CHAPTER 1

Greg Grandin

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

Guatemala has more than its share of martyrs but few, if any, national heroes.It is impossible to imagine a child of a Guatemalan president being namedafter an indigenous leader or a peasant revolutionary, as were CuauhtémocCárdenas and Emiliano Zedillo, the sons of Mexican presidents from opposingends of the political spectrum. Of Central America's three major NewLeft insurgencies—the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador,the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the GuatemalanNational Revolutionary Unity—only the last didn't take the name ofan idealized leader whose death symbolized frustrated national aspirations.

One reason for this distinction is the persistence of the country's extremeracial divide, which has restricted the kind of multiclass politics that memorializespopular figures like Emiliano Zapata and Augusto Sandino. In Mexicoby the late colonial period, an expanding economy had begun to break downindigenous ethnicity in the central valley into a homogeneous rural identity,which, though still ethnically marked, allowed for the emergence of fluid alliances(Knight 1994: 78). Peasants participated on all sides during Mexico'stumultuous nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet a great many marchedon the winning side of liberal-national history: independence from Spain,anti-imperialist struggles against the United States and France, the rise topower of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, and, of course, the Mexican Revolution.

Guatemala's backwater colonial economy, in contrast, allowed for theconsolidation and endurance of distinct indigenous identities centered onresidential communities; the nineteenth-century coffee economy created anagrarian proletariat defined along racial lines. Indigenous communities weresingled out as sources of labor; workers were conscripted through a series ofextra-economic "incentives," including forced labor drafts, debt peonage, andvagrancy laws. Whole villages became captives of specific planters, who reliedon them not just for labor but, unable to maintain a full-time labor force, tosubsidize, through ongoing subsistence production, the nutritional needs ofworkers during the off-season. Indigenous peasants, in turn, used the wagesthey did receive to maintain and even revive community traditions and rituals—forexample, cofradías (Catholic saint cults), fiestas (celebrations of specificsaints), and cabildos (indigenous administrative institutions, associatedwith Spanish colonialism)—even as the land base that traditionally underwrotesuch activities was coming under intense pressure.

As a result, the concordance of liberal nationalism with a form of capitalismthat deepened rather than dissipated racial identity generated a stableopposition: on one side stood indigenous communities allied with theCatholic Church, defending communal land and local autonomy; on theother were modernizing liberals pushing to alienate the corporate protectionsof both church and indigenous cabildo. When liberals took control ofthe state and its ideological apparatus in 1871, indigenous mobilization wasuniformly portrayed as an obstacle to achieving their nation. In 1951, in themiddle of Guatemala's "national-popular" decade, the historian Daniel Contreras(1951) did try to claim Totonicapán's Atanasio Tzul, who led a significantuprising in 1820, as a national procer, or statesman, paving the way toindependence from Spain. This one exception aside, nationalist intellectualsnearly unanimously blamed the failures of Guatemalan liberalism—the fallof the first postcolonial liberal regime, the destruction of the highland Estadode los Altos, the collapse of the Central American Federation, the enduranceof Rafael Carrera's conservative regime—on indigenous obstinacy.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the myths it generated inspired historiansto search Mexico's agrarian past for the Revolution's origins and antecedents,yielding a rich historiography. Scholars set Mexico's revolutionaryhistory within a context of long-term agrarian transformation, drawing onresearch done on other twentieth-century revolutions (Russia, China, Cuba,Algeria, various African nations, and Vietnam) and on concepts associatedwith peasant and subaltern studies. Guatemalan historiography, in contrast,came forth not in the flush of revolutionary victory but in the midstof counterrevolutionary terror. Starting in the 1970s historians and anthropologists,driven by an urgency to publicize and explain escalating repressionagainst mostly indigenous peasants, produced studies that sketchedout the history of the forced labor, stolen land, and militarized politics thatformed the foundation of Guatemala's plantation regime (Smith 1990; Carmack1988; Handy 1984; Cambranes 1985; Piel 1995; McCreery 1994). Butsubsequent scholarship failed to follow up on this work. While it is taken forgranted that repression has played a central role in mediating community-staterelations over the centuries, there is no long-frame rural sociology thatexamines how forms of violence, both oppositional and pacifying, changedover time, and how those changes indexed specific economic regimes andpolitical epochs. As a result, accounts of Guatemala's post-1954 civil war tendto be either ultradeterministic (holding unspecified racism and exploitationresponsible for the conflict) or ultracontingent (conflating the causes of thewar with its most immediate provocation, often in one localized region).

Violence itself accounts for a lack of in-depth analysis of rural violence.No one in Mexico would think to explain the Mexican Revolution by tryingto document whether it was the Zapatistas or the Federales who fired thefirst shot in Morelos, largely because the country has a vital intellectual classand a fully realized historiography that would render that exercise meaningless.But such an approach did consume much of the postbellum debate inGuatemala, where state terror had eliminated, either by execution or exile, ageneration of scholars.

A case in point is the Guatemalan historian Severo Martínez Peláez, whoin the 1970s had begun to sketch out a longue durée framework for studyingrural violence. Martínez Peláez is best known as the author of Patria delCriollo, published in 1970, which today is often criticized for defining indigenousidentity as something created whole cloth by Spanish colonialism. Butit also was an early effort to take seriously the generative and repressive functionof what he called "colonial language." "The colonial regime," MartínezPeláez wrote, "was a regime of terror," and needed to be that way (2009:264). He had planned to follow up this book with a study of agrarian indigenousprotest from the colonial period through independence, compelled todo so, as he put it, by the "current situation." At the time, violence againstpeasant activists, increasingly indistinguishable from the savagery inflictedon the urban opposition, was on the rise and about to enter a new stage withthe 1978 Panzós massacre and the ensuing scorched-earth campaign. But hewas forced to flee to Mexico at the end of the 1970s and therefore didn't gobeyond surveying episodic and colonial indigenous motines, or riots—moreoften than not provoked by elite overreaction to peaceful petitioning of grievances.But extrapolating from Martínez Peláez's (1991) initial review, five distinctstages of agrarian mobilization and repression can be identified as playinga "decisive role," as he put it, in the formation of the modern Guatemalanstate, leaving the country on the threshold of the 1981-83 genocide.

1524-1712

Following the shock of the Conquest and the consolidation of colonial institutions—whichincluded drastic demographic collapse and forced resettlementof survivors into controllable communities—Spanish rule in what isnow Guatemala, as it did in most of Mesoamerica, entered into what FriedrichKatz has called a pax hispanica, a period of notable quiescence and stability.In Guatemala, Q'eqchi's in the area of the Verapaces resisted Spanishdomination for decades and retained a degree of brokered (through theDominicans) autonomy throughout the seventeenth century. For hundredsof years the lowland Petén jungle, which extended east into what is nowBelize and north to the Yucatán, offered sanctuary to those who refused tobe incorporated into the colonial state; communities around eastern Chiquimula,as well as those in the far reaches of the Cuchumatanes, continued fordecades to withstand Spanish incursions (Jones 1998; see also Matthew andOudijk 2007; Restall and Asselbergs 2007).

Yet in the core Mam, K'iche', and Kaqchikel highland zones, the Spanishestablished authority quickly. There existed no common language or traditionamong these Maya, as in the more rebellious Andes, to unite subjugatedpeoples. And within a generation of the Conquest, the complexitythat defined pre-Columbian politics and society in this region had beenmuted. Noble lineages throughout the western and northern highlands continueto this day, yet by the middle colonial period macehualization—the erosionof aristocratic hierarchies and absorption of noble families into a morediffuse population largely made up of macehuales (commoners) and led byprincipales (elders)—had the effect of removing the nobility as an institutionor symbol through which opposition to Spanish rule could be mounted(see Pastor 1987: 323-44). Land for subsistence production was plentiful,which allowed survivors to participate in the colonial economy on relativelygood terms. Forced labor in the mines of Huehuetenango and in the indigenoushinterland of the colonial capital, though onerous, was nowhere nearas central a colonial institution in Guatemala as it was in Mexico or Peru.Many communities, including central ones like Santiago Atitlán, had a minimalSpanish presence throughout much of the seventeenth century, whilethe presence of mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicanshelped buffer against too heavy repartimiento (forced labor) or tribute demands levied by encomenderos (Spaniards granted a land concession settledby indigenous peoples), royal officials, and the secular clergy (not belongingto one of the orders, often associated with the Catholic hierarchy; vanOss 1986). Spanish institutions that did take hold often allowed indigenousleaders to take a stake in them. In K'iche' areas, for instance, descendents ofprecolonial lineages helped collect tribute, carry out censuses, organize workobligations, enforce church attendance, and adjudicate local disputes; principalesfrom Quetzaltenango negotiated new rights, including the right tooperate stores in the city plaza, in exchange for help in suppressing the 1712Tzeltal uprising in Chiapas (Grandin 2000a: 45).

1712-1821

That uprising, which took place shortly after the ascension of the interventionistBourbons to the Spanish Crown, brought the pax hispanica to an end.Provoked by intensified extractive demands, the revolt quickly expandedgeographically through dozens of villages north and east of San Cristóbal.It also escalated ideologically, taking on a strong millennial cast as rebelleaders pledged their allegiance to an incarnate Virgin and proclaimed a "republic"beholden to neither God nor king. Language divisions among ChiapanMayans limited the revolt, although rebels compensated by terrorizingneighboring towns that refused to join the insurrection, completely razingsome communities and forcibly conscripting residents of others. Royaltroops, with reinforcements from Guatemala, launched a punitive counterinsurgency,taking a year to completely pacify the insurrection. Martínez Peláezidentifies this campaign as previewing one of the basic "modalities of repression"subsequently deployed by colonial and republican officials against indigenousmobilization, be they contained "riots" or transcommunity revolts:horrific, exemplary violence, including the wholesale destruction of insurgentcommunities and public executions of leaders followed by proclamations offorgiveness and often some concessions, including promises to rein in localabuses. Martínez Peláez locates in the suppression of this revolt, even morethan in the violence of the Conquest, the elite race fear that would psychicallystructure state-indigenous relations for centuries to come. A hundredyears after the event, he writes, criollos (Spaniards born in the Americas) wereholding annual masses to thank God for the defeat of the Tzeltals; decadesafter independence, a panoramic painting could be found in Guatemala's oldAudiencia, the royal administration building, depicting "massacres of ladinos,massacres of rebels, the torture and hanging of clergy and the tortureof rebel leaders, towns burned to the ground by the insurgents, other townsreduced to ashes by the repressors, all presented with the most exact detail"(1977: 6).

The frequency and intensity of revolts increased throughout Mesoamericain the century that followed, with each riot and uprising signaling that, asMartínez Peláez writes, the "limits of the tolerable" in any given communityhad been reached (1991: 7). Fifty serious indigenous riots took placein what is now Guatemala between 1710 and independence from Spain in1821. (There were probably more, considering the poor communication ofthe time.) Plagues, famines, droughts, and other natural catastrophes couldstill, as they did in the earlier colonial period, instigate unrest, but increasinglythe provocations were intrusive Bourbon efforts to strengthen colonialadministration and regulate nearly every aspect of social life: alcohol,cockfighting, religion, education, burial rituals, dietary habits, and sanitationpractices. Spain also demanded more and more taxes and tributes in orderto fund its wars with other European empires. An expanding regional economystrengthened the power and wealth of local criollo elites, who took advantageof a royal state distracted by interimperial war to push their wheatand cattle haciendas deeper into municipal ejidos (common lands, often administeredby indigenous cabildos) and step up their efforts to press labor,revenue, and land from indigenous communities. At the same time, the trendtoward social secularization-due to migration and increased commerce—ledto a growing class divide separating principales from commoners, beginningthe unraveling of the patriarchal expectations of obligation and deferencethat bound together high and low, men and women, placing furtherstress on communities.

Starting around 1811, simultaneously with a massive, violent uprising (upwardof half a million people lost their lives) led by the Catholic priests MiguelHidalgo and José María Morelos that was spreading through Mexico's centralvalley, the pace of indigenous protests picked up in Guatemala. Riotsand uprisings took place in Santiago Sacatepéquez (1811), Patzicía (1811 and1821), Momostenango (1812), Comalapa (1812), Sololá (1813), Chichicastenango(1813), Santa Ana Malacatán (1814), San Juan Ostuncalco (1815), Quetzaltenango(1815), San Martín Jilotepeque (1815), Santa María Chiquimula(1814 and 1818), San Andrés Sajcabajá (1819), Santo Domingo (1821), andSan Francisco El Alto (1821). And in 1820 in Totonicapán and surroundingcommunities a full-scale insurrection broke out. Yet these protests did notcoalesce into a movement similar in scope or intensity to the Hidalgo andMorelos revolt. Historians of that revolt describe distinct regional variationin the levels of support it received from rural communities; the rebellion wasstronger in areas, such as Jalisco and Bajío, that had experienced the intensifiedcommercial agricultural production that generated grievances as wellas, by significantly breaking down community autonomy, the possibility ofjoining the kind of transregional, multiclass alliances that powered the rebellion.But Guatemala's situation corresponded more closely to those Mexicanregions where communities still retained significant land and cultural integrity,where support for Hidalgo was either mixed or nonexistent. Bourbon-periodpressure on rural community life in Guatemala did generate unrest,as did expectations of emancipation associated with the French Revolutionand the 1812 liberal Spanish Constitution. But complaints remained localized.Furthermore Guatemalan criollos continued to remain loyal to theCrown, preferring, until Mexico's final break with Spain left them no choice,not to be left alone with a racially distinct majority population. This oppositionof liberal-nationalists standing in fearful antagonism to rural society(as opposed to allying with rural society against a common enemy, be it theCrown, conservatives, or foreigners) would form the basic premise of Guatemala'scounterinsurgent nationalism.