In the spring of 1954, a group of exiled Guatemalan anti-communists, busy plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, made a series of unusual overtures to Spain. First, they sent an envoy to Mexico, to inform Spanish officials there of Arbenz's imminent fate. This initial meeting already had a touch of the cloak-and-dagger about it because, since the Republican government's defeat in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), Mexico and, later, Guatemala had protested by denying diplomatic recognition to Francisco Franco's Spain. Parlaying with Franco's representatives was therefore somewhat irregular. But the plot soon thickened. A few days later, the envoy returned, this time with a colonel named Marciano Casado Armentía. Casado, a Spaniard by birth, came on behalf of someone more powerful still: the Guatemalan General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. Ydígoras, who lost the presidency to Arbenz in 1950, still dreamed of power. From El Salvador, he had been leading a faction of conspirators seeking to oust Arbenz. In need of money and weapons, Casado reported, Ydígoras and his colleagues thought to reach out to Franco, a trustworthy fellow anti-communist. ‘The only two doors they can knock on in full confidence’, the colonel said, ‘are the United States and Spain’.Footnote 1
The Ydígoras camp called their proposal ‘Operation Isabella’, in reference to the Castilian queen whose Catholic armies completed the Reconquista by expelling Muslims and Jews from early modern Spain. It outlined their needs: US$30,000, arms for 1,000 soldiers, anti-tank bazookas, grenades, bombs, 70 experienced military trainers and much more besides. It was a lot to ask, the proposal conceded, but since Spain was the rebels’ ‘spiritual mentor’ – and since the supplies would be used to combat ‘communist unions’ and the Caribbean Legion, a group of anti-dictatorship dissidents that included ‘fugitives’ from the Republican army Franco's uprising had defeated – they hoped Madrid would help. To sweeten the deal, Ydígoras and Casado promised incentives upon seizing control of Guatemala: diplomatic recognition for Franco, the withdrawal of said recognition from the Republican government-in-exile and the expulsion of ‘red elements’ from Guatemala, namely Republicans who resettled there during the ‘Revolutionary Spring’, to be replaced by more ‘wholesome’ Spanish migrants. Even if Spain could not provide material backing, the plotters said, they would be ‘satisfied’ with moral support.Footnote 2 Operation Isabella, however, proved a dead end. Franco's regime gave moral approval but not material aid, unwilling to jeopardise its pending readmission to the United Nations or its 1953 defence pact with the United States, which allowed the United States to build military bases in Spain, by interfering in inter-American affairs.Footnote 3 Moreover, Ydígoras was by this point an also-ran, at least insofar as the 1954 coup was concerned. He would become president four years later, but for the moment the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had picked Carlos Castillo Armas to lead the invasion instead – in part because Ydígoras, writes Richard Immerman, ‘looked like a Spanish noble, which Agency pundits considered a definite liability’.Footnote 4 In hindsight, the whole episode seems little more than a historical curiosity, but it cannot be so easily dismissed.
Following the Spanish connection, rather, leads scholars to a fuller understanding of the Guatemalan counter-revolution. Notably, Castillo Armas also reached out to Spain before the invasion, sending his own envoy, fellow Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (Movement for National Liberation, MLN) member José Calderón Salazar, to meet with Franco's Mexico representative. In that meeting, Castillo Armas asked Spain for ‘moral assistance’ and a letter of support from the Patriarchate of the West Indies, a Vatican-appointed office then occupied by the Spanish Falangist Bishop Leopoldo Eijo y Garay. The letter, Castillo Armas hoped, would endorse Guatemalan Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano's pastoral letter of April 1954, which called for a ‘national crusade against Communism’ – language which copied that used by Franco's Nationalists 15 years earlier.Footnote 5 Additionally, Castillo Armas and Calderón asked Spain to be first in recognising their new regime, reminding the Spanish representative that Ubico's Guatemala had been first to recognise the Nationalists as Spain's legitimate government in November 1936.Footnote 6 After Arbenz's fall, Carlos Salazar, Castillo Armas’ foreign relations minister, wrote a warm letter to a Spanish diplomatic counterpart. It praised Franco's ‘victorious nationalist campaign against Communism’ while underscoring the MLN's ‘desire to intensify the ties of blood, language, [and] traditions’ that linked Guatemala, ‘a magnificent branch of the robust Hispanic tree’, to Spain, its madre patria (mother country).Footnote 7
In a history so often narrated, Jim Handy writes, as ‘a two-character play’ featuring nefarious US interventionists and Guatemalan progressives, it might seem curious that discussions of Spain, Republican exiles and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War featured so prominently in the unfolding of the 1954 counter-revolution.Footnote 8 Yet, as this article will demonstrate, closer scrutiny of how Guatemalans engaged with the Spanish Civil War, and with the dictatorship that succeeded it, reveals critical dynamics which have been overshadowed by the primacy of the United States in scholarly analyses.Footnote 9 These include the MLN's Falangist influences, local reformists’ identification with the Spanish Republic during the 1944–54 Revolutionary Spring, and the role of a transnational strain of arch-conservative Catholicism – what Guatemala's first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, called ‘ecclesiastical revanchism’ – in helping produce and legitimate the 1954 coup.Footnote 10 Indeed, the Spanish Civil War served both Guatemala's democratisers and reactionaries as a kind of template, or script, against which they situated themselves and their starkly divergent political projects. Examining how shows that the drama of 1954, one of the signal episodes of the global Cold War, involved considerably more than two characters, or two visions for social change.
This analysis presents a more complex version of the story. In it, we see how pro-Franco propaganda in Guatemala furthered the rebels’ cause; how rightists like Ydígoras and Rossell advanced a rationale for overthrowing Arbenz that shared means, but not necessarily ends, with US actors; how the ideas and goals of the fallen Spanish Republic took on new form, both in the policies of the Revolutionary Spring governments and in the Arévalo-backed, anti-fascist intrigues of the Caribbean Legion; how Guatemalan elites’ colonial nostalgia and sense of belonging to a Spanish ‘raza’ (‘race’), longstanding ideas re-energised in the Americas by Franco's regime, help explain their racial animus against the country's majority Maya population; and how the MLN, the self-styled ‘party of organised violence’ that was among the most violent factions of Guatemala's civil war (1960–96), took as its ‘spiritual mentor’ neither Eisenhower nor the United States, but franquista (Francoist) Spain. The Spanish Civil War, an open wound in the Hispanophone world to this day, appears again and again as a point of reference in this more complex narrative. Accordingly, this article argues that the ideological tumult of 1930s Spain was a significant current in the intellectual formation of both leftist and rightist movements in mid-century Guatemala. The parallels Guatemalans saw between their situation and Spain's were anything but epiphenomenal to their politics. As such, they merit deeper investigation for their impact on the Revolutionary Spring and the 1954 coup, and for what they suggest about the broader resonance of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America as the Cold War unfolded.
In undertaking that investigation, this article answers recent calls by Vanni Pettiná, Tanya Harmer and others to study the Latin American Cold War in a transnational context, as well as to complement scholarship about the US role in Guatemala with other perspectives – as Pettiná and José Antonio Sánchez Román write, ‘to explore the multiple dimensions of the Cold War as they were experimented in Latin America and by Latin Americans’.Footnote 11 To do so, this article draws on archival materials from Franco-era Spain, memoirs and first-person accounts by protagonists of both the Revolutionary Spring and the MLN, Falangist and Catholic journals that circulated in Guatemala during the 1930s and 1940s, papal encyclicals and pastoral letters. In this case, the evidence shows that while US material support was indispensable to the 1954 counter-revolution, the motivations and ideologies fuelling the overthrow of Arbenz had other roots. The United States contributed the arms, funding and logistical coordination, certainly. But Guatemalans provided a pre-existing reactionary fervour, conservative Hispanophilia and immediate hostility to both Arévalo and Arbenz – which began not with the 1947 Labour Code or the 1952 Agrarian Reform Law, but with the democratic leaders’ rejection of Franco, their embrace of the Spanish Republic and their commitment to the separation of church and state. Guatemalan anti-communism was weaponised by the United States but not imported from it, and it pre-dated both the formal advent of the Cold War and the founding of the CIA. Appreciating this helps us understand, for example, why Enrique Muñoz Meany, Arévalo's foreign minister, vowed that his country would reject Franco and defend the Republican government-in-exile ‘for as long as there is democracy in Guatemala’.Footnote 12 It also helps us understand why, when the MLN's militants rose up against Arbenz, they used the Falangist slogans of ‘¡ Viva la muerte !’ (‘Long live death!’) and ‘¡ Muera la inteligencia !’ (‘Death to intelligence!’).Footnote 13 As we shall see, it was no accident that Guatemala's democratic experiment was ended in this fashion.
Guatemala and Spain under Ubico (1931–44)
The Spanish Civil War began when an attempted coup on 18 July 1936 failed to swiftly overthrow the elected Popular Front government then helming the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic, in turn, dated to 1931, its birth proclaimed by the reformers who, in overthrowing the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and abolishing the monarchy, sought to dislodge the oligarchic and religious structures dominating Spanish economic and political life. Republican modernisers passed a new constitution which granted equality to all, declared Spain a republic of workers, moved decisively to separate church and state, introduced female suffrage and divorce, made secular education free and compulsory, ended the privileges of the Catholic Church, granted autonomy to sub-national regions like Catalonia, made provisions for agrarian reform and the state expropriation of private property and instituted a variety of other changes designed to open up society, break up the landed aristocracy and address inequality. Reminiscent of the post-revolutionary constitutions of Mexico and of France's Third Republic, it established an ambitious liberal agenda, even if it promised more than the Republicans ultimately delivered.Footnote 14
It also, however, alienated elites, conservatives and many Catholics. The Republic's efforts to weaken powerful institutions like the army and the Church, its steps toward rural land reform and its inability or unwillingness to control popular anticlerical sentiment, resulting in the burnings of numerous churches and the killings of thousands of clergy, generated intense resentment. Multiple rightist factions – Carlist traditionalists who sought the monarchy's restoration, large landowners, moderates sympathetic to some Republican programmes but outraged by anticlericalism, young fascist militants of the Falange – declared their opposition to the Republic's very existence. After a tumultuous few years, with power changing hands several times, these factions coalesced into what became the Nationalist uprising.Footnote 15 The failed coup of July 1936 produced a bloody struggle for territory, one both rooted in Spanish history and inflected by the brewing Second World War. Despite a 1936 non-intervention pact signed by all the European powers, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy provided extensive support to the rebels; Stalin's Soviet Union backed the Republic, though with strings attached. With the Republicans’ ability to obtain arms and materiel constrained by the non-intervention pact and their coalition sundered by violent Comintern-fuelled conflicts between communists, Trotskyists and anarchists, the Nationalists declared victory on 1 April 1939, leaving hundreds of thousands of Republican sympathisers dead, imprisoned or exiled. The nearly 40-year dictatorship that followed saw, Stanley Payne writes, ‘a restoration of religious traditionalism in Spain on a formal scale that has had no analogy in any other Western country of the twentieth century’.Footnote 16
Because the issues at stake were so similar to their own – the challenges of modernisation, land distribution, church–state relations and debates over the survival of institutions and conventions established by imperial Spain – Latin Americans followed the Spanish Civil War with interest. And for Guatemalan elites who prized their Hispanic heritage, the war was a family affair. Two months before the Republic's creation, General Jorge Ubico assumed Guatemala's presidency. Famed for his iron-fisted rule, Ubico moved quickly to centralise power and establish a police state. By the time Spain's war broke out, his authority was firmly entrenched. The dictator was more of a pragmatist than an ideologue, however. When, in November 1936, he made Guatemala the first nation to recognise Franco's Nationalists, he did so less because he subscribed to the particular ideology of any Nationalist faction – though Ubico admired Franco, with whom he shared, Carlos Sabino writes, a ‘spiritual affinity’ – and more because it allowed him to reiterate his anti-communist stance at home.Footnote 17 The Republic had ‘taken its struggle to extremes of indefensible cruelty’ and had ‘revealed itself to be openly communist’, he told Guatemala's National Assembly, whereas Franco's forces and, by extension, Ubico himself, represented ‘a guarantee of order and civilization’.Footnote 18
The general's stance on Spain turned any local support for the Republicans into an act of resistance. Novelist and future Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, for example, recalled hiding away with a radio at low volume to listen to news from the Spanish front, surreptitiously dedicating poems to the Republic because overtly doing so would invite reprisals; and the critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón published his anti-fascist commentaries from exile, usually in Costa Rica's Repertorio Americano.Footnote 19 Under Ubico, as Rafael Delgado recounts, simply believing in the Republican cause constituted a crime. Loyalist partisans faced expulsion from Guatemala, Ubico's secret police harassed anyone who dared express pro-Republican sentiment, and the writings of well-known sympathisers like Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado and César Vallejo, proscribed by Ubico, ‘circulated clandestinely as though they were anarchist bombs’.Footnote 20
Conversely, a Guatemalan wing, founded in 1937, of the Spanish Falange was allowed to function openly, establishing youth and women's branches, routinely holding large gatherings, and transmitting pro-Franco programming over its radio station, La Voz Blanca. The Spanish Falange, whose core objectives included the revivification of a Hispanic ‘cultural empire’, encouraged Spanish immigrants across the Americas to form satellite groups; one of their bulletins described the Latin American branches as ‘kindred spirits in the holy desire to save and magnify the Spanish fatherland, and to rescue an entire civilization from the brutal hands of Marxism’.Footnote 21 And Ubico, who counted Guatemala-based Falangists among his personal friends, not only tolerated their activities but encouraged them through actions like his endorsement of a 1938 mass, held by uniformed falangistas in Guatemala City's Iglesia de San Francisco, for the ‘fallen’ among Franco's armies.Footnote 22 Publications like Amanecer, in turn, were free to extol the virtues of militarised nationalism, Guatemala's colonial heritage and Catholic anti-communism. Circulating among Spanish immigrants, commercial sectors and religious officials of both Guatemalan and Spanish extraction, Falangist media gave voice to the notion that Franco's uprising represented a ‘blood communion’ and a ‘Holy Crusade’.Footnote 23
The Nationalists established a horizon of possibility for a militant Catholic resurgence against the corrupting forces of modernity, one received eagerly by Guatemala's Church hierarchy. Beginning with the Liberal regime of Justo Rufino Barrios (1871–85), which initiated what Richard Adams calls ‘perhaps the longest and most severe restriction that the Catholic Church has suffered in Latin America’, Guatemala saw foreign clergy expelled, Church property confiscated, the Church's legal personhood revoked, civil marriage and secular education established, and other measures designed to weaken the Church.Footnote 24 While Ubico was also a Liberal, he allowed the Church to reacquire some influence, appointing a papal nuncio in 1936 and granting permission, in 1937, for Jesuit priests to enter the country and train local clergy. Under Ubico, church and state established what Piero Gleijeses calls a ‘comfortable modus vivendi’ for the first time in 60 years.Footnote 25
This rapprochement coincided with a push from both Rome and Nationalist Spain for the world's Catholics to agitate not only against anticlerical violence in the Spanish Republic but also against Marxism in any form. In one sense, this was not new: Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum had expressly rejected socialism. Moreover, the Vatican's specific concern about the Spanish Republic's treatment of the Church pre-dated the 1936 uprising, with Pope Pius XI issuing, in 1933, a denunciation of the Republic's secularising policies in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.Footnote 26 But the tone of Divini Redemptoris, an encyclical released in March 1937 as the war raged, was unusually strident. It argued that ‘atheistic communism’, which it saw the Republic as promoting, was ‘an evil of the spiritual order’ from which emanated a ‘satanic logic’. In Divini Redemptoris, Pius XI warned that ‘what is happening today in Spain may perhaps be repeated tomorrow in other civilized countries’, recommending that ‘all diligence should be exercised by States to prevent within their territories the ravages of an anti-God campaign which shakes society to its very foundations’.Footnote 27 Echoing the Pope, in July 1937 a group of Spanish bishops penned a pastoral letter for global distribution. It defended the rebels’ efforts to oust the Republic as necessary ‘to safeguard the principles of religion and Christian justice which have for ages formed the nation's life’, declaring Franco's campaign to be a just war.Footnote 28 Their message was successfully projected beyond Spain; the letter was widely reprinted, including in Revista Eclesiástica, a publication circulated among Guatemalan clergy.Footnote 29
Two weeks after Franco declared victory, Pius XI named a new Guatemalan archbishop: Mariano Rossell y Arellano. Throughout his quarter-century as archbishop, Rossell made it his mission to restore what he saw as the Church's bygone glory. During the remainder of Ubico's reign, church–state relations thawed further, largely on the strength of the personal relationship between the dictator and the new prelate – one ‘undoubtedly facilitated’, writes Anita Frankel, ‘by the similarity of their views on the ideological conflicts of the period: both were staunchly anti-Communist and great admirers of Francisco Franco’.Footnote 30 A regular guest of honour at masses and other activities hosted by the local Falange, including a celebration of Franco's triumph, Rossell subscribed to a conservative, authoritarian strain of Catholicism, one fusing political and religious identity that aligned closely with Franco's governing philosophy of nacionalcatolicismo (National Catholicism).Footnote 31 Playing a lasting and outsized role in politics, and remaining archbishop until his death in 1964, Rossell was determined to combat secularism in all its forms. He believed in a hierarchical society ruled by the laws of the Church, with anything else tantamount to communism. That position endeared him to Guatemala's elites, who shared his commitment to defending the economic and racial status quo.
Rossell's Hispanophilic dreams of religious resurgence, however, would have to wait. In 1944, a popular movement for democracy deposed Ubico, ushering in Guatemala's Revolutionary Spring. And the elected governments of Arévalo and Arbenz would have rather different views about the Spanish Civil War.
The Revolutionary Spring and the Spanish Republic
Much has been written about 1944–54 in Guatemala, which Cardoza y Aragón called the ‘years of spring in the land of eternal tyranny’.Footnote 32 Under Arévalo, Guatemalans first saw the implementation of a state welfare system, the institutionalisation of the Labour Code, the protection of political freedoms, educational reform, the abolition of forced indigenous labour, and multi-party political competition. Under Arbenz, the democratising groundwork laid by Arévalo was expanded to more meaningfully transform the country's rural political economy, culminating in Decreto 900, the 1952 land reform that targeted not just United Fruit and other hoarders of untilled land but also the entire racialised agrarian plantation system. That such a progressive, coherent policy agenda coalesced so quickly in a society long dominated by generals and oligarchs impressed and, in some cases, perplexed observers. To explain the flowering of the ‘primavera guatemalteca’ (‘Guatemalan Spring’), some historians have said that Arévalo, Arbenz and their fellow travellers were inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.Footnote 33
But the US welfare state was not the only model for Central Americans seeking to dismantle the structures of inequality – latifundios (large estates), debt peonage and the like descended from colonial times. Importantly, Guatemala's democratic revolutionaries also looked to the Spanish Republic and its efforts to break the dominion of the Church, the military, and the landowning classes. The Republic's martyrdom did not prevent it from being seen as an example across the Atlantic, both for what sympathetic Latin Americans saw as the worthiness of its modernising goals and for the intensity of the backlash it provoked. Rather, what Cardoza y Aragón called ‘Republican Spain, the eternal Spain that all of us carry in our hearts’ served as a key point of reference for the Revolutionary Spring's leaders, who understood just how steeply uphill their journey would be. As Muñoz Meany put it, Spain offered ‘a tremendous lesson for us, for the few democracies that remain in our America!’Footnote 34
The ‘lessons’ of the Spanish Civil War took several forms during the Revolutionary Spring. First, Republican principles influenced the political philosophy of the Arévalo government. As Max Paul Friedman writes, Arévalo's often-misunderstood ‘spiritual socialism’ was rooted in the ideas of the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, ‘quickly forgotten in the Germanic and Anglophone worlds’ but ‘influential among Spanish Republicans, who adapted and transmitted his ideas across the Atlantic’. Much read by nineteenth-century Spanish liberals, Krause's thought was used by reformers throughout the Hispanophone world, including Cuba's José Martí and Argentina's Hipólito Yrigoyen, to inform discussions of anti-imperialism, nationalism and the responsibility of individuals to the greater social good. The dénouement of the Spanish Civil War, however, put the stakes of Krausean interpretation into starker relief. Living in Argentina before Guatemala's October Revolution, Arévalo, already an admirer of Krause, taught alongside Republican refugees at the Universidad de Tucumán, absorbing both their lived experiences of the war and their views on krausismo (Krausism). Upon taking office in Guatemala, Arévalo drew heavily on Krause in developing his philosophy of ‘spiritual socialism’, which, inter alia, stressed the importance of ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’, brokered by the state to avoid social conflict, between the antagonistic forces of capital and labour.Footnote 35
Second, that Western powers had stood by while a Nazi-backed insurgency overthrew Spain's elected democracy made a powerful impression on Guatemalan reformers. As such, they made the Spanish question a foreign policy priority. Just two months after Ubico's fall, before Arévalo's election and while the junta of Arbenz, Francisco Arana and Jorge Toriello remained in power, Guatemala's Legislative Assembly moved to sever diplomatic relations with Spain. ‘Guatemala, a country that gave its blood to secure democratic principles in the glorious revolution of October 20, is at war with any regime that imposes its will through force’, read the motion, ‘and it cannot tolerate any compromise with the totalitarian government of General Franco’.Footnote 36 A month later, in January 1945, the junta followed the Assembly's recommendation and suspended relations with Spain on two grounds: Franco's ideology and conduct was ‘repugnant to the principles of the Revolution’, and the Falange constituted ‘a reactionary hub whose manoeuvers represent a risk to continental security and a disturbance to peace and tranquility in the Republic’.Footnote 37
Each of these reasons reflected the revolutionary government's core priorities. In the first instance, as Guillermo Toriello, Arbenz's foreign minister, put it, the October Revolution had permitted Guatemala, ‘for the first time in its history, to project onto the international stage its domestic policy principles’, including the defence of representative democracy, support for the self-determination of all peoples and absolute respect for the principle of non-intervention.Footnote 38 While Mexico is better known for taking this position vis-à-vis Spain in the international arena and maintaining it until Franco's death in 1975, rarely is it noted that Guatemala's fledgling democracy joined Mexico in rejecting Franco and defending the Republican government-in-exile – even as the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western powers abandoned their original conviction, affirmed at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, that any regime installed with Axis help had no place in the international community.Footnote 39 The Arévalo and Arbenz governments, seeing this as an unforgivable moral reversal, instead invited delegates from the Republican government-in-exile to celebrate Arbenz's inauguration.Footnote 40 Upon hearing of Spain's planned readmission to UNESCO in 1952, Arévalo exclaimed, ‘Generalísimo Francisco Franco, bulwark of Western democracy! … Is this a dream? A nightmare? A journalist's April Fools’ Day joke? No: a terrifying reality.’Footnote 41 The flip side, of course, of communicating Guatemala's new-found respect for democratic principles in the diplomatic arena was defending those principles from domestic and foreign saboteurs – those sectors referred to by Muñoz Meany as ‘displaced ubiquismo [Ubicoism], creole fascism, hypocritical clericalism, latifundista [landowner] feudalism, and the aggressive imperialism of large foreign businesses’. In a 1951 essay, Muñoz Meany reminded readers that Guatemala broke with Franco ‘not only out of loyalty to democratic ideals or the violated madre patria, but also in view of the conspiratorial militancy of the Spanish Falange in Central America’.Footnote 42 Guatemala's anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist posture was thus born of both idealism and insecurity, revealing not only reformers’ analysis of history but their fears for the future.
A third manner in which the Spanish Civil War remained a live issue was via the arrival of Republican refugees. While far more exiles resettled in Mexico, thanks to the welcome Lázaro Cárdenas extended during the war itself, the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations made their own efforts, from 1945 onward, to bring marooned Republicans to Central America. As detailed in a magisterial study by Arturo Taracena, Guatemala's refugee resettlement programme, though later and on a smaller scale than Mexico's, shared the same objectives: demonstrating ‘fraternity and solidarity with the Spanish Republicans’ while also hoping that the influx of skilled migrants would provide economic stimulus.Footnote 43 Guided by Muñoz Meany, the programme, Taracena writes, was ‘modest but sincere’, extending refuge to some 600 exiles.Footnote 44 Their community nucleus was the Casa de la República, which convened new arrivals, other exiles who had come through Mexico or the Caribbean and the minority of resident Spaniards who were pro-Republican. Renamed the Centro Republicano Español (Spanish Republican Centre) in 1949, it became a hub of fundraising and events among exiles and Guatemalans alike. Although the refugees represented distinct and mutually hostile tendencies within the Republican coalition, they largely united around Guatemala's defence of the Republican government-in-exile, its rejection of Francoism, and the need for vigilance against local Falangist activity.Footnote 45 (Both the US government and Guatemalan rightists, however, considered the Centro a communist front group.)Footnote 46
Fourth, and related to the matter of refugees, was Arévalo's support for the Caribbean Legion. Less a formal organisation than a motley crew of Latin American and Spanish exiles, the Legion, with Arévalo's backing, spent the late 1940s attempting to overthrow Central American and Caribbean dictators – particularly Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza, who sponsored competing groups of exiles seeking to undermine the region's democracies.Footnote 47 The Legion was anti-fascist and anti-communist, like Arévalo, although, as Gleijeses notes, the hemisphere's prevailing polarisation meant that the Guatemalan leader's sponsorship of the Legion was seen, perversely, by his enemies as ‘evidence of his communist proclivities’.Footnote 48 In any event, the group was noteworthy for featuring Republican combat veterans – including Alberto Bayo, who later trained a young Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara in the art of guerrilla warfare – and thus its actions further cemented the association between the Revolutionary Spring and the Spanish Republic, as well as the hostility of Trujillo, Somoza and other local rightists to both.Footnote 49
The consequences of that hostility soon became clear. Dictators like Trujillo – described in these years as ‘a pillar in defense of all things Spanish’ – and Somoza backed many of the conspiracies and coup attempts survived by Arévalo and Arbenz, along with the one to which Guatemala's democracy ultimately succumbed in 1954.Footnote 50 If the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations’ pro-Republican stance had been a point of principle consistent with their anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism, for opposition sectors it offered powerful ammunition. The break with Franco, the visibility of Republican exiles, and the kinship with the Republic avowed by prominent figures like Cardoza y Aragón, Muñoz Meany, Guillermo Toriello, Arévalo and Arbenz: opponents saw all of this as a rejection of the true Catholic Spain and, hence, as evidence of communist penetration. That evidence proved a more than sufficient basis for action against the Revolutionary Spring – not just after 1947 when Arévalo became involved with the Legion, or after 1952 when Arbenz passed agrarian reform, but from democracy's very inception in 1944.
Spain and the Guatemalan Right under Arévalo and Arbenz
Though the United States demonstrated relatively little concern about communism during Arévalo's initial years in office, local rightists were incensed immediately. Guillermo Putzeys Rojas, an MLN soldier, described his movement as ‘ten years of anti-communist struggle’,Footnote 51 showing that he and other MLNistas defined the Revolutionary Spring as ‘communist’ well before the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (Guatemalan Communist Party, PGT) was legalised or its leaders became advisors to Arbenz. The trouble, instead, began when the revolutionary junta of Arbenz, Toriello and Arana broke relations with Spain in 1944. Franco had styled his insurrection and his regime as the very incarnation of Catholic ideals, relying heavily on the language of sacred exceptionalism to legitimate his rule. (Not incidentally, as William Viestenz writes, ‘Francoist Spain [was] an ideal representation of how consolidating sovereignty and projecting national identity through sacred imagining is liable to purifying, exclusionary violence.’)Footnote 52 Accordingly, the revolutionary junta breaking ties with Spain was a red flag, so to speak, for religious conservatives. As Arévalo later wrote, the Church viewed this as ‘a mortal sin’, while Castillo Armas attested that he saw it as ‘clear proof of [the junta's] Soviet inclination’.Footnote 53
Arévalo's prompt recognition of the Republican government-in-exile, shortly after his inauguration, made matters worse. It was then, he remembered, that ‘the Catholic clergy active in Guatemala, some Falangist Spaniards, others Italian fascists, declared war to the death. What else besides communism’, he asked rhetorically, ‘could account for a government refusing to maintain relations with the defenders of Western Christianity?’ Writing after 1954, Arévalo blamed the Church (along with the Caribbean dictatorships, United Fruit and the State Department) for the replacement of the Revolutionary Spring with a reactionary winter. ‘Ever since those remote years’, he argued, referring to 1944 and 1945, ‘the term “communists” was disseminated in the sacristies and from the pulpits with a declamatory emphasis, and great combative fervour’. No agrarian reform was needed for Arévalo and Arbenz to be depicted, in the former's words, as ‘enemies of Christ, burners of images, ravagers of priests, rapists of nuns, profaners of temples, vile atheists, poisoners of souls, fellow-travelers of Lucifer, [and] heirs of Attila!’Footnote 54 Rather, their rejection of Franco provided sufficient justification. Guatemala was ‘a Spanish country’, wrote commentator Antonio Micala, and ‘it is extremely sad to see a Spanish country oppose Spain; it is precisely in response to this that we rebel’.Footnote 55
The separation of church and state was also immediately divisive. The new government promised and provided religious freedom, but it also moved to keep the Church at arm's length from affairs of politics, a principle enshrined in Article 29 of the 1945 Constitution (which, itself, was partly modelled on the Republic's 1931 Constitution).Footnote 56 This sparked fierce opposition. Acción Social Cristiana, a new, popular newspaper that owed its existence to the very Arévalo-era religious liberties it claimed were under attack, spread alarm whenever it saw the Church's interests threatened. For example, in January 1945, when Education Minister Manuel Galich stated that education was the exclusive purview of the state, the newspaper characterised Galich's position as ‘pure totalitarianism’.Footnote 57 Not mincing words, one contributor described secular education as ‘the most anti-democratic institution of which it is possible to conceive’, one ‘equivalent to the blinders placed on draft animals so they can only see the road where they are being led, pulling the heavy cart of a most odious spiritual dictatorship’.Footnote 58
Conservatives’ complaints were not limited to education policy. Acción Social’s editors and writers, some of whom later participated in the counter-revolution, also lamented that the Church was being ‘prevented from rescuing the worker from the red unions’, that Guatemala was being hijacked by ‘a few communists who call themselves democrats’, and that the ‘religious and moral life of Guatemalans’ risked ‘definitive destruction’.Footnote 59 The paper reprinted Franco's speeches, defended Spain against charges of totalitarianism, protested when Republicans like the poet León Felipe visited Guatemala, and circulated tallies of members of Spanish religious orders supposedly murdered under Republican rule.Footnote 60 In urging local Catholics to organise themselves and resist the Arévalo government's efforts to reserve jurisdiction over syndical and educational matters, the newspaper's director, Juan Alberto Rosales, explicitly and approvingly cited Catholics’ contributions to the overthrow of the Spanish Republic.Footnote 61 ‘I have heard many people saying’, Rosales wrote in a 1946 column, ‘that if being a Falangist means not being a Communist, then we would rather be Falangists’.Footnote 62 Others echoed the sentiment: a 1947 editorial argued that ‘we have the model of the noble, chivalrous Spain of our own times, which defended the liberty of its faith with the blood of more than a million of its sons’.Footnote 63 As one columnist put it, ‘So Franco overthrew a legally constituted government. So what?’Footnote 64
Joining the regular and rising drumbeat of the religious press was Archbishop Rossell. In an October 1945 pastoral letter designed to raise ‘the voice of alarm’, the prelate and his colleagues advised Guatemalans that they had ‘proof in hand’ of subversion's local flourishing. ‘The fruits of schooling without God are seen in our intellectuals’ ideas, so far astray, about truth and eternal principles’, it read, ‘obsessed with advancing, with gigantic strides, toward the vanguard of the enemies of Christ’. The pastoral argued that charity-based Catholic social doctrine should supplant the state redistribution of resources, calling upon believers to ‘Christianize economic life’.Footnote 65 Warning of the coming dissolution of traditional gender and family roles, it foreshadowed Rossell's mobilisation of women, across class lines, against Arbenz after 1950.Footnote 66 Subsequently, a 1946 letter signed by the entire Guatemalan episcopate claimed that ‘Communism was at the gates of our homeland’, accusing the Arévalo administration of trying to ‘de-Christianize the souls of our people’.Footnote 67
The episcopal letter also articulated a complaint, soon common on the Right, about the malign influence of foreigners, especially Republican exiles, on the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations. It argued that while respectable clergy were being barred from the country, ‘adventurers trained in the Communist tactics of the Third International’ were being welcomed.Footnote 68 Mario López Villatoro, an activist with the right-wing student group Comité de Estudiantes Universitarios Anticomunistas (Anti-Communist Committee of University Students, CEUA) and participant in the 1954 coup, said the Revolutionary Spring had been ‘fanned by the upwellings of the recently liquidated Spanish Republic’ and described the democrats’ inner circles as ‘swarms of opportunists … among whom Spanish refugees and Cubans always stand out’. The refugees, López asserted, were ‘agents of Marxism’ who spent their days ‘as peaceful pastry sellers in the atria of the churches’ but at night served as hit men for Arbenz's regime. He described Republicans as ‘ferocious torturers and implacable assassins of anti-communist combatants in the dungeons, thanks to the criminal connivance and complicity of those presidents who have betrayed the Guatemalan nation’.Footnote 69 López was not alone in accusing Republicans of importing leftist violence. After the coup, Castillo Armas claimed to the Spanish journalist Manuel de Heredia that ‘like you, in Spain, we had tchekas [Chekas] here’,Footnote 70 which de Heredia argued were run by ‘experts from the Spanish Civil War and from Russia proper’.Footnote 71 Similarly, the 1954 Black Book of Communism in Guatemala, published by the Permanent Commission of the First Congress against Soviet Intervention in Latin America, identified the Centro Republicano Español as a ‘center of international conspiracy’; it referred to Spanish émigrés as a ‘fifth column’, poised ‘to intervene as an armed strike force whenever the communist regime of Colonel Arbenz is threatened’.Footnote 72 (No historical evidence substantiates such claims.)
Importantly, however, the relevance of the Spanish Civil War for Guatemalan anti-communists lay not only in their rejection of the Republic and its exiles, or in their critique of how Arévalo and Arbenz spurned Franco. Rather, a clear and affirmative ideological affinity for franquista-style National Catholicism and elements of Falangist thought and practice undergirded the MLN's politics. Some MLNistas had been active in Falangist circles since the Ubico period, such as José Calderón Salazar, who had published in Amanecer, had served as Castillo Armas’ envoy to Franco's representatives in 1954, and who Castillo Armas described as the ‘ideologue and builder’ of the anti-Arbenz movement.Footnote 73 In his book Letras de liberación, Calderón borrowed the Francoist language of a ‘national crusade’ against communism, quoted the Falangist anthem ‘Cara al Sol’ in elegising a fallen fellow insurgent, and adopted the Nationalist slogan ‘¡Viva la muerte!’ when describing the MLN's casualty-littered path to victory.Footnote 74 His vision for a hierarchical and ‘radically Christian’ society, governed by the principles of corporatist verticality and religious nationalism, viewed civil law as ‘only a cadaver’ and, adapting the writings of conservative Spanish philosopher Juan Donoso Cortés to the post-1917 global context, proclaimed the holy superiority of ‘dictatorship from above … dictatorship of the sword’.Footnote 75
Like the writings of other MLN insurgents, Calderón's text reflected the influence of Falangist ideas about the cultural primacy of hispanidad, which held that the Hispanophone world constituted a raza, united by its shared imperial history. While hispanidad had a long and somewhat varied intellectual lineage, with liberal and conservative variants prominent both in Spain and in its former colonies at least as far back as the nineteenth century, the ideological exigencies of what Eric Hobsbawm termed the ‘Age of Extremes’ pushed hispanidad’s conservative adherents toward more radically revanchist interpretations of the concept. Theoreticians of the Spanish Falange, like Ramiro de Maeztu, argued that hispanidad, a form of Catholic spiritualism exalting early modern Spanish life as the social ideal, represented a ‘third way’ between unbridled US-style capitalism and Soviet communism. De Maeztu proposed, moreover, that this third way, if rooted in Catholic social doctrine and deployed as a politics of governance, could help Latin American leaders resist both the depredations of US imperialism from above and ‘communist uprisings of indio s [Indians]’ from below.Footnote 76
In a country like Guatemala, whose population was more than half indigenous and where, from 1981 to 1983, the state would perpetrate acts of genocide against the Maya population, hispanidad’s presence in the ideological foundations of military rule had chilling implications. Arévalo described local oligarchs as afflicted with ‘aristocratic nostalgia’, and indeed, as sociologist Marta Casaús Arzú has demonstrated, the families of Guatemala's ruling classes assiduously protected the bloodlines linking them to the conquistadors of the sixteenth century.Footnote 77 Those elites were, therefore, a natural constituency for the Francoist twist on hispanidad, which yoked the exaltation of early modern Spanish imperial glory to Cold War anti-communism: ‘How lucky’, Calderón wrote of native Guatemalans, ‘was the moment when Spain set you down upon your secular knees to teach you the alphabet and language of God’. Calderón compared the MLN's insurgency against Arbenz to what he saw as the original liberation, that of 1492, in which ‘the indigenous cup received the water of the Holy Spirit. And Spain was the baptizing hand.’Footnote 78 For his part, Rossell contended that campesinos had thrived under Spanish colonialism – ‘our land never had better or more numerous owners than in the sixteenth century of our history’ – and blamed the 1952 Agrarian Reform for fomenting ‘racial hatred’ among indigenous peasants.Footnote 79 Historians and anthropologists have amply documented the ways in which the Guatemalan army of the 1980s saw indigenous Mayas as inherently receptive to communist subversion and thus deserving of preventive slaughter. It is hardly incidental, therefore, that a hispanidad-inflected world view equating Catholicism with civilisation, and Marxism with ‘savagery’, undergirded what the MLN, following Franco, called its ‘reconquest’ of the country.Footnote 80
Contemporary observers noted the consonance between this strain of Guatemalan conservatism and its Spanish counterpart. Discussing the string of coup attempts against Arévalo, Muñoz Meany characterised as ‘typical’ the failed 1949 uprising led by ‘the Spanish Falangist Casado’ – the same Casado who served as Ydígoras’ envoy seeking Franco's support in 1954. Casado's coup attempt was ‘rooted in peninsular fascism’, Muñoz Meany wrote, noting that its 18 July date was ‘a Francoist anniversary’ timed to honour the Spanish Civil War's outbreak on the same date in 1936. Another coup attempt in July 1950, Muñoz Meany observed, ‘began with moments of silence and fascist salutes down the main avenues’.Footnote 81 Arévalo, in turn, likened the MLN's burning of left-wing books to Franco's practice of the same in 1939, as well as to his ‘war of life or death against heterodox ideas’.Footnote 82 And Guillermo Toriello postulated that the profusion of conspiracies against Arévalo and Arbenz was a function of the new political liberties those governments had allowed. Toriello wrote:
Precisely this atmosphere of freedom permitted the extreme right – large landowners, elements of the older tyrannies displaced by the Revolution, clerical elements identified with falangism, etcetera – to ally themselves without any modesty, as soon as the impact of the revolutionary laws caused them to lose the privileges they had enjoyed prior to 1944, with the foreign interests that found themselves in the same position.Footnote 83
Toriello blamed Franco and his admirers for stoking the revanchist flames. He cited ‘the call to “Hispanidad”, the malicious exploitation of the people's Catholic sentiment, and the intensification of Falangist propaganda by elements of the Catholic clergy’ as key factors in Arbenz's downfall. Even the MLN's slogan – ‘God, Fatherland, Liberty’ – was, he argued, Falangist in inspiration.Footnote 84
Much as with Spain's Nationalists, what became Guatemala's counter-revolutionary coalition united multiple conservative communities. These included high-level church operatives like Rossell; grassroots sectors like the anti-Arbenz market women and the believers Rossell mobilised under the banner of the Black Christ of Esquipulas, a Christ icon and pilgrimage object the archbishop reframed as an anti-Arbenz rallying symbol; military dissenters like Castillo Armas; and the students who formed the CEUA and the Comité de Estudiantes Universitarios Anticomunistas Guatemaltecos en el Exilio (Committee of Guatemalan Anti-Communist University Students in Exile, CEUAGE). The student militants, among them López Villatoro, Mario Sandoval Alarcón and Lionel Sisniega Otero, authored the 1953 Plan de Tegucigalpa, which became Castillo Armas’ working platform. The ‘God, Fatherland, Liberty’ slogan appeared there too, and the Plan's language, florid and moralistic, strongly recalled that of the major Falangist and Hispanist texts that had circulated throughout the Americas since the early 1930s. It called not only for communism's destruction but also for the establishment of a society governed by the laws of Catholic social doctrine; it stressed the ‘absolute sterility’ of civil law and described Guatemala's struggle as being one of the ‘disloyal and impious hammer and sickle versus God and Nation’. Regarding the Mayas, it recommended a ‘tutelary’ system designed to ‘defend’ them, thus restoring the Church's role from colonial times. That most Mayas continued to speak indigenous languages would be remedied not only by ‘bringing the [Spanish] language to the heart of the mountains’ but also through instructing them ‘in the rudiments of mathematics, hygiene, civility, morality, and, above all, making them learn to love Guatemala with a fully nationalist conscience’. Finally, the Plan's emphasis on a kind of third-way politics, between ‘an enslaving Communism’ and ‘an exploitative capitalism’, also echoed Spanish nacionalcatolicismo’s corporatist thrust. Many of the Plan de Tegucigalpa's principles would be written into Guatemala's 1956 Constitution after Castillo Armas seized power.Footnote 85
Guillermo Toriello's larger point, then, was crucial: the Guatemalan counter-revolution was not the result of US anti-Arbenz sentiment alone, whether of the corporate variety (United Fruit) or the ideological/geopolitical variety (Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers). Rather, the United States empowered and funded a pre-existing and sharply reactionary tendency originating from within Guatemala and reflecting its elites’ conservative Hispanophilia. ‘This was the genesis of the so-called Guatemalan “anti-communism”’, Toriello reflected, ‘and a regression to the past was its reason for being’. United Fruit, with its vast resources and ties to the Eisenhower administration, ‘served to catalyze these forces’, Toriello wrote, but it did not create them from whole cloth.Footnote 86 As Arévalo observed, ‘the falangist Catholic clergy … associate themselves with the United States for its political and commercial power, and they have made a pact to the death against communism, even if the theory of liberalism separates them’.Footnote 87 The US government and US corporate actors were utterly indispensable to the counter-revolution, to be sure, but their relationship with the Guatemalan Right was an alliance of convenience more than one of affinity. Religious conservatives like Rossell denounced secular liberalism and communism with almost equal enthusiasm, while the State Department and United Fruit would hardly have endorsed the Catholic nationalism their local allies espoused – one which waged its crusade, Calderón stressed, under the banner of ‘the dagger and the cross’.Footnote 88 These camps’ shared loathing for Arbenz, however, was strong enough to bind the working relationship that produced the 1954 conjuncture, along with the ensuing decades of military rule.
1954: Déjà Vu and Spain's Afterlives
In a 1950 homage celebrating the 19th anniversary of the Republic's founding, Muñoz Meany told his audience that ‘our duty is to keep the memory of the Spanish Republic, and the crimes done to her, vivid and alive’. This was the ‘lesson’ the Republic had taught Latin America's democracies, he argued: via military betrayal, foreign intervention and a profoundly mismatched balance of forces, Spain was transformed ‘from an idyllic dream into a Dantesque nightmare, one that cost a million lives and sank a Republic that was a model of democratic rule’. In the 1930s, the international community had shown itself willing to tolerate – indeed, to abet – the demise of social democracy as collateral damage in the global war against communism, and two decades later, Muñoz Meany argued, ‘nothing has changed’. The diplomat died in 1951, but his speech anticipated his country's fate in 1954: ‘We can hope for nothing from international promises, nor from the demagogic declarations of prominent statesmen, nor the complicated chess games of the Great Powers.’Footnote 89
The limits of diplomacy were on abundant display at the Tenth Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States (OAS), held in Caracas in March 1954. Guatemala's delegation, led by Guillermo Toriello, had arrived ‘confident … that the countries of Latin America would rally around us’ as the threat of US invasion loomed. And rally they did: defending the non-intervention principle, the Latin American delegates pushed back firmly against John Foster Dulles’ proposal that the OAS authorise intervention in any country of the western hemisphere threatened by ‘the international communist movement’. As Friedman writes, the final wording of the resolution constrained US action against Guatemala more than it authorised it, and it was only approved after the United States strong-armed and bought off delegates to obtain the face-saving appearance of a diplomatic victory. In the end, however, no consultative process involving Latin American powers could stop what the United States had already decided to execute. Neither Dulles’ failure to secure regional consensus nor widespread Latin American opposition deterred the United States from setting the Revolutionary Spring's demise into motion.Footnote 90
The unfolding of the CIA's ‘Operation PBSUCCESS’, Arbenz's fall and the purges subsequently carried out by the MLN have been chronicled by many historians, who rightly cite the episode as a crucial turning point in the global Cold War. Yet, by and large, scholars have not narrated the story as many Latin American and Spanish political leaders on both the Right and the Left saw it at the time: in the context, however refracted, of the Spanish Civil War. This represents a missed opportunity to understand how many in the Spanish-speaking world made sense of Great Power conflicts and their local consequences, and to understand the lasting impact of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas. For example, when the United States blocked Arbenz's last-ditch effort to import arms from Czechoslovakia, Arévalo likened the move to the West's fatal blockade of weapons entering the Republic 15 years earlier.Footnote 91 Che Guevara, who had been in Guatemala during the coup and fled to Mexico after, wrote that Arbenz's government was ‘just like the Spanish Republic, betrayed from within and without’.Footnote 92 The Andalusian poet Rafael Alberti, exiled to Argentina in 1939, made the comparison in his poem ‘El rostro del crimen’, calling the overthrow of Arbenz ‘a new face’ of the same crime.Footnote 93 And the Movimiento Democrático Latino-Americano (Latin American Democratic Movement), a Chilean group led by parliamentarian Armando Rodríguez Quezada, argued in a statement to the UN and the OAS that ‘Guatemala, like the Spanish Republic, is the victim of a bellicose readjustment on the part of imperialism's rearguard’ – one that undermined not only the principle of national self-determination but, importantly, the integrity of the international organisations that allowed both coups to happen.Footnote 94
While progressive Latin Americans and Spaniards decried the crushing of another attempt at social democracy in the Hispanophone world, Castillo Armas and his allies moved quickly to enact their priorities. Before Arbenz had even resigned, Carlos Salazar, the new foreign minister, wrote to Spanish representatives about the new regime's desire to ‘re-establish diplomatic relations, impelled by a restlessness and a yearning to revive the ties of blood, of language, of tradition, of our shared centuries-old history and the nature of our aspirations in Spain and Guatemala, both sisters in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith’.Footnote 95 As Republican sympathisers had been forced to flee Spain, so too were thousands of arbencistas (Arbenz supporters) hounded out of Guatemala and, if they could not escape, imprisoned or killed.Footnote 96 Rossell's ambitions of rebuilding the Church's power also came to fruition. As Richard Adams writes, ‘the state began to treat the Church as a special friend rather than as a special enemy’, not least because they ‘found in the Church an important ally to enhance their own control over the expanding population and far-left groups’.Footnote 97 Accordingly, the Church recovered its legal personhood, was permitted to reopen a seminary, was encouraged to import clergymen – many from Franco's Spain – and celebrated the undoing of many of the anticlerical laws imposed by nineteenth-century Liberal regimes.Footnote 98 In a mass honouring anti-communists killed by ‘the reds’ during the coup, Rossell praised ‘a new legion of martyrs filling Guatemala with glory’, giving their ‘innocent and heroic’ blood in a ‘generous and expiatory offering to help stop the vicious Hydra of communism’. He reasoned that the coup's violence was ‘a natural consequence of having abandoned God years ago’, and argued that, because of the Revolutionary Spring's secular education policy, ‘it is little wonder that anti-social castes of spies, snitches, torturers, and political assassins took form’. While giving thanks for the ‘authentic peace of Christ’ that followed the invasion, Rossell warned Guatemalans to remain vigilant: ‘in this hour of joy, let us not forget that we have only cut off one of the seven heads of this Hydra’.Footnote 99
In the ensuing years, these self-styled liberationists used anti-communist vigilance as the pretext for what can most accurately be termed a proleptic counter-insurgency – a battle against dissent that pre-dated the early-1960s emergence of leftist armed movements. ‘Now we must think of the fire of creation, a fire of restoration’, wrote Calderón – ‘the holy fire that sacrifice has given us’. Guatemalans needed to unify ‘not around a revolution which destroys, but around a crusade that purifies’, since, he wrote, ‘the Movement for National Liberation, realized by God's will, a perfect work of Christ on earth, will never die’.Footnote 100 The MLN used the language of a Christian crusade or reconquest to legitimate rather more worldly forms of oppression. These included the dissolution of all political parties; the burning of books and purging of leftists from the national university; the forced displacement of thousands of campesinos from the lands they had just obtained via Arbenz's agrarian reform; the creation of groups like the Committee for National Defence Against Communism with the authority to arrest anyone suspected of ideological deviance; the building of a massive blacklist of enemies of the state (amounting to 10 per cent of the adult population, by one estimate); and the beginning of a US-funded build-up of state security forces.Footnote 101 In line with the papal encyclicals declaring the fight against communism to be a ‘just war’ under Catholic doctrine, Putzeys, a liberacionista (liberationist) soldier, articulated the new law of the land: ‘the roads of Holy rebellion lead us to the most authentic form of legality’.Footnote 102
The MLN promised that ‘war to the death against Communism would be our constant goal’, and as Guatemala descended into bloodshed, it remained the most radical of the country's right-wing sectors.Footnote 103 After 1954, the MLN transformed itself into the powerful de facto political party of the growing military, with its candidates occupying the presidency, vice presidency or presidency of Congress during significant portions of the war. Reflecting its original, insurrectionary Falangist tendencies, the MLN thenceforth called itself ‘the party of organized violence’. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it sponsored death squads like ‘Ojo por Ojo’ (‘An Eye for An Eye’), ‘Frente de Resistencia Nacional’ (‘National Resistance Front’) and ‘Mano Blanca’ (‘White Hand’), whose methods included torture, murder and forced disappearance. The MLN consistently pushed politics rightward, attacking not just leftists but also centrists and liberals, whom it accused of abetting subversion. MLN positions were intransigent and unyielding. In 1972, for example, it presented to Congress a draft law for the control of ‘undesirables’, which, according to MLN Deputy Alvaro Cuevas Figueroa, was modelled on a 1939 Spanish law imposed by Franco. It aimed, according to a US Embassy observer, to ‘provide for fines and imprisonment for actions adjudged perilous to society’, including ‘public drunkenness, use or sale of drugs, abandoning or rebelling against the family, use of vile or obscene language, or frequenting billiard halls’. Public reaction was negative: the press labelled it ‘the new Inquisition’ and the ‘Torquemada Laws’, and Christian Democrats warned that it aimed ‘toward the creation of a fascist state’.Footnote 104 The law never passed, but it did not need to – the impunity of the MLN-backed death squads, along with the National Police's limpieza social (social cleansing) operations, meant that hard-liners had other ways to crack down on vice and enemies.Footnote 105
Guatemala's long years of dictatorship, though internally varied, shared elements with Spain's: intense anti-communist violence, featuring tactics like forced disappearance and the abduction of children from leftist families for clandestine adoption into military ones; close ties between the official Church and the state, at least in the conflict's early decades; and a vigorous military nationalism. This fusion of right-wing Catholicism, reactionary patriotism and state terror against dissenters was best symbolised in a ceremony held by Monsignor Mario Casariego, the archbishop who succeeded Rossell, in Guatemala City in March 1967. Casariego, an ardent backer of Guatemala's post-1954 authoritarian regimes, was Spanish by birth and had been ordained to the priesthood on 19 July 1936, a day after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The ceremony in question took place outside Guatemala's Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the arrival of 54 Ford Broncos and Falcons acquired for the National Police by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office for Public Safety, which coordinated US aid to foreign police forces. Showing Church approval for the state counter-insurgency campaign then decimating the ranks of the labour and campesino movements, Casariego personally blessed and sprinkled holy water onto each of the 54 vehicles.Footnote 106
History, however, is not destiny. Guatemala's conservatives may have demonstrated their affinity for Franco-style nacionalcatolicismo by invoking the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, encouraging the spread of lay groups like Catholic Action to increase the Church's reach, and tarring all opposition as subversion. But their actions often produced unexpected results, especially as broader economic and cultural changes took hold both locally and globally. For example, many of the fiercely nationalist cadets and students among Guatemala's first wave of anti-regime insurgents – adherents of the Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (Revolutionary Movement 13 November, MR-13) and the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces, FAR) of the early 1960s – were the children of the arbencistas exiled in 1954, and constituted, Taracena writes, ‘a generation for which the Spanish Civil War was at the heart of their flag’.Footnote 107 Meanwhile, Catholicism proved a far more ideologically capacious faith than its traditionalists wished to accept. Though Guatemala's official Church was staunchly right-wing early in the war, it later generated some of the fiercest resistance to state violence of any national institution, most poignantly incarnated by the murdered Bishop Juan Gerardi. And the missionaries and lay faith groups welcomed by Rossell in his campaign to re-Christianise Guatemala proceeded, influenced by the Second Vatican Council and liberation theology, to lead much of the consciousness-raising work among both ladino and Maya populations that generated recruits for the guerrillas of the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 108
Whatever the unintended consequences, it is clear that the Spanish Civil War figured prominently in the political thought and strategy of the primary actors in Guatemala's mid-century drama. Tracing its resonance both before and after 1954 allows historians to see this touchstone moment of the Cold War in a more nuanced and multifaceted way. No ‘two-character play’ after all, the Revolutionary Spring had transnational influences well beyond the United States, even if the United States was ultimately essential to its destruction. The Spanish Republic served the Arévalo and Arbenz governments as a model, however idealised, of how to dismantle feudalism and socialise core aspects of public life while retaining a commitment to electoral democracy. It was an object lesson in the importance of national self-determination, and a cautionary tale about how the international community would not hesitate to sacrifice social democracy to serve anti-communism. In turn, the Republic served conservatives as a bogeyman, a spectre invoked to convince Catholics, in particular, that the Revolutionary Spring portended Guatemala's undoing from the moment of its inception.
The violent abrogation of both Spanish and Guatemalan efforts to reform their deeply unequal societies by democratic means did not forestall demands for change from below. Rather, it only exacerbated the acute social conflicts that had given rise to those democratising projects in the first place, generating further polarisation and violence. Though Enrique Muñoz Meany did not live to see it all transpire, he did, in part, predict it. Before his death in 1951 he had observed, mordantly, that ‘the Spanish Republic, with its academic liberalism, with its timid socialism, produced infinitely fewer Communists than those being produced by Franco with his use of misery and hunger as methods of government’.Footnote 109 The same could be said of Guatemala, where it was US-backed, right-wing repression after the coup, not the fledgling welfare state established by Arévalo and Arbenz, which gave rise to Marxist insurgency. And while 1930s Spain and 1950s Guatemala may have had less in common than actors like Muñoz Meany or Rossell y Arellano imagined, their ideas about such commonalities nevertheless informed their actions. They also pointed to larger truths about the devastation wreaked across the Americas, supposedly in the name of freedom, during the Cold War.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Julia Irwin, Silvia Arrom, Arturo Taracena Arriola, Sergio Delgado Moya, Ana Villarreal, Ieva Jusionyte, Max Paul Friedman, Jeffrey Gould and JLAS anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research and writing were supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
