In 1954, when a US-sponsored coup toppled Jacobo Arbenz's leftist government, at least 1,000 Guatemalans fled the country.Footnote 1 Scattered across Latin America, the exiled supporters of the deposed government formed a loosely organized transnational network that opposed the new dictatorship and sought to reinstate democracy. Under Arbenz's rule, a small faction of communists had organized alongside a wider array of social democrats and other leftists in a government that for ten years fought for a strong labor movement, the creation of a modern welfare state, representative democracy, and the redistribution of land. In Guatemala, which had long been characterized by dictatorship, massive poverty, and economic underdevelopment, this was a truly radical program.
Historians have thoroughly documented how the Eisenhower Administration collaborated with conservative Guatemalan allies and plotted a coup to destroy the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 2 Generally, scholars have assumed that once the government was gone, the political movement behind it died rapidly, and that political activity afterward centered on a new far-right military establishment and an armed insurgency that challenged it. I argue that while the coup succeeded in overthrowing Arbenz, it was subsequent waves of exile and repression that ultimately broke the movement that brought the Guatemalan Revolution to power.
In this article, I argue that the exile of key political leaders and activists of the Guatemalan left contributed significantly to the demise of the radical left-liberalism that had dominated the country's political life for ten years prior to the 1954 coup. During this period, the left grew much weaker, owing first to sharp factional rifts (particularly over questions of how to treat Guatemala's communist movement) and second to leaders who were increasingly out of touch with changing circumstances in Guatemala. The exile of left-wing political elites helped block peaceful paths to political change, which exacerbated political polarization and contributed to the onset of civil war. I argue below that the defeat of Guatemala's democratic-left tradition, and the ensuing hyper-polarization and civil war, depended on a number of contingent developments. It was not inevitable after the overthrow of Arbenz that the country would become embroiled in a civil war between communist insurgents and a far-right military regime. Rather, there were still meaningful political alternatives in play well into the 1960s. To understand those alternatives, and how they were gradually eliminated, it is necessary to follow the story of the left in exile.
This article draws primarily on the personal correspondence of Juan José Arévalo. Arévalo was president of Guatemala from 1945 to 1951, and became the central figure among Guatemala's left in exile during the counterrevolutionary period. His return to the country in 1963 to initiate a presidential campaign provoked a coup that overthrew the government of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes and consolidated far-right military control over Guatemala. Arévalo and his followers fit into a still under-examined political tendency in Cold War Latin America, one that historians have struggled to define. Broadly social democratic, and firmly anti-authoritarian, scholars have labeled this tendency the anti-fascist left, the democratic left, or the anticommunist left.Footnote 3 The Arevalistas were all of these things, but each term obscures their politics as much as it clarifies. They were anticommunists, but not defined by their anticommunism. They were both anti-fascist and committed to electoral democracy, but so were many of the more radical leftists they disagreed with, including many Guatemalan communists. For that reason, I mostly call them what they called themselves: Arevalistas.
During Arévalo's time in office, he established himself as a leading light of Latin America's democratic spring, and he remained an internationally respected public figure long after leaving office. After handing over power to Arbenz following the 1950 elections, Arévalo did not disappear from the public eye, but instead served as a roving ambassador of sorts on behalf of the Guatemalan Revolution. When Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, Arévalo established himself as a polemicist, penning a series of book-length critiques of US foreign policy and Latin American dictatorships. His supporters clamored for a political comeback, confident that his leadership alone would be enough to revive Guatemalan democracy. Historians, for their part, have been mixed in their assessment of Arévalo. Scholars of the Guatemalan Revolution are often critical of Arévalo's failure to embrace land reform, and credit the progress that did occur during his time in office to grassroots social movements rather than the leadership of a patrician intellectual who more or less stumbled into the presidency.Footnote 4 Arévalo, after all, was not even present in Guatemala during the overthrow of the Ubico and Ponce dictatorships, watching events from abroad as a professor in Argentina. As a politician, Arévalo was less ambitious than his successor, though major reforms, including a revamping of Guatemalan labor law, the expansion of voting rights, and the introduction of a social security system did occur under his watch. These were the major policy accomplishments associated with his idealistic but vaguely defined governing philosophy of “spiritual socialism.”
The Exiles’ Debate: Who Killed the Revolution?
Regardless of how scholars remember him today, as the Guatemalan left dealt with the political trauma of the 1954 coup, Arévalo quickly became viewed as a natural leader for their movement. After receiving safe-passage guarantees from the Castillo Armas regime, the Guatemalan Revolution's leading lights began leaving crowded Latin American embassies in Guatemala City for their new homes across the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps inevitably, the exiles became mired in an increasingly contentious debate as to why they had lost power. That being said, they generally agreed on who the principal villains were: Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, the United Fruit Company, and the McCarthyist tendency in American politics were all bitterly denounced in their letters for many years to come.Footnote 5 Similarly denounced were Carlos Castillo Armas and other conservative “vendepatrias.”Footnote 6 A series of hastily written books were published on the coup by exiled supporters of the Guatemalan Revolution. These books, including works by Arévalo himself and Arbenz's foreign minister Guillermo Toriello, generally adhered to the narrative of American imperial villainy and Guatemalan conservative treachery.Footnote 7
In contrast, exiled revolutionaries disagreed on how to evaluate the record of Jacobo Arbenz and his allies. Increasingly, Arevalistas blamed Arbenz for the overthrow of the government, while other exiles remained loyal to the deposed president, reflecting a longstanding tendency towards factionalism in the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 8 The Arevalista critique of Arbenz began with frustration over his decision to resign. Arbenz had hoped in vain that ceding power to the chief of the armed forces, Carlos Enrique Díaz de León, would be enough to prevent Castillo Armas from seizing power and undoing the democratic reforms of the previous decade.Footnote 9 Noting that Arbenz was himself a colonel, and by all accounts had been quite popular among the rank-and-file, many of Arbenz's newly exiled critics questioned his resolve and leadership skills in the final weeks of his government. The Nicaraguan political dissident Juan José Meza spoke for many of the Arevalistas when he wrote to Arévalo, “In my judgement . . . Arbenz didn't know how to respond after nine years of function[ing] revolutionary [government], when a moment came that required force and sacrifice.”Footnote 10
As time wore on, the critique of Arbenz's crisis management skills gave way to a more substantive rejection by the Arevalistas (and eventually by Arévalo himself) of Arbenz's more radical positions. Arevalistas contended that had it not been for the decision to legalize the PGT and welcome communists into the president's inner circle of advisors, the revolutionary government likely would have survived.Footnote 11 Arbenz's reputation further deteriorated given his isolation from other Guatemalans in Mexico City. Deeply depressed, the deposed president refused to see all but a tiny handful of visitors. When he left Mexico for Europe, it only confirmed for the Arevalistas that Arbenz was a poor leader, compromised by communist connections.Footnote 12
As Jacobo Arbenz came under attack, Arévalo's record became increasingly romanticized by the exiles. Like Arbenz, Arévalo had been hated by the United Fruit Company and much of the landed elite in the countryside, but despite these powerful enemies, he had survived every coup attempt against his government.Footnote 13 And though Arévalo pursued reforms that empowered workers and expanded the welfare state, he stopped short of two more radical structural changes to Guatemalan political economy that were initiated by Arbenz: the legalization of the communist party and the redistribution of land. The exiled diplomat Eliseo Martínez Zelada, who had been appointed to his position by Arbenz, likewise praised Arévalo as blameless for the coup: “I think that Arevalismo was not present as an operating force in the June drama [the liberationist invasion and coup].” He went on to complain that many of the radicals “fled like chickens at the sight of a hawk” rather than stay to defend the country.Footnote 14
Other former supporters of Arbenz found themselves moving more toward the Arevalista camp. Gonzalo Enrique Sandoval, an exiled journalist and trade unionist, wrote from Havana that he had once believed Arévalo's accomplishments had been superseded by Arbenz, but now had changed his mind. He wrote of his newfound faith in Arévalo's leadership: “Your political, intellectual, and humanitarian personality is the only thing that can bring together the democratic forces, with a view to reconquer our defiled dignity and tainted national sovereignty.”Footnote 15
If internal tensions had been limited to the question of the legacy of Jacobo Arbenz, exiles might have avoided major factional splits, but soon even Arbenz's supporters came under fire by the Arevalistas. Perhaps most significant were the attacks leveled against Augusto Charnaud, a prominent legislator and cabinet member in both the Arévalo and Arbenz Administrations. In the years following the coup, Charnaud attempted to organize a new political party that would coordinate exiles’ political activities, while maintaining ties to supporters who remained in Guatemala. His efforts were undermined by a relentless stream of red-baiting attacks from other Guatemalans in exile, who maligned Charnaud as both a political opportunist overly concerned with his own political career, and as a communist sympathizer, whose radicalism would lead him to repeat the same errors as Arbenz. Charnaud had been viewed before the coup as a likely successor to Arbenz, having built his reputation on staunch support for the agrarian reform and the labor movement.Footnote 16 But despite this adherence to left-wing politics, he was no communist: there was in fact some bad blood between Charnaud and the PGT, which had formed after the communists led a split from the most significant of the revolutionary parties, the Partido Acción Revolucionaria (PAR), where Charnaud held a leadership position.Footnote 17
Nonetheless, Charnaud argued it was a tactical error to suppress or alienate communist activists, many of whom had already clandestinely returned to Guatemala to begin the dangerous work of rebuilding the unions and organizing a resistance movement to the dictatorship.Footnote 18 In an increasingly contentious correspondence with Arévalo between 1954 and 1957, he spelled out his views on both the PGT and the Guatemalan Revolution's future. For Charnaud, whatever the communists’ faults, efforts to sideline them undermined revolutionary unity in a moment of political catastrophe. They had a notable base of support and it was better to partner with them than to attempt to marginalize them. He believed that “their existence is a fact that cannot be erased . . . the truth is that the communists constitute a political and ideological current in Guatemala; they represent a substantial sector.”Footnote 19 As such, energy spent ostracizing the PGT would only undermine the already difficult task of retaking power from a violent dictatorship propped up by the United States. In his view, the communists remained valuable allies, just as they had been in the fight to implement the agrarian reform.Footnote 20 The key was to harness their talents as organizers without allowing them to capture or dominate the larger, more liberal, revolutionary movement.Footnote 21 In general, Charnaud feared the risk of anticommunism moving in an illiberal direction, more than he feared the risk of the resistance to the dictatorship being tarred as communist.Footnote 22
Charnaud's attempts to cultivate an alliance with Arévalo by mail ultimately failed. Arévalo resented criticism, and Charnaud's willingness to disagree with Arévalo, even mildly, rendered him somewhat unique among the former president's regular correspondents, as did his defense of the PGT.Footnote 23 As the Arevalistas increasingly came to view Arbenz and his supporters in a negative light, Charnaud was virtually alone in his calls for unity between the two former presidents and their supporters. Arévalo was particularly dismissive of Charnaud's suggestion that Arbenz and Arévalo arrange a meeting to discuss the future of the revolution, as a signal to their many supporters both in exile and in Guatemala that they remained united in their commitment to rebuild Guatemalan democracy.Footnote 24 Cementing Arévalo's mistrust, a number of exiles wrote to the former president suggesting Charnaud was both a closeted communist and an opportunist who merely wanted power for himself. Footnote 25 When Arévalo accused Charnaud of working secretly to sideline the Arevalistas as part of a power grab, Charnaud wrote back insisting that the former president was receiving bad information.Footnote 26 But it was to no avail: by the end of 1955, Arévalo wrote dismissively to one of his supporters that Charnaud “has surrounded himself with communist and Arbencista emigrants.”Footnote 27
Yet if Arévalo was too much of an anticommunist to embrace a leftist like Charnaud, he nonetheless did not adopt an anticommunist perspective to the degree that would satisfy the suspicions of Guatemalan conservatives or American foreign policy officials, who always saw him as at best a fellow traveler. Writing to a former legislator exiled in Mexico, Arévalo adopted a more conservative position than Arbenz or Charnaud, but a more moderate line compared to some of his supporters, who hoped to drive the communists underground should the Guatemalan Revolution be restored:
They [communists] should be kept apart, alone. We should make no alliance or pacts with them, secret or public. . . . We should not persecute them, but neither should we stimulate them, much less commit the idiocy of going back to offering them command of any government agency or labor organization. The danger lies in ceding to them leadership of the Guatemalan working class. Arevalismo was the sincerest and the most effective protector of the Guatemalan working class, rooted in Guatemala, without foreign ties or slogans.Footnote 28
Arévalo was a left-leaning nationalist, not a Marxist. He agreed with Charnaud that adherence to liberal ideals of freedom of thought meant that communists should not be persecuted, but he still viewed them as potentially dangerous political actors that ought to be marginalized.Footnote 29 The distance between these two positions was enough to help isolate Arévalo and his supporters from would-be allies further to their left. This tension between the more radical elements within the Guatemalan Revolution and the Arevalistas ultimately served to undermine exiles’ efforts to restore democracy to Guatemala.
Ironically, even as the Arevalistas excluded radicals from their circle behind the scenes, Arévalo's public writing and media interviews for the remainder of the 1950s did not highlight his anticommunism. Instead, Arévalo published a trilogy of polemical books condemning both US intervention in Latin America and various right-wing dictators throughout the region, particularly in Central America and the Caribbean.Footnote 30 Additionally, Arévalo's foreign policy record while in power in the 1940s added to his reputation as a champion of democracy among Latin Americans, and as a potential threat to US hegemony among policy-makers in Washington. As president, he was a prominent figure in the Caribbean Legion of the 1940s, an international alliance which took aim at the dictators of the region, who were invariably allies of the United States.Footnote 31 Such vocal opposition to figures like Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Fulgencio Batista, and Rafael Trujillo, as well as explicit criticism of US foreign policy, meant that the American foreign policy establishment viewed Arévalo with great suspicion, despite his anticommunist political commitments.
The Presidency of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes
An unexpected opening for political change arrived with the assassination of Carlos Castillo Armas in the summer of 1957. The period that followed, which ultimately brought former general Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes to power, was a time of greater political opportunity than scholars generally appreciate.Footnote 32 Among the exiles, news of the assassination was met with hope. For the democratic left, Castillo Armas symbolized tyranny and the demise of the October Revolution, and more importantly, his death meant that the balance of power in Guatemala might change in the aftermath of new elections.Footnote 33 Even Jacobo Arbenz, a recluse since his fall from power, resurfaced in Arévalo's correspondence for the first time since 1954, writing a brief letter asking for a meeting shortly after the assassination.Footnote 34 Another source for optimism was the return of constitutional rule even before Castillo Armas's death. The 1956 Constitution was far more conservative than its 1945 predecessor, but it did nonetheless put checks on the power of the executive.Footnote 35 With the constitution in place and Castillo Armas dead, there was reason for cautious optimism in leftist circles.
Even so, there were clear limitations to the 1957–58 political opening. The government maintained a ban on the revolutionary parties of the 1944–54 period, and unsurprisingly, the politicians contending for power in the elections of 1957 and 1958 did not inspire much hope for the left. Only one party ran on the legacy of the October Revolution in the aftermath of Castillo Armas's death, the Partido Revolucionario (PR), but it increasingly tacked too far to the right for the Arevalistas to trust it. Formed in December of 1955, the PR initially adhered to a left nationalist program that dovetailed neatly with the ideals of the Arevalistas: the PR leadership called for a return to the progressive Constitution of 1945, the immediate end of Castillo Armas's government, and a scaling back of US involvement in Guatemalan politics and the economy.Footnote 36
However, the leader of the group, Mario Méndez Montenegro, had a troubling history. Though he had supported the revolution in 1944, in 1949, he participated in a failed coup attempt against Arévalo and left the country in disgrace, not returning until after the collapse of the revolutionary government.Footnote 37 Those concerned over this past saw their fears realized by the end of 1958 when Méndez Montenegro purged 68 politicians and organizers from the party for being too far to the left, provoking bitter denunciations of “maccartismo” in various letters exiles sent to Arévalo.Footnote 38
The alternatives in the 1957–58 elections, however, were worse. The Movimiento Democrático Nacionalista (MDN), a precursor to the far-right militarist Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) party that would dominate Guatemalan politics until the late 1980s, campaigned on Castillo Armas's legacy. The MDN struggled to select a candidate that unified the party: in the 1957 election they chose Miguel Ortiz Pasarelli, a former judge and cabinet member to Castillo Armas, but in 1958 went on to nominate José Luis Cruz Salazar, a military leader who served as ambassador to the United States.Footnote 39 The only alternative to the MDN that had a real chance of victory was the Partido Reconciliación Democrática Nacional (PRDN), a new party formed as a vehicle for Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a former general who one historian has labeled the leader of “the less inflamed wing of the counterrevolutionary coalition.”Footnote 40 Even absent any left- of-center electoral challenge, a faction of former Castillo Armas loyalists blatantly rigged the election in their favor. The legitimate winner of the 1957 election was almost certainly Ydígoras, but, the MDN maneuvered to declare their candidate winner of elections on October 20, 1957. Mass demonstrations ensued in opposition to the flagrant election fraud, and a new election was held in 1958, bringing Ydígoras to power.Footnote 41
The left played a crucial role in the demonstration that overturned the fraudulent election and paved the way for Ydígoras's presidency, but the Arevalistas’ optimism nonetheless gave way to renewed cynicism quickly. Conservatives engaged in open corruption as they angled to preserve their power under the new administration. Particularly dismaying were a series of bribes, covered openly in the press, that were paid out to the leaders of the MDN in exchange for their acquiescence to Ydígoras'a presidency.Footnote 42 Moreover, the Eisenhower Administration remained firmly entrenched in power in Washington, leading many of the Arevalistas to think that any meaningful reform or modest accumulation of power in the current political system would inevitably be undermined by imperialist acts of sabotage. Arévalo himself thought that domestic politics in the United States foreclosed on the possibilities of progressive change, writing to a trusted friend and advisor, “We the fallen from 1954 have not the slightest chance in this opportunity . . . even winning the elections (this time impossible), Eisenhower would not permit us to take power.”Footnote 43 And in any case, the left remained in a state of disarray, unable to consolidate around a new party candidate in time for the new elections, to the dismay of many exiles.Footnote 44
Furthermore, Ydígoras's record was in conflict with his efforts to present himself as a supporter of democracy. He had served as a loyal general to Jorge Ubico for over a decade. In the run-up to the 1950 elections, which Ydígoras lost to Arbenz in a landslide, he and Castillo Armas met a handful of times to discuss the possibilities of a coup. Ydígoras apparently abandoned the idea not out of any commitment to democracy, but only because it became clear that he would not be guaranteed the presidency after the planned coup. As the Arbenz years wore on, Castillo Armas and Ydígoras became competitors for leadership of the conservative opposition, but for a variety of reasons, the US State Department viewed Ydígoras as a less reliable partner.Footnote 45 With Castillo Armas dead, however, Ydígoras was perhaps the most prominent conservative politician in the country, and well positioned to be the next president, once he made peace with the MDN. Though no one on the left believed that Ydígoras would be a progressive leader, what remained of Guatemala's organized left inside the country threw their weight behind him in a desperate bid to prevent the hardline MDN from winning. Remarkably, when the MDN attempted to steal the election from Ydígoras in 1957, even the PGT lent its organizing muscle to the pro-Ydígoras demonstrations that forced a new election in 1958.Footnote 46
Underscoring the peculiarities of Ydígoras's position in Guatemalan politics, at least one high-placed admirer of Arévalo also enthusiastically supported the new president.Footnote 47 Carlos Urrutia Aparicio, born into a prominent Guatemalan family, wrote to Arévalo frequently from Washington, DC, where he worked for the Organization of American States while completing a doctorate in international law at American University. Urrutia was essentially a conservative democrat. He condemned the Castillo Armas dictatorship and praised Arévalo as a champion of democracy (albeit one with flaws), but viewed Arbenz as a traitor who had greatly damaged the country, writing, “I consider Arbenz a criminal against his people, against Arevalismo, and against democracy. . . . The October Revolution in Guatemala committed the inexplicable error of not rejecting communist collaboration.”Footnote 48
Urrutia was also a vocal supporter of Ydígoras, due at least partly to a personal relationship—at one point he described the general as a “family friend.”Footnote 49 Later, in March 1958, he accepted a position in Ydígoras's administration as Guatemala's ambassador to the UN, insisting that he did so only after receiving assurances that the new cabinet would be reasonably democratic in orientation.Footnote 50 Later, he suggested to Arévalo that the Ydígoras government marked the beginning of “a period of democratic transition,” and took at face value Ydígoras’ promises to allow for the return of all nonviolent and noncommunist exiles; he even offered to help negotiate with the new president on Arévalo's behalf for permission to return to the country.Footnote 51 As time went on, Urrutia's support for Ydígoras withstood the many authoritarian elements of the government, but to his credit, he drew a line at military coups and immediately resigned from his position after Peralta Azurdia seized power in 1963.Footnote 52
Despite having some democratic tendencies, the smattering of progressive measures in Ydígoras's campaign platform—including a moderate agrarian reform, partial relaxation of restrictions on labor unions, and the return of all the exiles—was almost immediately abandoned once he became president. And despite the anti-imperialist rhetoric that Ydígoras indulged in while campaigning, critics charged him as a stooge for Washington once he was actually in power.Footnote 53 Throughout his time in office, Ydígoras flirted with the idea of allowing for the repatriation of those exiled in 1954, but he ultimately allowed for only a handful to return. This was partly the result of American pressure: in late 1957, as domestic pressure for repatriation built after Castillo Armas was murdered, the US embassy provided the Guatemalan government with a list of some 497 exiles who should not be allowed to return, including Arévalo, Arbenz, and many leading figures of the deposed government.Footnote 54 Regardless, Ydígoras's gestures toward repatriation, and his apparent willingness to support free elections, led to some of the exiles muting their criticism of the president, at least publicly, hoping that doing so would pay off in the long term.
Privately, however, the Arevalistas soured on Ydígoras quickly. A pair of letters sent in January of 1958 from Juan José Meza captures the rapid collapse in the Arevalistas’ hopes for the new government. On January 27, Meza noted the “fall of another despot” in reference to the collapse of the Venezuelan dictatorship led by Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and predicted more Latin American tyrants would go the way of Castillo Armas and Pérez Jiménez, crowing that “We are in the year of liberty.”Footnote 55 Yet a short four days later, Meza had already scaled back his grandiose predictions of a mass regional movement toward democracy, somberly reporting that “Ydígoras already begins to break with his declarations,” after the news broke that Ydígoras had agreed to bribe MDN leaders in exchange for their support.Footnote 56 This was clearly a poor sign for those hoping to see a return to the 1945 Constitution, the legalization of the revolutionary parties, and the return of all exiles.
Nonetheless, for all the sharp limitations of the new political opening, the democratic elements of the Ydígoras era help explain how events unfolded in the way that they did. There is real reason to believe that Ydígoras intended to respect free elections in 1963, even allowing Arévalo to campaign openly, either out of concern for his legacy, or perhaps, as Piero Gleijeses has suggested, to blackmail the elite into backing his unpopular preferred successor, rather than the rival conservative candidates.Footnote 57 And as I note above, Ydígoras had the support of the students and even the PGT in 1958, albeit for strategic reasons. For all Ydígoras's corruption and his ties to the old Ubico regime, he was clearly not quite as extreme as the other leading figures of the Guatemalan right. There were real opportunities for elements of the left to carve out space as part of the legitimate opposition during his presidency, which had not been the case under Castillo Armas.
The Ydígoras Administration might best be understood as a forerunner of what political scientist Terry Karl calls the Central American “hybrid regimes” of the 1990s: somewhere between a democracy and a dictatorship.Footnote 58 In any case, the distinction between Ydígoras and his predecessor did not go unnoticed by the exiles. The Arevalistas finally had room to organize inside Guatemala, and the most ambitious of them could even see a path back to power.
Guatemala and the Cuban Revolution
Less than a year into Ydígoras's presidency, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on the back of a mass revolutionary movement, an event that reshaped Guatemalan politics, and required a response from both the right and the left. Having established himself as a leading anti-imperialist voice in the aftermath of the 1954 coup, Arévalo initially supported Castro, as did virtually all of the democratic left. Even Ydígoras's future ambassador to the UN, Carlos Urrutia Aparicio, supported Castro in 1957, believing that he might help spur a region-wide movement toward democracy.Footnote 59 A prominent Arevalista described a small gathering in Guatemala City celebrating Castro's victory that was attended by Arévalo's mother, and optimistically predicted that dictatorships in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic would be next.Footnote 60 Another of Arévalo's supporters happily declared Castro's victory a “triumph of democracy” and optimistically wrote that “the fall of the Cuban dictatorship . . . has been the best New Year's gift for Latin America, and a warning to all dictators.”Footnote 61 In toppling the long-hated Fulgencio Batista and confronting the United States, Castro at first seemed a natural ally. Combined with the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela the previous year and the prospect of at least some democratization in Guatemala under the leadership of Ydígoras, many of Arévalo's allies wrote with an excitement and optimism not felt since 1954.
Arévalo spoke in favor of Castro in the Latin American press for the first two years of the Cuban Revolution, couching his support in terms of his long-standing commitments to democracy and anti-imperialism. In one representative interview, Arévalo told the Puerto Rican nationalist magazine Claridad, “There are two approaches to the United States in Latin America: that of [Puerto Rican governor] Muñoz Marín and Fidel Castro. I prefer Fidel.”Footnote 62 In late 1959, he visited the island as an honored guest, following an invitation by Raúl Castro.Footnote 63 He allowed one of his books, La fábula del tiburón y las sardinas, to be published by the revolutionary government in discounted mass market editions, accepting a reduced royalties arrangement. An estimated 100,000 copies were sold on the island, and the book was apparently received favorably by Castro himself. The success of the book in Cuba led to a request by the Cuban government for the rights to publish an edition of another of Arévalo's books, AntiKomunismo en America Latina, this time without royalties, as a donation to the revolution.Footnote 64
But as it became clear that no elections would be scheduled, and that Castro was pursuing a diplomatic partnership with the Soviet Union, Arévalo ultimately broke with the Cuban Revolution toward the end of 1960, granting an interview to the short-lived anti-Castro newspaper Bohemia Libre in which he sharply criticized the Cuban government. The pull-quote from the interview which adorned the cover of the paper read, “When the fish is red, the fable changes,” in reference to the title of his most popular book, The Shark and the Sardines. The response from his supporters was initially mixed. Speaking for a group of left-wing intellectuals in Central America, Rafael Leiva Vivas, a Honduran academic, wrote to Arévalo, describing an intense debate sparked by Arévalo's critique of Castro as a totalitarian communist. Some in the group doubted the veracity of the report, assuming it to be part of a right-wing disinformation campaign to discredit Castro by taking advantage of Arévalo's reputation as a staunch anti-imperialist. Leiva Vivas urged Arévalo to reconsider his position, particularly given the parallels between the ongoing American campaign against Cuba and the Guatemalan coup in 1954.Footnote 65
Other supporters of Arévalo did not realize the change in Arévalo's position for some months, continuing to write approvingly of Castro deep into 1961. For example, the former legislator Roberto Alvarado Fuentes, a political ally exiled in Chile, wrote to Arévalo approving of even the authoritarian elements of the Castro government, including the executions of counterrevolutionaries, arguing that this move would help Castro avoid the fate that had befallen Arbenz.Footnote 66 The gap between Arévalo's new position and that of his supporters was understandable: his most recent book denounced anticommunist rhetoric as a smokescreen for Washington's imperial ambitions, and a tool for right-wing despots attempting to legitimize their brutal governments.
Nonetheless, others quickly followed Arévalo into the anti-Castro camp. Castro, they reasoned, had traded one empire for another, in courting Soviet aid. By refusing to hold elections, he was scarcely better than Batista. And because communism was inherently incompatible with democracy, they concluded, he could not be trusted to evolve, and embrace democratic constraints on his government.Footnote 67 This became yet another issue dividing Arévalo and his increasingly irrelevant rival Jacobo Arbenz. In one of their few post-1954 exchanges, Arbenz—now an avowed communist and member of the PGT—wrote to Arévalo from Havana in 1960, expressing enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution as a model for the Latin American Left, and optimistically predicting improvement in the Guatemalan political situation soon.Footnote 68 Arévalo wrote back more pessimistically, dismissing the Cuban Revolution as ideologically “at odds” with the defunct democratic revolution in Guatemala, and arguing that he saw few opportunities for progress in the short-term in Guatemala: “You tell me that very good news arrives from Guatemala. The news I see is not so good. General poverty runs the risk of becoming outright misery and the democratic farce will degenerate soon into a charade.”Footnote 69 Noting the failure of the military uprising on November 13, 1960 (which he guessed was the source of Arbenz's optimism), and the prevalence of American military aid, Arévalo doubted that armed insurrection would work in Guatemala.
The Arevalistas were not the only Guatemalans struggling to form a satisfactory response to the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro cast a long shadow over virtually all Guatemalan political actors in the early 1960s. It was in no small part Ydígoras's decision to lease land to the CIA-backed Cuban exiles that prompted the rebellion of one-third of the armed forces against the government in November 1960. Nationalist objections to Ydígoras's support for American intervention in Cuba helped motivate the coup plotters of November 13, 1960. Today, this military uprising is understood as a pivotal turning point in Guatemalan history, frequently used to date the start of the Guatemalan Civil War. The rebellion was put down within a matter of days, but a number of its participants—most prominently, Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios Lima, two mid-level officers—went on to become leaders of the insurgency in the 1960s. Even though the rebellion of November 13 was quickly squashed, it exposed a greater degree of dissent and disunity within the military than most observers had believed existed up to that point.Footnote 70
At the time, however, supporters of Arévalo viewed the uprising dismissively. Part of this may have stemmed from the fact that many of the rebels were the children of exiled supporters of Jacobo Arbenz.Footnote 71 The factional rifts between the Arevalistas and the radicals had never healed, leaving the Arevalistas unlikely to support a political action led by their rivals. Perhaps more significantly, Arévalo and his supporters loathed political violence and mistrusted the military. Juan Ángel Núñez Aguilar, an economist and trusted friend of Arévalo's, wrote that the military rebellion “was the stupidest thing you could ask for,” going on to argue that its isolation from the popular sectors or any political party doomed it to failure: “It was a movement strictly of the barracks, and for that reason they failed.”Footnote 72 Another confidante of Arévalo's lamented that the uprising had succeeded only in rendering the army more united than ever before.Footnote 73 Arévalo himself dismissed it as merely a squabble for power within the military, and nothing more.Footnote 74
Arévalo and his supporters shared a principled objection to the use of the military coup as a means of seizing power, just as they had disapproved of Castro's authoritarian turn. This rejection underscored a failure to understand that the rules of engagement in Guatemalan politics had shifted, leaving the Arevalista approach behind. In the aftermath of the events of November 1960, there are few if any references to the possibility of coups or insurgencies in Arévalo's correspondence—the event was understood as a one-off failure. The Arevalistas instead focused on their own political project: a new presidential campaign to return Arévalo to power in the 1963 elections. Though they had dismissed the November 13 rebels as politically naïve, their own project proved to be an even worse political failure that betrayed a deep misunderstanding of the state of Guatemalan politics in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Once again, the intra-left factionalism that emerged in the aftermath of the 1954 coup undercut the likelihood of progressive political outcomes. Though the 1960 uprising was a failure, the events of 1963 would prove that the Arbencistas were right to organize in the military, and the Arevalistas were wrong to dismiss the tactic out of hand.
Arévalo's 1963 Presidential Campaign
Aside from Arévalo's long-standing anticommunist position, it is possible that his public break with the Cuban Revolution was a calculated move made in preparation for his next presidential campaign. Arévalo knew that the United States would not tolerate a pro-Castro government in Central America, and he also knew that support for Castro would further inflame the Guatemalan right. In any case, the decision to pursue a second term as president in the 1963 election was years in the making, and began to come to fruition in 1960, as US-Cuban relations continued deteriorating. As early as 1954, Arévalo had been inundated with sycophantic letters from supporters, insisting that he alone could unite the Guatemalan revolutionaries and return them to power.Footnote 75 The political space opened up by the assassination of Carlos Castillo Armas in 1957 only accelerated these calls. The changing political circumstances in Guatemala, combined with a steady stream of positive publicity across Latin America for Arévalo's books, alongside his decision to move from the distant Southern Cone to nearby Venezuela, all set the stage for a comeback. Supporters were highly optimistic that Arévalo's campaign would win in a landslide in any fair contest.Footnote 76 Their prediction was shared, much less enthusiastically, by many in the Guatemalan military, as well as in the American embassy.Footnote 77
Still, there were substantial challenges to overcome. The government maintained a ban on the political parties from before 1954. The Partido Revolucionario (PR), headed by Mario Méndez Montenegro, had been active in Guatemalan politics since 1955, claiming the mantle of the October Revolution of 1944, and would not be endorsing Arévalo. The Arevalistas denounced the PR as a “McCarthyist” organization built around the personal ambitions of its fairly conservative leader.Footnote 78 Still, the PR had years’ worth of organizing power in Guatemala to build on in the 1963 elections, as did the conservative MDN and PRDN parties. Conservatives could also count on operating in the absence of government repression, unlike the Arevalistas. In one letter, an organizer noted that a number of supporters would not commit to putting their names to paper as supporters of Arévalo, for fear that they and their families would be targeted by the Guatemalan right.Footnote 79 Another lead campaign organizer, Humberto González Juárez, owned a radio station called Radio Nuevo Mundo, which was bombed in 1962 by unknown actors in what was surely a politically motivated attack.Footnote 80
Further undermining Arévalo's campaign, his supporters were divided between four political parties, not out of ideological differences but rather personal rivalries between the leaders.Footnote 81 Arévalo's correspondence in 1962 and 1963 is full of recriminations between leading figures, despite few, if any, major disagreements on policy or campaign strategy. This lack of unity was a cause of concern for many who wanted to see a center-left government return to power.Footnote 82 To receive certification as a legitimate political party capable of nominating candidates to the presidency or the legislature, it was necessary to secure 10,000 signatures from supporters. As the lead organizers of Arévalo's presidential candidacy underwent multiple splits over the course of 1962, it became a cause for concern as to whether or not any of the new organizations would secure enough signatures to get Arévalo's name on the ballot.Footnote 83
Another challenge confronting the campaign was the hostility of Washington. In theory, Arévalo was the ideal partner for the Kennedy Administration's Alliance for Progress program, which ostensibly aimed to foster moderate democratic governments by pursuing economic reforms that would grow the middle class, stimulate economic development, and thereby weaken the appeal of communism in notoriously stratified Latin American countries. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it to Kennedy: “If the possessing classes of Latin America make the middle-class revolution impossible, they will make a ‘workers-and-peasants’ revolution inevitable.”Footnote 84 The Alliance's lofty rhetoric and ambitious policy proposals did not go unnoticed: Kennedy's 1960 election further contributed to the new optimism felt by many of the Arevalistas.
The Alliance for Progress was well received by the Arevalistas, who drew parallels between Kennedy's vision for Latin America and the political program Arévalo had pursued as president in the 1940s.Footnote 85 Furthermore, the prospect of funds from the United States was especially enticing in the midst of an economic recession. The fact that Kennedy was not a Republican raised hopes among Arévalo and his supporters, who generally held positive views toward the past administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.Footnote 86 As one of Arévalo's close friends put it: “The American interests you fought are the same as those that were fought by Roosevelt and Truman, and now Kennedy . . . that is, the power of monopolies, of the great trusts, and their political meddling. . . . Now, more than ever, we should be friends.”Footnote 87 In the preface Arévalo wrote for the American edition of The Shark and the Sardines, he originally praised Kennedy's 1961 Punta del Este speech on the Alliance, but his US editors urged him to remove the passage in case Kennedy's actions in Cuba rendered Arévalo's optimism naïve to future readers.Footnote 88
Arévalo himself remained optimistic about the Alliance for Progress, in part because he had friends and allies working in Washington who advised him on how he might access economic development funds from the Kennedy Administration once he became president. One of those was Manuel Noriega Morales, one of nine Latin American economists selected by the Kennedy Administration to help administer the Alliance for Progress. Noriega Morales had been appointed Guatemala's representative to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, and went on to be the first director of Guatemala's central bank, founded in 1945, at the start of the Arévalo administration.Footnote 89 After a stint working at Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLA), he became involved in the Alliance for Progress, and reconnected with Arévalo in 1962, exchanging letters and arranging a meeting in Mexico City to discuss economic development strategies.Footnote 90 Noriega Morales viewed the distribution of land as the central problem in the Guatemalan economy and advised Arévalo to pursue an ambitious agrarian reform, alongside reforms to the tax code, to create a “rural middle class, like in Costa Rica and Uruguay.” Noriega Morales further advised that the ongoing economic recession would undermine any development efforts, necessitating aid from the Alliance for Progress.Footnote 91
A closer friend of Arévalo's, the Honduran economist Juan Ángel Núñez Aguilar, also worked on Latin American issues in Washington, for the Inter-American Development Bank. From his position in Washington, Núñez Aguilar worried that Arévalo's positions were being misinterpreted by US officials as anti-capitalist and anti-American, and warned his friend that the affinity between Arevalismo and American liberalism was not at all recognized by government officials working in Washington.Footnote 92 Despite that, Núñez Aguilar saw immense promise in the Alliance for Progress, and urged Arévalo to endorse the program in his campaign for the presidency, both because he thought it was good policy and because he hoped doing so might allay the concerns of American policy-makers.Footnote 93
Both Núñez Aguilar and Noriega Morales greatly underestimated the extent of hostility toward Arévalo held by Washington's foreign policy establishment. The former president's association with Arbenz, as well as his long record as a critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, contributed to disdain for Arévalo among American policy-makers. A series of memos sent to Washington by Ambassador John Bell painted a portrait of Arévalo as a dangerous radical, “a man who is not only passionately and pathologically antagonistic to the United States and all its works, but a man who certainly paved the way for the accession of communism into power in Guatemala during the Arbenz regime.”Footnote 94 Ironically, in the State Department's own estimation, the kind of economic reforms that the Alliance for Progress backed—progressive labor laws, moderate redistribution in the tax code, and agrarian reform—were fervently opposed by Arévalo's likely opponents in that election cycle.Footnote 95 In the end, this was irrelevant to State Department officials, who still viewed the 1954 coup as a Cold War victory in Latin America, and worried about a reversal in fortune. State Department records confirm that most American officials following Guatemalan politics viewed a second Arévalo presidency as the worst possible outcome.Footnote 96 As early as March 1962, Ambassador Bell argued that if American officials were approached by military leaders planning a coup prior to the election, it would be a grave mistake to stand in their way.Footnote 97
Despite these various obstacles, by the start of 1963, Arévalo had received the nomination for the presidency from three officially recognized political parties.Footnote 98 At this point, Arévalo relocated from Caracas, where he had held an academic position since 1958, to Mexico City, where he could maintain closer contact with the lead organizers of his campaign, who traveled regularly to Mexico to meet with him.Footnote 99 Supporters (both exiles and those organizing in the country) were increasingly confident in an Arévalo victory—some projecting that Arévalo might gain as much as 80 percent of the vote.Footnote 100 The economy was weak and Ydígoras was unpopular, as were the other parties that had exercised power since 1954, and popular sentiment remembered Arévalo's first presidency as a time of prosperity and sensible reforms. Supporters even reported meeting sympathizers in the rank-and-file of the National Police and the military, who spoke of a pro-Arévalo faction (perhaps even the majority) in these increasingly critical institutions in Guatemalan politics.Footnote 101 Arévalo himself seemed to believe this, insisting in his Carta Política to the Guatemalan people that rank-and-file police and military officers were quietly Arevalistas.Footnote 102
The US State Department and the Guatemalan right also believed that Arévalo would win in a free election, and they worried that his victory would either directly or indirectly empower Guatemala's communist movement. The embassy became concerned that Ydígoras, an outspoken critic of Arévalo, was in fact conspiring with Arévalo to allow him to return to the country and campaign, as a way of solidifying his legacy as a democratic leader.Footnote 103 To shore up his reputation with hard-liners in the armed forces and with the US embassy, Ydígoras issued an extradition request to the Mexican government, accusing Arévalo of participating in a 1949 conspiracy to assassinate Francisco Arana, a political rival who had attempted to overthrow Arévalo's government in a military coup.Footnote 104 This accusation did not trouble Arévalo's supporters, who were certain the charges were baseless and would not result in any meaningful legal action. Nor did it reassure hard-liners in the military or the US embassy, who still mistrusted Ydígoras and feared an Arévalo presidency.
At the start of 1963, Arévalo issued an extended statement on his campaign platform in the form of an open letter to the Guatemalan people, which was circulated by his supporters at the cost of 10 cents a copy.Footnote 105 The letter, later published in book form, balanced an explanation of Arévalo's political beliefs and policy proposals with a self-aggrandizing personal narrative, in which Arévalo reluctantly reassumed leadership of the democratic movements to save Guatemala from its political and economic crises. Throughout the letter, Arévalo took great care to present himself as neither a communist nor a capitalist, but rather as a nationalist, with harsh words for the radical left (including Arbenz) and for conservatives alike. In one passage, he argued, “The people do not want to return to power the false leaders who wanted to turn us into a North American colony, nor to those ‘scholars’ who were going to turn us into a colony of Moscow.”Footnote 106 Still, he reiterated his longstanding adherence to “spiritual socialism,” his strong support for the labor movement, and staunch opposition to the hyper-stratified character of Guatemalan society, all while repeatedly criticizing Marxists for their failure to grasp cultural and spiritual dimensions of human life. The October Revolution, he insisted, was not a class war as the communists had wanted it to be; rather, it was a democratic and nationalist movement, that aimed to advance human dignity for all Guatemalans. The letter downplayed his past opposition to Washington's foreign policy establishment, with passages underlining the affinity between his previous administration's program and the utopian goals of the Alliance for Progress, connecting Kennedy to the Good Neighbor Policy of Franklin Roosevelt. The letter sent a clear signal to the Guatemalan communist movement that Arévalo was not their ally, but clearly did not succeed at assuaging the anxieties of the anticommunist right in Guatemala or American officials in the Guatemalan embassy.Footnote 107 Arévalo's disavowal of communism on somewhat abstract philosophical grounds, while he continued to embrace the socialist label, could not have been well received, or perhaps even understood, by Cold Warriors in Guatemala or Washington.
The new Arevalista argument that there was an affinity between his politics and Kennedy's existed in tension with the public persona Arévalo had cultivated for at least a decade. Indeed, the argument of his most recent book was that anticommunism was an ideology used opportunistically by right-wing tyrants in Latin America and imperialists in Washington to crush progressive social reform—which sent at best a mixed signal to American policymakers.Footnote 108 Less than two years earlier, he had approved an English translation of his earlier book The Shark and the Sardines, another sharply written polemic condemning US foreign policy, first published in Spanish while Eisenhower was still president, and lacking in the gentler take on American politics evident in Arévalo's correspondence.
The translated book received a substantial advertising campaign (including full-page ads in the Sunday New York Times and Publishers Weekly) from his American publishers, who leaned into the book's radicalism and overstated its influence in Latin America in breathless terms. This advertising campaign surely raised Arévalo's profile in the United States, and did so by painting him as a radical with messianic personal appeal, beloved by the Latin American poor. Copy for one ad claimed the book had sold more copies than any book in Latin America other than the Bible and Mein Kampf, and went on: “People who hardly have money to buy bread buy this book. People in rags stand in line to borrow it. People who cannot read beg a village schoolmaster to read it to them.”Footnote 109 Max Paul Friedman has documented that the Kennedy Administration understood that Arévalo was not a card-carrying communist but mistrusted him anyway, viewing him as an anti-American demagogue, who would undermine US interests. In White House conversations over how to respond to a possible coup attempt in advance of the elections, one advisor commented on the “violently anti-American” nature of the book.Footnote 110
Arévalo entered the country clandestinely at the end of March 1963. It was the first time he had touched Guatemalan soil in a decade. Originally, campaign organizers had planned a grand reception for his arrival at the airport in Guatemala City, even advertising the event in the press.Footnote 111 But as the political climate grew increasingly volatile, this highly publicized event was cancelled, and Arévalo instead arrived in disguise and spent the next several days moving from house to house to avoid being detected by the government.Footnote 112 Within a few days of his arrival, the minister of defense, General Enrique Peralta Azurdia, seized power in a military coup, removing Ydígoras from the country and immediately shutting down all dissenting political activity. After two weeks in the country, without holding a single campaign rally, Arévalo fled to Mexico, where he was granted asylum.Footnote 113 While many of his supporters begged him to speak out against the coup and repression, Arévalo remained silent, avoiding interviews with the press and securing a job with UNESCO based in Paris, far away from the fray of Guatemalan politics.Footnote 114
In his absence, the Peralta dictatorship systematically punished the Arevalistas. Humberto González Juárez, whose radio station had been bombed months earlier, was captured in Quetzaltenango and thrown into prison.Footnote 115 In June, he fled to El Salvador.Footnote 116 Mario Paiz Novales, another lead campaign organizer, went into hiding after the coup, fearing for his life.Footnote 117 Student activists associated with the Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios (AEU, arguably the most important progressive institution from the 1944 revolution still active in Guatemalan politics) were viciously repressed by the military.Footnote 118 The legislator Arturo Campollo y Campollo, among the few elected officials to openly support Arévalo's campaign, wrote from San Salvador in August, asking for help finding work, his savings exhausted after five months of clandestine living without an income.Footnote 119 Less prominent supporters also wrote to Arévalo expressing their well-founded fears of the military. One supporter feared he and his brother were going to be forcibly disappeared, or simply blacklisted into hunger and poverty by the new regime.Footnote 120 Another supporter claimed he had lost his low-ranking civil service job for being an Arevalista, and reported that others had been forced into exile, lamenting “we are without laws, without a constitution, and in an unending state of siege. The rights of citizens are at the mercy of a few military men.”Footnote 121
Perhaps the most striking feature of the 1963 coup is the fact that so few of Arévalo's supporters seemed to see it coming. In a country that had historically seen few peaceful transfers of power via democratic elections, the Arevalistas remained convinced that they could simply organize a presidential campaign and successfully regain power absent any resistance outside the electoral arena. The ground beneath them had shifted, and yet they played by the rules of engagement established by their revolution in 1944, and snuffed out by Castillo Armas and the CIA a short ten years later. When roughly a third of the military participated in an armed insurrection on November 13, 1960, it hardly registered with the Arevalistas as a notable event. Dismissing the armed insurrection as the work of politically naïve idealists, they failed to consider that the insurgents were operating in accordance with the logic of a new political order. Few of the Arevalistas expressed fear of a civil war or military coup in the run-up to the events of 1963, and those who did had no strategy outlining how to respond.
In many ways, this failure to anticipate the coup speaks to the significance of the factional split with the Arbencistas in the latter half of the 1950s, given that the more radical Arbencistas generally better understood the growing importance of the military, and some within their ranks had even been involved in the November 1960 uprising. It also suggests that exile disadvantaged Arévalo by weakening his ability to maintain many contacts in Guatemala who had actually lived in the country consistently since 1954. None of his closest advisors had lived under the Castillo Armas dictatorship, and as a result they did not fully understand the extent to which the military had become the crucial actor in Guatemalan politics.
This is not to suggest that the Arevalistas’ political defeat in 1963 was inevitable. If the broader democratic left had avoided the severe factional splits that developed in exile, Arbencista efforts to organize inside the military might not have ended in a failed revolt in 1960, but instead could have continued into the run-up to the 1963 election, giving the hard-liners in the military less room to maneuver. Or, if Ydígoras had not lost the confidence of American foreign policy officials and the conservative military elite in Guatemala, perhaps he could have finished his term and allowed for free elections, which the Arevalistas surely would have won. Perhaps if Arévalo himself had not spent so much of his time in exile openly condemning US foreign policy, he might have won over enough of the Washington foreign policy establishment to prevent their acquiescence to the 1963 coup, and that could have been enough to dissuade the hardline right from acting to prevent the elections from taking place.
As with all counterfactuals, these hypothetical scenarios are of course unproveable. I share them to underscore that the Arevalistas remained a potent political force with a plausible path to power for nearly a decade after the 1954 coup. Their defeat was not inevitable from the day Jacobo Arbenz resigned from the presidency, though the challenges of exile did much to accelerate their eventual demise.
Conclusion
The Arevalistas did not disappear entirely with the military coup of 1963. As the dust settled, some eventually returned to public life in Guatemala, acting as advisers to the administration of Julio César Méndez Montenegro, president from 1966–70 and leader of the Partido Revolucionario, a center-right party Arevalistas had dismissed as too conservative for much of the previous decade. Though he proclaimed his presidency to be the “third government of the revolution,” Méndez Montenegro granted the armed forces a free hand to carry out an increasingly brutal counterinsurgency campaign, and allowed military elites to continue accumulating unchecked power.Footnote 122 The rest of his agenda stalled, and by the time he handed over power to General Carlos Arana Osorio (memorably branded the “Assassin of Zacapa” by his detractors) in 1970, it was difficult to identify many accomplishments. By then, Guatemala's democratic left, once at the helm of what had been among the most ambitious political projects in Latin America, was greatly diminished, focused on the narrow task of survival rather than the transformation of Guatemalan political economy and social relations. Exile, not just violence, played a key role in the hollowing out of Guatemala's democratic left, by exacerbating factional tensions, and rendering leaders unfamiliar with the shifting rules of engagement in Guatemalan politics.
The history related here underscores the extent to which historians of Latin America's Cold War have neglected democratic reformers in favor of stories of armed revolution and reactionary dictatorship, particularly in countries with histories like Guatemala's.Footnote 123 To be clear, Arévalo and his followers were flawed, and while there is no way of knowing how they might have governed if they had returned to power in the 1960s, there were clear limitations of their particular brand of left-wing politics. The Arevalistas were prone to paternalism in their attitudes toward the urban workers and rural campesinos they championed, and could be outright chauvinistic in their treatment of women and indigenous people. Yet for all these failures, their commitment to the empowerment of Guatemala's impoverished majority was genuine, and truly radical given the time and place. Many of the Arevalistas paid dearly for these political commitments, including with their lives.
Though in the end they were defeated, center-left reformers like the Arevalistas—and others in Latin America's democratic left—should not be dismissed today as mere historical footnotes whose successes and failures had minimal impact on the trajectory of Latin American political development during the Cold War. The Arevalistas did not assume they were doomed to failure, even in the face of growing repression and ever sharpening political polarization. Nor did their enemies, at home or abroad. Rather, they continued organizing and maintained a substantial base of support for years. Quite reasonably, they assumed they could win. It was not inevitable that they would falter and give way to an increasingly emboldened military dictatorship to their right and armed communist insurgencies to their left. Guatemala today is still suffering from their long exile from national politics.
