information. Private conflicts are converted into public violence as external political actors ‘provide incentives without which local actors would be unable or unwilling to undertake violence’.Footnote 28 As political actors seek to tap into the ‘underlying networks of negative ties within local communities’ to identify and persecute political opponents, they enable indirect violence by ordinary civilians pursuing private interests with impunity.Footnote 29 By handling ‘the gory details’ of acting violently, political actors offer civilians ‘irresistible opportunities to harm everyday enemies’, transforming greed, petty conflicts, envy and local rivalries and feuds into state violence.Footnote 30 As denunciation requires private information, it is more likely to emerge between peers horizontally tied in everyday social and spatial interaction.Footnote 31 Analysis of denunciations and their investigative reports confirms that Guatemalan denouncers tended to belong to the same working-class backgrounds as those they denounced, sharing intimate social circles as neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers. Denouncers seemed to originate primarily from the lower ends of the social scale, as handwritten denunciations revealed denouncers were often functionally literate at best. In a handful of cases, denouncers belonged to the same popular or armed movements as the individuals they accused. One denunciation informed on plans for the assassination of three military high officials that the denouncer claimed to have overheard during a clandestine meeting. The informant admitted participating in an insurgent group but provided the information because ‘in part, I'm already tired of this struggle’.Footnote 32
Social historians have transformed the practice of denunciation from a marginal phenomenon into a key tool to rethink clearly defined roles between the state and society, providing compelling evidence against reducing ‘the policing of society to a simple repressive relationship’ in which fear of persecution results in obedience.Footnote 33 The voluntary nature of denunciations, Gellately argues, corrects the ‘undue emphasis’ historians traditionally place on ‘coercion, force or even open violence’, regarding ‘the population as essentially passive, apathetic or not involved directly’.Footnote 34 Denunciations have thus served to question conceptualisations of state security forces as imposed on the population from outside, instead envisioning them as apparatuses whose efficiency depends on collaboration from society at large.Footnote 35 State and society are no longer conceptualised as ‘delineated universes’ but rather as ‘overlapping entities’ within a permanent, fluid and changing interconnectedness marked by ‘adaptation, negotiation and flexibility’, thus highlighting the entanglement of ordinary citizens within authoritarian regimes.Footnote 36
Over the years, police and military intelligence agencies in Guatemala crafted a clear strategy to achieve civilian participation in counter-insurgent intelligence gathering. Police manuals placed a premium on local knowledge without which ‘the police and intelligence services of the armed forces cannot function and accomplish their mission’.Footnote 37 According to the Manual of Counter-Subversive Warfare, an instructive study reflecting the military doctrine as put into practice by the Guatemalan security forces from 1978 onwards, civilian support should be expressed ‘not merely in sentiments of sympathy and approval’ but through ‘an active participation in the struggle against the subversion’. The manual elucidates that, rather than pursuing ideological alignment of society at large, the military regime strived to obtain the collaboration and loyalty of an ‘active minority’ or a small number of dedicated supporters.Footnote 38 As civilians were to provide the bulk of counter-insurgent intelligence, police strategies prescribed ‘all citizens should be encouraged to provide information and be permitted to communicate directly with intelligence units’.Footnote 39 As scholars on community watch schemes in liberal democracies have noted, authorities seek to ‘break down the walls’ between police and society in a broader strategy to ‘tap into the intelligence of social networks and local communities’.Footnote 40 Guatemalan counter-insurgency strategy instructed authorities to put into place the required legal and institutional framework, providing ‘simple and secure ways’ to level denunciations and anonymity to mitigate the risk of denouncing and avoid retaliations.Footnote 41 Anonymous letters and phone calls to police tip lines were to function as a ‘private safety-valve’: a low-cost and supposedly low-risk medium through which information could be passed on to authorities securely.Footnote 42 While some denouncers applauded themselves for their bravery, many omitted their names, stating ‘by providing you this information, I put my life in your hands’.Footnote 43 Yet in the ‘terrifying blend of clumsiness and zeal’ that, according to Kirsten Weld, characterised the PN, investigative reports reveal that agents regularly disclosed personal details of denouncers, enabling their identification and exposing them to retaliation.Footnote 44
Like scholars have noted in other historical contexts, false denunciation thrives whenever regimes guarantee the guise of anonymity. As apparent in Stoll's account of a loyalty ceremony in which local villagers pledged allegiance to the army, Guatemalan authorities were well aware of the private motivations underlying much of the collaboration with state security forces: ‘Those who really are guerrillas, bring them to me [but] don't bring me people with whom you have some problem over a piece of land, over a cow, over a woman, over money, none of that.’Footnote 45 Yet even as individuals attempted to settle private conflicts through denunciations, false informing nonetheless contributed to processes of political self-disciplining and social control. It enabled state security forces to convey an impression of ‘omnipotence’ and ‘omnipresence’ that far exceeded their actual strength, as the origin of information was shrouded in secrecy.Footnote 46 Witness testimonies and literary accounts of daily reality in wartime Guatemala are riddled with references to informants and the pervasive atmosphere of fear and mutual suspicion these actors installed. As the wife of an abducted and disappeared trade unionist recounted to Marta Gutiérrez: ‘In the buses, you couldn't talk about anything […], there's always someone listening. The buses and taxis are full of orejas […], listening, to later gossip and take people away.’Footnote 47 Widespread practices of informing signal the existence of a vast local intelligence network and provoke a generalised suspicion and fear not only of armed actors but primarily of denunciations by neighbours. As scholars observed in Soviet Russia, and as proved true in Guatemala, too, the perpetual threat of being under surveillance created an ‘illusion of constant oversight’ while, in fact, ‘it was not the oversight that was constant, but rather, the fear generated by the potential for continuous oversight, the unrelenting sense of looming danger’.Footnote 48 In her work on trade unionists, Deborah Levenson-Estrada concludes that ‘Terror infiltrated all aspects of Guatemalan life, it transformed the way life was understood and negotiated [and] bred extreme caution in all relationships and in all communications.’Footnote 49
In sum, grassroots participation in political surveillance inserted a chilling cautiousness into daily interactions and nurtured social fractures. Systems of denunciations achieved a ‘multiplicity of social effects’ that directly contributed to the deep-rooted impression that ‘real terror lurked around the corner’.Footnote 50 By nourishing this climate of mutual suspicion, Guatemalan authorities sought to deter acting openly for social change while instilling fear and paranoia within activist circles, forcing activists to withdraw from society and provoking their ‘demoralisation and psychological destruction’.Footnote 51 As in the case of Nazi Germany, even when presenting false accusations inspired by selfish motives, denouncers thus unwittingly enforced the social functions of the institution of denunciation and enabled state security forces to penetrate the lowest levels of society, specifically opening up working-class neighbourhoods and shanty towns to state terror.
The Engineering of a Denunciatory Atmosphere
Denunciations reaching the military and police authorities in the 1970s and 1980s built on a prolonged tradition of anti-communism that gradually took root in Guatemalan society in the aftermath of the military coup d’état against democratically elected and reformist president Jacobo Árbenz (1951–4). The dramatic event brought to power Colonel Castillo Armas (1954–7), whose regime ‘justified the coup as a God-given struggle against atheistic communism’.Footnote 52 The regime change reversed the Árbenz administration's policies of political inclusion and land redistribution and put the country on the path to civil war by installing fanatical anti-communism as a pillar of state ideology.Footnote 53 The CEH argued that persecution of supporters of the former Árbenz regime installed ‘anti-communism in the collective consciousness’ of the country and created a social climate of ‘fear of being denounced’.Footnote 54 Over the years, counter-revolutionary regimes manufactured a political discourse which was maintained, as Weld argues, by a ‘Cold War rhetoric to justify a full-spectrum campaign against any form of democratic opening’.Footnote 55
Subsequent military regimes rhetorically manufactured what Gellately, referring to Nazi Germany, dubbed a ‘denunciatory atmosphere’.Footnote 56 According to the Manual of Counter-Subversive Warfare drafted by the Guatemalan military in 1978, ‘mobilising public opinion’ was key to maintaining and recovering popular support.Footnote 57 According to other military documents quoted by the CEH, psychological operations and anti-communist advertising campaigns were designed to ‘elevate the national spirit within the anti-communist ideology’ and create a ‘sense of legality and justification to fight communism openly’.Footnote 58 Facing a massive social confrontation in the streets of Guatemala City and the resurgence of revitalised guerrilla groups with strong rural and indigenous support, state calls for civilian intelligence acquired a fresh impetus and systemic character from 1978 onwards. Eliciting private information from ordinary civilians assumed an institutional character and became official PN strategy.Footnote 59 In the regime's effort to draw civilians into ‘a spiral of accusation, exposure and punishment’, intensive multimedia propaganda campaigns fuelled anti-communist fears and political polarisation.Footnote 60 State discourse aimed to establish denunciation as a political imperative and a patriotic and moral obligation by calling for the ‘national unity of all Guatemalans […] to defeat the communist threat’.Footnote 61 Authorities divested denunciation of its negative connotation by recurring to euphemistic language, framing denunciations as efforts to build peace and protect the family. Denouncing was thus converted into a civic virtue, resolving doubts concerning the morality of the practice. During his inauguration address, President Lucas García (1978–82), in turn, implored citizens to inform authorities on all suspicious behaviour: ‘Starting from today, Guatemalans can no longer evade their responsibility to actively participate in our search for solutions to the grave problems that overwhelm our country.’ The ethical duty of citizens desiring ‘justice, legality and respect’, as the newspaper El Imparcial editorialised, became to watch, listen and inform on each other to authorities.Footnote 62
Yet underneath these appeals for civilian unity lay a ‘violent and primitive anti-communist discourse’ and a broader social intolerance.Footnote 63 These intertwined into a virulent exclusionary and isolationist rhetoric upheld by the National Security Doctrine that understood Guatemalan subversion as part of the ‘international communist movement’ and its ‘politics of global expansion’.Footnote 64 In the eyes of the military regime, ‘guerrilleros, trade unionists and the political opposition were part of the same subversive plan, therefore all of them had to be converted into military objectives and intelligence gathering’.Footnote 65 Public discourses by state officials were marked by a moral division of the population into good, honourable and law-abiding Guatemalans united in a nationalist-patriotic community against the regime's internal enemies that ‘even without being communist, attempted to break the established order’.Footnote 66 Tellingly, state discourse did not differentiate between political and common crimes. Instead, in what Bayley recognised as a recurring practice in law enforcement, authorities attributed ideological motivations to all lawbreakers, thus enhancing the ‘danger of lawlessness’ by ‘associating it with ideological conspiracies’.Footnote 67 State propaganda portrayed the delinquent as inherently subversive, and vice versa. In an editorial in El Imparcial, one columnist accurately grasped the political culture that had taken root in Guatemala since the 1950s: ‘There is no sustainable difference between common delinquency and political delinquency because both crimes are rooted in the law [that] evaluates and grades the damage that is being caused to society with absolute objectivity.’Footnote 68
Through what the CEH calls its ‘efficient control over the press’, military intelligence made extensive use of written and audio-visual media to conduct its psychological operations and influence public opinion.Footnote 69 Denunciations reveal that between 1978 and 1984 authorities made continuous use of television and radio broadcasts to spur civilians to denounce suspected subversives. Denouncers repeatedly refer to these public appeals, stating, for example, ‘I do this because on the radio and television they say that every good Guatemalan who knows or suspects something should bring this [information] to the knowledge of the authorities.’Footnote 70 In widely distributed newspapers such as Prensa Libre, the presidency's Secretariat of Public Relations published a whole-page advertisement informing Guatemalans of the dangers communism posed to the individual, the family and the country. In newspapers such as El Imparcial, conservative opinion-makers and editors continuously called for ‘spontaneous collaboration’ with the military regime, equating fearful silence with criminal complicity and lamenting that ‘no one moves a finger in defence of their fellow countrymen […] to restore the legal order and morale of other times’.Footnote 71 In rural areas, military propaganda targeted civilians by dropping leaflets containing thinly veiled threats, urging Guatemalans to denounce rebels ‘if you want peace, if you respect the law, if you love your family’.Footnote 72
Weaponising Gossip
The reporting of overheard gossip and rumours formed the most common pretext for writing to authorities and attests to the ways practices of denunciations produced a social fabric in which, as Silvia Posocco argues, ‘secrets were harboured, accessed, intercepted, exchanged and stolen’.Footnote 73 Local knowledge, regardless of how trivial, became a valuable commodity as the institution of denunciation offered a medium for ordinary Guatemalans to weaponise gossip and elevate it to the political and judicial arena.Footnote 74 Practices of denunciation and gossip furthermore converge as both are deeply embedded in local knowledge and flourish in ‘close-knit, highly connected social networks’. In relationships ‘marked by tension, distrust and ambiguity’, gossip and denunciations can be ‘used as effective combat devices’ to indirectly forward private interests or to ‘cast moral doubts’ and harm others to gain relative status within a community.Footnote 75 Yet whereas gossip serves to deal non-violently with interpersonal conflicts, denunciations transfer private information to supra-local actors, thus playing a critical role in the conversion of private conflicts into violence.
Denunciations were often remarkable only in the triviality of the accusations that undergirded them. Yet as official police policy prescribed ‘every received denunciation has to form the object of a police investigation’, few denunciations were deemed so futile that they merited immediate archiving without prior investigation.Footnote 76 One such seemingly nonsensical denunciation the PN investigated informed on a neighbour who ‘made himself suspicious because he drives his car with excessive speed and very quickly parks it [and] he is not communicative with his neighbours’.Footnote 77 Another denunciation informed authorities on ‘very weird and suspicious people’ that kept their curtains closed at all times and another even attempted to incriminate a peasant who ‘always works his land without communicating’.Footnote 78 Other individuals were denounced merely because they originated from neighbouring states considered communist hotbeds (such as Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba), for speaking with a foreign accent or driving a car with foreign licence plates. Such biographic details provided sufficient pretext to brand individuals as ‘spies’ or ‘arms traffickers’ and flagged them as financers and organisers of the armed insurgency in Guatemala. Fears of foreign involvement reflected a state-promoted, nationalist-patriotic scheme in which national sovereignty was continuously under siege by foreign regimes and their domestic accomplices. Tellingly, one denunciation accused a woman of subversive tendencies on the sole grounds that she often travelled abroad, ‘bringing many communist doctrines to our beloved fatherland’.Footnote 79 Similarly, a man was accused of being a guerrillero because he ‘brought information and disgrace’ to his community.Footnote 80 Congruent with the state's National Security Doctrine, denouncers thus viewed the desire for social transformation of the country as alien to Guatemala and forced upon Guatemalans from the outside.
As mere hearsay sufficed to prompt ordinary Guatemalans to denounce others, individuals found themselves targeted because of privately voiced statements and opinions. Various denunciations informed authorities about rumours of impending coups and bomb attacks on political leaders or reported overhearing criticism of state officials. Reflecting many letter-writers’ apparent preoccupation with the professional reputation of the PN's director-general, one denunciation claimed a woman had accused him of the assassinations of Alberto Fuentes Mohr and Manuel Colom Argueta, two prominent progressive politicians executed in 1979 by state security forces. ‘[As I am] already tired of hearing so much criticism of you and other public officials’, the denouncer requested an exemplary punishment to put a halt to circulating rumours.Footnote 81 As Louise E. Walker observes in her study on Mexican intelligence agents, state security forces’ preoccupation with ‘destabilising’ jokes, rumours and gossip reflects a regime's heightened anxiety and ‘self-perceived vulnerability’.Footnote 82 Similarly, rumours and gossip increasingly became a subject of interest to Guatemalan police and military intelligence services, considering them a tool to gauge ‘hostility towards the government’ and a ‘barometer for public attitudes [and] the existing level of insurrection’.Footnote 83
No matter how petty or absurd the allegation, Guatemalan authorities proved highly receptive towards civilian intelligence. Police reports demonstrate how the majority of the individuals implicated in such trivial denunciations were placed under close scrutiny by the PN, which operated within a logic of a presumption of guilt where the burden of proof lay on the accused. One such denunciation concerned a bus driver who, allegedly, had ‘expressed himself badly’ when discussing the director-general of the PN, accusing him of being ‘a great thief’ and ‘talking badly’ about his next of kin. The denouncer concluded that ‘a man that talks like this about the authorities is a delinquent’. Despite the meagre charges and the flimsy evidence, police reports disclose that two detectives spent various days locating the vehicle. The agents then proceeded to set up an elaborate trap. In an attempt to provoke the suspect into hostile statements about the authorities, one policeman halted the shuttle bus to check its registration documents while the other boarded the vehicle in plain clothes, posing as a regular passenger. The latter agent, who travelled six kilometres on the bus, concluded that ‘no absurd gossip against the police could be heard at all, [observing] only good behaviour’. The detectives nonetheless summoned the bus driver to the police station for additional questioning. After concluding he was an ‘upright, sincere, educated and responsible citizen’ denounced by an ‘unscrupulous person’, the accused was discharged. The aura of suspicion nonetheless remained, as the bus driver was instructed to present himself at the police station when summoned and the denunciation was archived for ‘future reference’.Footnote 84
The fervour with which authorities investigated frivolous accusations illustrates, as Gellately argues, how ‘socially or politically powerless people’ find in the weapon of denunciation a way ‘to be taken seriously’ by authorities that ‘follow[ed] up relentlessly’ on their words.Footnote 85 Police unresponsiveness, according to Bayley, discourages the population from contacting the police, while ‘exemplary enforcement’ is concurrently the ‘foundation’ of (political) crime deterrence.Footnote 86 Authoritarian regimes, in turn, eagerly follow up on unsubstantial accusations as it provides them with an opportunity to ‘discipline (or educate) society’.Footnote 87 Civilians having a brush with authorities thus found themselves confronted with what policing theorist Benjamin Bowling considers the ‘core features of police work’, namely its seemingly unlimited capacity for surveillance ‘coupled with the threat of sanctions for deviance’.Footnote 88
Motives for Denunciation and Persuasion Strategies
Authoritarian regimes generally care little for the identity of the denouncer or the motives that spurred them to volunteer information. Although admitting reasons to denounce are inevitably mixed, Gellately broadly classifies motives into political or ‘system-loyal motivations’ and ‘instrumental motivations’.Footnote 89 Yet such categorisations quickly turn untenable upon examination of actual denunciations. While instrumental motives and private vindictive purposes indisputably formed the prime motivation to register denunciations in Guatemala, these false denunciations often contain highly ideologically charged discourses. As other scholars on the practice of denunciation have remarked, nearly all denunciations contain a ‘minimal expression of moral and political sentiments’ intended to persuade authorities that the author is trustworthy and motivated by ‘altruistic concern for the public good’.Footnote 90 Therefore, what might appear at first glance as unequivocal evidence of an identification with the counter-insurgent state and its anti-communist doctrines often merely testifies to the denouncer's abilities to produce compelling discourses that speak the counter-insurgent language and frame personal daily-life conflicts in terms relevant to the military regime. On the basis of fine-grained content and critical discourse analysis, the following paragraphs illustrate both the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that spurred ordinary Guatemalans to hurl accusations at their fellow citizens as well as the strategies of persuasion they employed. Following common scripts and adopting the counter-insurgent jargon of the military regime, denouncers encouraged authorities to intervene on their behalf.
Instead of being inspired by impersonal ideological polarisation and abstract hatred, denunciations more often ‘turn common disputes into violence’, providing ‘new means to satisfy a long-repressed grudge or provide a decisive advantage in previously restrained contests’.Footnote 91 As interpersonal power plays merge with formal institutional power, denunciations offer ‘the less powerful and the disadvantaged an opportunity to take out their spite’, attesting to how ‘systems hungry for information’ open themselves up to manipulation by those who seek to take advantage of state terror.Footnote 92 In Guatemala, police investigations into denunciations demonstrate that ordinary civilians instrumentalised the practice as a medium to attain material and social gains, to get rid of business competitors, enemies or rivals, to take emotional revenge or to obtain disputed territories. Through denunciations, ordinary Guatemalans thus politicised interpersonal disputes, supplying state security forces with private information in exchange for their intervention, to prevail in personal and private disputes.
Romantic and professional rivalries and family honour formed a common pretext for malicious denunciation. In September 1970, a Honduran family informed Guatemalan authorities that their under-age daughter had fled to Guatemala City with her Guatemalan boyfriend, who was accused of being ‘some kind of communal hippie’ who had ‘induced her to smoking marijuana’. Additionally, the denunciation implicated the accused young man in the assassination of Karl von Spreti, the West German ambassador to Guatemala executed by guerrillas earlier that year. Police investigations revealed the girl's parents had made the accusations to prevent a marriage between their daughter and a Guatemalan man. The racism underlying many denunciations quickly surfaces as the parents argued ‘Guatemalans have a very high index of Black and Indian blood’ and they ‘would not allow a plebeian Indian into the family’.Footnote 93 In another denunciation, a retailer of lottery tickets was accused of spreading rumours in a local canteen, stating a coup was on the way in which the president would be assassinated. A police investigation revealed the details of the denunciation did not add up and, upon interviewing the accused, concluded the denunciation was motivated by competition within the lottery business.Footnote 94
Denunciations proved to be opportunities for revenge for losers in local conflicts. For example, one denunciation accused a municipal inspector of detonating a grenade in one of the central marketplaces of Quetzaltenango, resulting in the death of a milk vendor. Police investigations quickly established that the denouncer was seeking to settle scores as he had recently been fired as a marketplace security guard by the denounced because he collected political funds during work hours.Footnote 95 Another denunciation had caused the unwarranted arrest of a school principal and various pupils on the accusation of distributing subversive propaganda. The false accusations had been levelled by a school security guard, recently dismissed for violent behaviour towards female students.Footnote 96 Finally, one denouncer repeatedly informed on her neighbour to authorities, accusing her of being a guerrillera who stashed weapons in her home and nursed wounded insurgents. As a result of these accusations, security forces extensively surveilled the accused over four years and searched her home on three separate occasions. A final investigation established baseless accusations had been registered on the basis of ‘personal hatred’.Footnote 97
Land-use conflicts formed another common pretext to falsely accuse neighbours. In November 1978, the PN received a telegram requesting an intervention against a family that supposedly operated a subversive training camp on their lands. Police investigations concluded that long-standing conflicts over communal lands were at the heart of the rivalry between both families. Prior to the denunciation, local courts ruled that the denouncer had illegally occupied the accused family's lands. Upon being released from prison, the denouncer had intended to, at long last, settle the dispute in his favour by levelling false accusations.Footnote 98 In a similar territorial dispute, one denouncer wrote a personal letter to the Guatemalan president to accuse a family of breaking into houses and threatening their neighbours, adding ‘they are not afraid of you, Mr President, [they say that] you are worth nothing and that those in Cuba are stronger than you’. Upon interviewing residents of the neighbourhood, police investigators established the families were at odds because the denounced family's livestock had destroyed the denouncer's crops.Footnote 99
Fear and Self-Preservation
Fear constituted another powerful catalyst for denunciations. Ordinary Guatemalans often found themselves trapped in an existential competition for survival that propelled them to report alleged subversives in an attempt to save themselves from state terror against individuals aligning with the insurgency. In rural communities, denouncers sought to protect their communities from the massacres committed against localities accused of sympathising with rebels. In other words, security fears coupled with mutual distrust spurred civilians to denounce others pre-emptively to escape state violence and exonerate themselves from suspicions. Large numbers of letters from rural areas contain community-centred denunciations from villagers asserting their concern that the armed conflict was reaching formerly quiet and peaceful communities. The mere appearance of subversive propaganda and graffiti in a village formed sufficient basis to denounce those ‘attempting to install communism in this zone […], a place that has always been known as quiet, unaccustomed to political issues and home to people willing to work’ but now seemed on its way to becoming ‘another Nicaragua’.Footnote 100 Others singled out alleged communists in their communities on the sole motivation that ‘I have kids and I don't want any more massacres’, tellingly equating the mere presence of subversives with the eventuality of mass murder.Footnote 101 In another illustrative example from the town of El Chol in the department of Baja Verapaz, authorities were informed that ‘everything had always been calm but now everything had become rotten’ because ‘agitators’ distributed propaganda leaflets. The five local residents that signed the denunciations set themselves up as representatives of their communities which they explicitly portrayed as aligning with the state, emphasising ‘we are simple people siding with our president and we are obligated to denounce the agitators’, hoping that ‘these bad people stop bothering us because things could get ugly’.Footnote 102
Many rural denunciations demonstrate how civilians also sought protections from the political violence of guerrillas and their local supporters. Communities under effective rebel control witnessed rigorous enforcement of political conformity as those tasked with raising inhabitants’ consciousness backed up their message with death threats and ajusticiamientos (revolutionary executions).Footnote 103 Guerrilla organisations regularly reported on the selective killings of confidential informants and civilian denouncers as acts of revolutionary justice, a prospect that undoubtedly drove those publicly accused of collaborating with state agents further into the latter's hands. Two members of a workers’ union of sugar refineries, for example, sought protection with police forces by denouncing their fellow union members as rebels. As the two delegates had failed to resolve a salary dispute in favour of the union, disgruntled workers at the factory accused the delegates of collaborating with the landowners, stating they would pay a high price for their treason.Footnote 104 One student leader at the University of San Carlos sought refuge with police forces after suffering death threats and, ultimately, an assassination attempt at the hands of fellow students who condemned his political stances. Upon asking for protection, the denouncer named over 20 student organisers and the dean of the Law Faculty, whom he considered responsible for the hate campaign orchestrated against him. A few years later, the denouncer would formally join the ranks of the police force as a legal adviser to the Detective Corps.Footnote 105 Similar fears of revolutionary politics also resonated in denunciations that voiced concern on the right to private property under the Marxist programme the guerrillas proposed. One denunciation accused a local family of ‘threatening, robbing and killing all those who do not want to join their party of guerrilleros’, fearing that once the guerrillas ‘kill off the generals, they would steal all our land and possessions’.Footnote 106
Ideological Persuasion
Regardless of the underlying motivations, denunciations more often than not contained highly ideological discourses centred on a basic set of interlocking conservative ideals. These reflected the exclusionary nationalism and the National Security Doctrine upheld by the military regime: law and order, anti-communism and patriotism. Such denouncers aligned themselves with regime values to strengthen their legitimacy and supposed honourability, depicting themselves, for example, as a ‘mother and good Guatemalan’ or as a ‘good citizen that should denounce the traitors’.Footnote 107 While some emphasised their trustworthiness by guaranteeing no personal motives were at play, others affirmed their loyalty and allegiance to the state by explicitly choosing sides, declaring ‘I'm against the guerrillas because with the government it's the safest.’Footnote 108 In a more impassioned denunciation, an informant identified as an ‘anti-communist and honourable person’ desiring an end to ‘the violence that affects all Guatemalans rightly born in the land of the Quetzal’ so that ‘peace and tranquillity may reign and we can earn our daily bread as God instructs’.Footnote 109 Others denounced ‘in the name of our fatherland and the youth which is its future, so our country doesn't end up in the hands of crazy people’.Footnote 110 Such denouncers handed over lists of suspected communists that ‘the honourable citizenry suspects and points out’.Footnote 111 Another rhetorical strategy consisted of underlining one's aversion and profound resentment of the guerrillas and their sympathisers, referring to them as ‘devils’, ‘cowards’, ‘depraved’ and being ‘in an armed struggle against human rights’ or ‘the bad children of our beloved Guatemala’. Such phrasings inevitably engaged with the belief systems and ideological codes of the authorities. Denunciations also mirrored the exclusionary nature of Guatemalan political culture through discriminatory discourses and ethnic stereotypes that always seemed to lurk around the corner, demanding, for example, police interventions against ‘all these shaggy Indians that are on the streets, [because] they don't want to work, they sit all day on the pavement’.Footnote 112
Some discourses suggest that especially conservative sectors of society entered into hyper-vigilance. Reminiscent of and sharing many features with the Red Scare and Lavender Scare of US McCarthyism, denouncers labelled alleged subversives as foreigners, homosexuals, prostitutes and (Indigenous) vagrants lacking a work ethic.Footnote 113 An anonymous letter from Guatemala City, for example, informed on four brothers for being liaisons of the Salvadorean guerrillas in Guatemala and denounced them on a variety of additional charges, ranging from marijuana trafficking to laziness, also accusing one brother of being a ‘homosexual who meets in his room with others of his class’. The denouncer concluded his letter with a plea to take action ‘because the guerrilleros, delinquents, thieves and drug-addicts are finishing off the honest working people of the country’.Footnote 114 One anonymous denunciation accused several teachers of politically indoctrinating pupils, proclaiming the desire for a ‘Guatemala free of vandalism that brings forward Marxist pseudo-leaders that plummet our fatherland into chaos’.Footnote 115 In the many denunciations focusing on the University of San Carlos, an epicentre of opposition to the military regime, a vigorously conservative discourse surfaced that remains potent up to current times. According to one denouncer, students and ‘subversive terrorists’ were ‘wasps belonging to the same swarm’ and the discredited university was saturated with subversives that the people of Guatemala maintained through tax money.Footnote 116
Violent Persuasion
Denunciations usually contained a ‘humble suggestion’ or otherwise detailed instructions to the authorities to intervene in a manner the denouncer saw fit.Footnote 117 Such orders generally ranged from surveilling, capturing or interrogating the denounced, to raiding residencies and handing out ‘warning calls’ and ‘good punishments’. Some denouncers provided specific directives, commanding that the police arrest specific individuals and ‘make them confess where the others are, so as to finish these guerrilleros off’.Footnote 118 Such discourses provide unique insights into the denouncers’ way of seeking justice and the disciplinary role they envisioned for the state. Some denouncers were undoubtedly aware of the potential lethal consequences of denunciations, stating they had ‘always been a collaborator of the authorities’ and had already ‘denounced several people that have been eliminated by the army’.Footnote 119 Examples of such open calls for violence against political adversaries are abundant. One particularly dramatic denunciation originated from the owner of a mortgage and loan company and a large agricultural estate. As a local anti-communist had informed her that the peasants who worked her land provided money and medicine to the guerrillas, she instructed authorities to bomb the entire estate because ‘the miserable guerrilla fighters’ and ‘the communist fibre entered my ranch’.Footnote 120 Another denunciation informed the director-general that ‘those abducted by the communist guerrillas, supported by the bearded criminal Fidel Castro’ received annual payment from their abductors, and instructed the police chief to ‘execute all the guerrilleros you can find’.Footnote 121
Denouncers frequently incited state security forces to exercise extralegal violence on the denounced. Such calls for violence appeared most prominent in impersonal denunciations that indiscriminately targeted entire groups commonly branded as subversive, such as teachers, priests, catechists and cooperative members. One such denunciation informed on schoolteachers who allegedly spray-painted anti-government slogans in the town of Malacatancito alongside the Pan-American Highway in the department of Huehuetenango. The denouncer, identifying as a proponent of the military regime, called on the police to ‘kill them all at once’ and ‘make an example of them so as to end the subversion of these teachers that feed off the state and don't dedicate themselves to their labour’.Footnote 122 Other teachers were denounced for criticising the government and organising communist classes. ‘In the name of the anti-communist people in our village’, authorities were instructed by the denouncer to ‘abduct and murder them all at once for being enemies of the government’.Footnote 123 Denunciations that involved minors proved especially revealing in terms of the ruthlessness of some denouncers. A denunciation from the colonial town of Antigua Guatemala informed authorities on the recent surge in the appearance of subversive propaganda. Unable to identify the authors of the leaflets, the denouncer suggested fathers of the pupils of a nearby school were ‘involved in bad politics’ and in possession of a stencil duplicator to copy large quantities of pamphlets. In the denouncer's opinion, authorities should conduct a thorough investigation, not by persecuting the parents, but by ‘extracting [information] from the pupils’.Footnote 124
Justice-Seeking Persuasion
Denunciations often dealt almost entirely with common crimes such as armed assault, theft, rape, prostitution and the trade and consumption of narcotics, which denouncers framed as political issues. In a few cases, such conflation of common criminality and political infractions followed a plausible logic. One denouncer accused local ‘propagators of communism’ of being thieves: ‘First they steal cattle, now they are guerrilleros […] demanding corn and beans.’Footnote 125 As roaming guerrilla groups requisitioned crops and cattle from the local peasantry to sustain the armed insurgency, uncooperative peasants undoubtedly perceived this requisitioning as forced collaboration or plain theft. Moreover, considering the incessant efforts by the state and the media to turn political opponents into common criminals in the public eye, the conflation of subversion with criminality might well have been partially appropriated by a segment of the broader populace. Many ordinary Guatemalans likely found themselves genuinely confused and unwittingly lumped together guerrilleros, death squads, armed plain-clothes security forces and common criminals as they struggled to visually differentiate between them. The chaos and disarray that characterised the internal armed conflict additionally provoked a broader social breakdown in which common crime thrived, enabling civilians to draw causal relations between revolutionary upheaval and the experienced crime wave. Denouncers associated armed criminals with armed insurgents, without any clear justification. One illustrative denunciation informed the police about a gang of alleged guerrilleros and cattle thieves that threatened to kill the denouncers if they complained to authorities. A police patrol later caught the perpetrators transporting stolen cows in their truck. The denounced were brought to the courts on the charges of theft, without mention of any subversive activities.Footnote 126
As Vladimir Kozlov observed in Soviet denunciations, denouncers keyed into ‘the ideological codes that would open the door to mutual understanding’ with the authorities, using ‘standard ideological frames’ or exploiting the regime's favourite themes.Footnote 127 Denouncers thus introduced elements of political wrongdoing to reinforce denunciations on crimes that had remained unpunished by authorities. Civilians likely politically framed denunciations on common criminality to appeal to the counter-insurgent priorities of state security forces, triggering them to take action against types of criminality otherwise neglected. In this sense, police theorists have shown denunciations are a ‘rational response to growing insecurity’ in the face of a weak and non-responsive state.Footnote 128 Ordinary Guatemalans thus learned to speak regime language and used denunciations as a means to navigate a lawless society in which the state failed to provide safety and redress. Denouncers satisfied their need for local security and retribution by exploiting the receptiveness of authorities to civilian information, appropriating it as a channel to defend themselves and their livelihoods against common criminality. In one illustrative example, an anonymous complaint denounced a coyote (people smuggler) who allegedly trafficked Salvadoreans and Hondurans to the United States with Guatemalan passports, trafficked marijuana, falsified bank cheques and identification papers and ‘dedicated himself to the subversion’, storing a case of hand grenades and machine guns in his office. Police investigations confirmed the accused defrauded his clients, accepting money to smuggle people across the border, yet never delivering on his promises. Neither the accusation of pertaining to the subversion nor the trafficking of marijuana could be substantiated.Footnote 129 The familiarity with the specifics of the smuggling operations and the exact location of weaponry in the offices of the denounced hint at personal motives to which the accusations of narcotics trade and subversion were added as a means to trigger the police into taking action against the scammer.
Conclusion
Drawing on the denunciations presented throughout this article, these closing paragraphs intend to scrutinise denouncers’ historic responsibility and culpability. Historians have largely refrained from historicising denouncers’ agency, simply stating informers ‘never operated under coercion’ and ‘alternative courses of actions were always open to them’.Footnote 130 More nuanced efforts have attempted to reconstruct whether denouncers ‘reckoned on the eventuality that accused persons would and did pay with their lives’.Footnote 131 In Guatemala City, extreme state violence created an urban landscape of terror that would have been hard to ignore for local residents. As Weld puts it, the ‘city had become a war zone’.Footnote 132 Guatemalans were ‘taken off busses and from street corners, pulled from restaurants, classrooms, cars, workplaces, or their homes, and hustled away by the proverbial unknown armed men’.Footnote 133 Their unidentified, tortured and often decomposed cadavers were dumped in the city's ravines, streets and wastelands in a public display that formed part of the daily urban scenery. Quantitative studies on state violence note that in 1980 ‘hardly a day went by when newspapers did not report on a political disappearance or the appearance of a mutilated corpse in the metropolitan area’.Footnote 134 According to the CEH, urban terror combined with the press’ nearly constant diffusion of images of cadavers showing signs of torture and mutilation ‘consolidated a constant reminder of violence even for those not directly involved in the political struggle’.Footnote 135 Denouncers were thus likely well aware of the all-surrounding terror, but did they also understand its logics and modalities?
There are ample indications that ordinary Guatemalans struggled to assign responsibility for the violence, especially selective violence against targeted victims. As Weld observes, clandestine terror by death squads was ‘committed quietly, leaving behind little evidence and few witnesses’ while police and military intelligence units in plain clothes gunned down and abducted civilians.Footnote 136 Coordinated campaigns of ‘disinformation and confusion’ rendered the truth ‘almost imperceptible for ordinary citizens’ as authorities denied any responsibility and ascribed disappearances and dumped cadavers to feuds among the guerrillas.Footnote 137 Staged press conferences, manufacturing of evidence and manipulation of witness testimonies were common practices. As Lvovich argues for Argentina, because much repression was carried out invisibly and clandestinely, denouncers likely possessed an ‘ample margin to construct and interpret and to decide to see or not to see, to know or not to know, to understand or not to understand’.Footnote 138 Contrarily, by purposely and wilfully encouraging authorities to violently persecute the denounced, many denouncers provided an unequivocal view on the intentionality underscoring denunciations. These denunciations demonstrate that denouncing did not merely serve rational and instrumental goals. For some, the prospect of punishing a local rival constituted an emotionally satisfying undertaking. Such persuasions bring to mind Guillermo O'Donnell's imagery on how the Argentine military regime ‘released the wolves’ within society, referring to certain sectors that ‘without any official necessity’ exercised ‘their own authoritarian pathos’, going ‘further than the regime required of them’.Footnote 139
Besides grasping their knowledgeability, another method to gauge denouncers’ responsibility has consisted of assessing margin of freedom and capacity for decision. Widely accepted definitions of denunciatory practices stress the voluntary and spontaneous character of such practices. It has been argued that ‘whatever incentives regimes may offer and whatever personal advantages may be gained’, denunciations remain ‘always a matter of individual choice’.Footnote 140 Such generalisations, however, fail to situate individual agency in its proper socio-historical context and overlook how civil war dynamics inevitably structure and constrict individual choices. Such approaches, in other words, fail to map the ‘messy moral landscape’ generated by armed conflict and its political terror.Footnote 141 Primarily, the uncertain outcome of the confrontation between the state and insurgent groups generates ‘many grey and morally ambiguous realms’.Footnote 142 As Greg Grandin posits, revolutions are not merely ‘compressed and exploded moments of intense hope’; they constitute moments of great fear for the ‘coming of the new’. Insurgent forces’ inability to establish political control render it easier to ‘live inside the counterrevolution’ than venture into the revolutionary unknown.Footnote 143 In the words of Stoll, what prevails with a population ravaged by counter-insurgency is ‘the hunger for stability, even on blatantly disfavorable terms’.Footnote 144 In the countryside, Guatemalan armed forces eagerly promoted and capitalised on these longings, portraying themselves as guardians of communities allegedly threatened in their subsistence by subversive delinquents seeking to collectivise their most valuable asset: land. The coordinated state propaganda campaign misrepresented the origins of violence, criminalised and dehumanised political opponents and reversed negative moral associations of denunciation by framing it as a patriotic and selfless contribution. In rural areas, the military seduced and co-opted the local population with ‘benevolent development initiatives, psychological operations and fabricated nationalist propaganda’, convincing rural families that only the army could provide security and much-needed basic services.Footnote 145
Such underlying dynamics of subordination, destitution and dependence resonate clearly throughout the denunciations of ordinary Guatemalans. In the face of direct coercion and overwhelming individual and collective fears, for many individuals denouncing constituted a strategy to secure their own survival, adopted to exonerate and protect themselves, their friends, their family members and their communities from the constant suspicion from which no one was safe. In what Kalyvas has called the ‘pragmatic day-to-day calculus of personal survival’ in civil war, collaboration with state security forces was often re-interpreted as a way to negotiate the survival of the broader community in the face of massacres against communities accused of ‘harbouring’ or collaborating with alleged subversives.Footnote 146 Other denunciations testify to their instrumental use as one of the few available options to ordinary Guatemalans to alleviate necessities and redress injustices. As law enforcement functioned poorly, common criminals were denounced as political opponents and denouncers thus gained access to authorities by speaking to their priorities. Some denouncers appealed to state security forces under false pretences, asking them to mediate and intervene on their behalf within local rivalries unresolved in the face of a collapsing or absent rule of law. The practice of denunciation thus clearly linked up with the necessities of the broader population, which in turn learned to exploit the systems that exploited them. As Fitzpatrick concludes, ‘for the great majority who were not powerful or well connected, denunciation is one of the few available forms of agency’, a way that an ordinary citizen can ‘hope to impose himself on his environment’.Footnote 147 In these cases, denunciations were clearly spurred by survival and security considerations, imposed by necessities rather than deliberate political conviction.
Yet as a concrete form of participation in the military regime, there can be little doubt that denouncers made individual yet causal contributions that made the machinery of terror run. At the hands of unscrupulous citizens who had mastered the art, accusing fellow citizens was converted into a weapon and a sinister strategy to expose personal adversaries to state violence. Ordinary citizens, by performing police work, became what Micol Seigel dubs ‘violence workers’, exposing their fellow countrymen to the ‘premise and promise of violence’ which constitutes the essential and ‘quotidian power of policing’.Footnote 148 Their information fattened police records and quenched intelligence services’ thirst for private information, in the process generating a climate of deep-rooted mutual distrust and fear which fuelled a self-disciplining society. Yet grey zones often emerge once we historicise the restricted opportunities that lay before denouncers. The state encouraged participation by heightening existing social tensions and simultaneously lifting societal constraints and individual self-restraint on violence, thus mobilising denouncers to exercise power over state-targeted citizens in an uninhibited fashion. Though Guatemalan state security forces firmly controlled the repressive apparatus itself, they provided moral absolution to denouncers who eagerly appropriated the authority bestowed upon them to exercise it against their personal adversaries.
Acknowledgements
I extend my gratitude to Magaly Rodríguez García, Manolo E. Vela Castañeda and Velia Muralles for their encouragement to pursue the article's contentious topic. I also thank the JLAS anonymous reviewers and editors for their comments and generosity.
