310 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
cultures, and in the face of weakly developed colonial capitalism they were able to
reconstitute through time many of their native organizational and cultural patterns.
Therefore, this guerrilla leader went on to explain, orthodox Marxist revolutionary
ideology about class warfare was an inappropriate model for the revolution because
“ ‘ethnic-nationalism’ constitutes one of the essential factors for any possible revolu-
tionary change.”
The counterinsurgency forces organized by the Guatemalan military establish-
ment not only recognized but also exaggerated the importance of the Indian factor
in the revolution. According to interviews with army officers fighting against the
guerrillas, the army’s most critical task was to eradicate the Indians’ “worldview” and
replace it with a modern, “cosmopolitan” view. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the army
began to lay down a structure of civil patrols, model villages, and development poles
in the Indian areas in an attempt to transform the thinking and behavior of
Guatemala’s Indians. This highly repressive military apparatus constituted concrete
evidence of the importance that Guatemala’s political establishment attached to the
Indians and their involvement in the ongoing revolutionary war.
Scholars have pointed out that the peasants most strongly identified as Indians
were at the very center of revolutionary actions in Guatemala, and it was thought
that their joining one side or the other would probably be decisive to the eventual
outcome of the war. The majority of the over five million Guatemalan Indians in the
country at the time were Mayas. They spoke Mayan languages and were cultural heirs
to the Mesoamerican traditions of the past. But they had become highly diversified
in social status, and Mayas from these social divisions responded differently to the rev-
olutionary struggle. Although the individuals making up the diverse sectors were all
identified as Indians in Guatemala, in varying degrees they had retained elements of
the Mayan cultural tradition and tended to manifest divergent “affinities” for revo-
lutionary action.
The largest social sector of Mayas were peasants who inhabited tightly integrated
communities. They tended to hold to traditional native cultures, which clashed on
most points with revolutionary ideology. For these Mayas, power was expressed more
as a supernatural than as a secular force. Their enemies were defined in local rather
than national terms, and often were identified as neighboring lineages, hamlets, or
villages; furthermore, social change was conceptualized in terms of cyclic rather than
linear time. It is understandable that the “traditional” Indians of this sector were un-
likely to be receptive of revolutionary ideas; and, in fact, with few exceptions they did
not join the guerrilla movements.
Indians from other sectors held to versions of Mayan culture that seem better
suited to revolutionary action. For example, it is well known that Indian leadership
within the guerrilla organizations was largely provided by a much smaller sector of
urbanized, educated Mayan Indians. One example would be Pablo Ceto, an Ixil-
speaking Mayan Indian who attended high school in the town of Santa Cruz del
Quiché during the 1970s and who later became a leader in an EGP guerrilla unit.
While in Santa Cruz and before joining with the guerrillas, Ceto organized a study
group of town Indians intent on discovering their Mayan roots. Anthropologists were
invited to help Ceto’s group identify nativist elements consistent with the needs of