For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960-1990

2. Mayas Mobilized

29 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Mayas Mobilized President Jacobo Arbenz called the agrarian reform of 1952 Guatemala’s first act of justice since the conquest. The ill-fated reform law, which encouraged peasant committees to petition the national government for expropriation of fallow lands, propelled Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano, an ardent anti-Communist, to action. He used the powerful symbols at his disposal to decry Arbenz as a Communist. Most memorably, he enlisted the Black Christ of Esquipulas—a much-revered icon among Mayas and Guatemalans in general—to help rid the fatherland of the October Revolution. When the faithful of Esquipulas nearly rioted at the suggestion that their saint would be removed, Archbishop Rossell commissioned a replica and took that on rounds throughout the country in 1953. This National Pilgrimage of the Christ of Esquipulas was hugely successful and met with expressions of devotion all over Guatemala. Emeterio Toj Medrano, a K’iche’ Maya from an area near Santa Cruz del Quiché, the capital of the department of El Quiché, was thirteen years old at the time. He was the grandson of campesinos and the son of an itinerant merchant, and, along with many young people in the community , active in the local catechist program, Catholic Action. With the Black Christ, Toj now believes, Archbishop Rossell took advantage of people’s attachment to the figure, using these visits to deliver speeches that wildly distorted the Arbenz record. Toj now characterizes the Christ of Esquipulas as the “Captain General” of the so-called Army of Liberation that toppled Arbenz. At the time, though, many Maya Catholics like Toj heeded the archbishop’s calls to “rise up as one man against the enemy of God and the Nation.”1 Emeterio Toj supported Arbenz’s ouster, what he later viewed as the “overthrow of hope.”2 Like many Guatemalans, Emeterio Toj now looks back on the October Revolution as a foundational moment for reformism in the country, a 2 30 C H A P T E R T W O period when real change seemed within reach. While he and other Mayas from highland communities went along with the church’s anti-Arbenz agenda, many of them saw matters quite differently soon after the 1954 coup. The counterrevolutionary state worked quickly to undo the reforms of the October Revolution and squelch the mobilization that the period had engendered. In that militarized context, Mayas like Toj went from being supporters of the coup to becoming part of community organizing in the 1960s and 1970s criticizing state repression and pressing for change. This chapter follows local organizing efforts in three places: Toj’s Santa Cruz del Quiché, the community of Santiago Atitlán in Sololá, and the department of Huehuetenango. These are just a few of the many examples that could illustrate how local Maya mobilization developed in those years. Each story is in some ways distinct, and community-level efforts reflected local realities and possibilities. Alongside such variations , though, there are strong similarities in the kinds of organizing that unfolded in different communities, and these experiences were for many activists stepping stones toward regional or national-level organizing . We’ll use these cases, then, to consider how the stage was set for more collective Maya mobilization.3 Santa Cruz del Quiché Emeterio Toj Medrano is in some ways typical of activists from El Quiché, in other ways extraordinary. He tells of his grandfather (also named Emeterio) losing his land in the area through debt peonage before the October Revolution. Born in 1940, Toj was raised in an environment of agrarian mobilization and what he calls the “pensamiento de lucha,” the fighting spirit encouraged by the reformist governments from 1944 to 1954.4 During the Arévalo and Arbenz years, his grandfather joined the local agrarian committee, or CAL, one of thousands of such groups established under Arbenz and empowered to petition the government for land expropriations. Throughout the country, local leaders channeled labor and land struggles through the October Revolution’s new legal mechanisms, supported by the labor federations General Confederation of Workers of Guatemala (CGTG) and the National Peasant Confederation of Guatemala (CNCG). CALs challenged the labor practices of landowners and corrupt officials and, most significantly, 31 M A Y A S M O B I L I Z E D petitioned for land redistribution. A study by...