middle-class revolution supported by sections of
the army. Free elections brought to power Juan
José Arévalo (1945–51) and Colonel Jacobo
Arbenz Guzmán (1951–4). Forced labour was
abolished, social reforms were initiated and
extended to the Indians, a labour code and land
reforms were started. Arévalo had opened gov-
ernment to the left and Arbenz accelerated
the process, thereby thoroughly alarming the
land-owning aristocracy and Washington, which
believed that communism was gaining the upper
hand. US-owned companies and land belonging
to the United Fruit Company were nationalised,
and more nationalisation was threatened. The
Communist Party was legalised.
With the help of the CIA, Arbenz was over-
thrown in 1954. The clock was turned back; the
old oligarchy and the United Fruit Company
regained their influence, with the army now again
the real power in the land. There were thousands
of killings and the Marxist labour movement was
wiped out. Corrupt and inefficient military-run
regimes became the despair of the American
advisers, who could see no alternative other than
the communists. In 1960, Guatemala became the
staging post for the invasion of Cuba. After
another military coup in 1963, the military
remained in control of Guatemala until 1982.
The repression of guerrillas and leftist opponents
was particularly bloody – the civil war killed
120,000. The sheer extent of the abuse of human
rights was unequalled in degree even by the low
standards of Central America. Labour leaders,
university teachers and political opponents just
‘disappeared’; 40,000 are estimated to have died
in this way. By the early 1980s the army chiefs
fought each other for the spoils of office – and
this was the army that had received substantial US
military aid. Amnesty in 1982 accused the
Guatemalan government of massacring 2,600
people, and that was an underestimate.
Guatemalan politics are subject to a cycle of
hope and disillusionment. In 1986 Vinicio
Cerezo Arévalo was inaugurated as a popular
reforming president. The hope was that he would
end the brutal excesses of the generals who
had dominated Guatemala for three decades and
under whose authority the security forces had
murdered an estimated 65,000 civilians. But the
reforms did not last. The military soon began to
exert their power again. Death squads resumed
their murderous missions, killing student leaders,
trade unionists and human-rights advocates.
Guatemala became a profitable transit point for
Colombian cocaine on its way to the cities of the
US. Almost half the population was unemployed
and inflation was high; civilian government in
1990 was losing control and making little effort
to check violence, crime or corruption. In January
1991 Jorge Serrano Ellas became president and
assumed the burdens of trying to end violence
and restore the economy.
El Salvador
El Salvador’s descent into civil war and bloody
conflict was equally tragic. It is the smallest and
most densely populated Central American repub-
lic. Some forty families owned most of the coffee
plantations and dominated banking and the mer-
cantile sector. The distribution of wealth is grossly
unequal and the per-capita income was almost as
low as that of Honduras.
The history of peasant uprisings and protests
is a grisly one. A communist-inspired peasant
revolt ended in 1932 in wholesale slaughter, a
precedent for contemporary times. Here, too, US
attitudes after the Second World War were shaped
by the fear of communist penetration. Alliances
between the wealthy oligarchy and the military
were regarded as the only viable alternative and
the US has supported them, thereby impeding
reform and change. In 1969, El Salvador briefly
went to war with Honduras and the resulting
victory further enhanced the prestige of the mil-
itary. But the military and oligarchy began to be
challenged by the rise of an urban middle sector.
José Napoleon Duarte led a rapidly expanding
Christian Democratic Party. By the 1970s there
appeared to be a possibility of more representa-
tive government. It was a false hope. In 1972,
the army frustrated the election that would have
brought Duarte to power and he barely escaped
with his life. But repression in El Salvador did
not bring stability. The economic deterioration
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