Federico Fuentes
"Guatemalans, let us honour the revolution and defend our national sovereignty", social movement leader Miguel Angel Sandoval stated at a rally to remember the 60th anniversary of the overthrow of dictator Jorge Ubico.
Sandoval was addressing more than 10,000 trade unionists, students, feminist activists, indigenous people and others who marched through the capital of Guatemala, chanting "As long as there is the people, there will be revolution", on October 21.
The overthrow of Ubico was followed by the election of President Juan Jose Arevalo. Arevalo, and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, oversaw a decade of progressive reform and unprecedented freedom of political organisation before being overthrown by a US-backed coup in 1954. The reforms of the Arevalo-Arbenz era included social security, land reform, freedom of organisation and increased autonomy of government institutions.
The coup, started by an invasion from Honduras led by mercenary Carlos Castillo Armas, began a civil war that only ended with the signing of a peace agreement in 1996. More than 200,000 people were killed in the conflict, and another 40,000 disappeared.
Historian Jorge Lujan Munoz noted the civil war was "a product and a reaction to the counter-revolution, which interrupted the democratic process initiated in 1944. The fate of the revolution in Guatemala was similar to the situation faced by most Central American nations as part of Washington's bloody war against the peoples struggles waged throughout the region from the '60s to the early '90s."
Remembering the "the governments of revolution", the protesters drew attention to not only the role played the US, through the CIA, in the counterrevolution, but its continued interference in the country today. Protesters condemned neoliberalism and free trade agreements between the two countries.
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004.
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