CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 309latures (the URNG party in Guatemala, FMLN in El Salvador, and FSLN in
Nicaragua). In all three cases, too, the power of the military has been greatly curtailed
(of the three, the military remains the strongest in Guatemala). Conservative parties
have dominated the recent political scene, but in every case they have been strongly
challenged by more liberal and even radical parties (the strongest radical party being
the FSLN, the Sandinista party of Nicaragua).
Let us now look more closely at the role of the native Mesoamericans in two
major revolutionary movements in Central America: the Guatemalan and the
Nicaraguan.
Guatemalan Revolution. In many ways the Guatemalan revolution can be
understood as the legacy of the U.S.-orchestrated overthrow of the country’s
legitimate government in 1954, and subsequent U.S. backing of a long succession
of corrupt military regimes. The Guatemalan army virtually took over the state,
serving the interests of foreign and local capitalists and its own generals, who
increasingly used political office to acquire personal wealth. As the state became
more repressive, opposition from the lower and middle classes intensified. In the
1960s a group of young army officers broke with their commanders and formed
bands of revolutionary guerrillas in the eastern zone of the country. They were
joined by proletarianized mestizo peasants there, and together they achieved
widespread popularity throughout the country.
The military government went on to create a permanent state of terror in
Guatemala, losing any legitimacy it might have enjoyed and creating dissidence from
all social sectors, even from members of the upper class. Toward the end of the 1970s,
guerrilla fighting erupted again, this time in the western highlands where the majority
of Mayan Indians resided. Most of the guerrilla leaders were urban Marxists affiliated
with the earlier movement in the East, but now they were joined by several thousand
Indian soldiers and aided by hundreds of thousands of sympathizers from the In-
dian communities.
The two most important guerrilla organizations in Guatemala—the Guerrilla
Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA)—were
established squarely in Indian zones, and the bulk of the guerrilla soldiers and most
civilian support of a logistical nature came from the Indian sector. At the high point
of guerrilla activity around 1980, a few thousand Indian soldiers joined the insur-
gent forces, and up to a quarter of a million civilian Indians provided them with sup-
port of various kinds. Furthermore, most of the civilians killed in the
counterinsurgency war were Indians (estimated at over 200,000 persons for the en-
tire civil war period), as were almost all of the refugees, both inside Guatemala (es-
timated at around one million persons) and outside the country (some 200,000 in
Mexico alone) (Jonas 2000:24).
The guerrilla leaders, most of them ladinos (mestizos) from the urban middle
class, recognized that the Indian presence was a major factor in Guatemala’s revo-
lution. One of the guerrilla spokespersons wrote that the Guatemalan revolution
was “unique” because the Indians were heirs to highly developed pre-Hispanic native